Educational Equity, Politics & Policy in Texas

Arizona's Precious Knowledge: Blockbuster New Film Chronicles Ethnic Studies Battle

2012-01-27T13:27:00.001-06:00

This is an extraordinary film that ALL should see. It'll show you exactly how ridiculous and racially and ethnically motivated the attack against Ethnic Studies in TUSD is.-Angelahttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/jeff-biggers/precious-knowledge-arizona_b_875702.htmlPosted: 6/13/11 08:34 PM ETAs ethnic studies defenders in Arizona prepare for the latest showdown in the state's controversial ban this week, a blockbuster new film chronicling the unknown back story behind the crisis is gearing up for national release.Rarely has a film been so timely and downright revelatory.Casting aside the inflammatory rhetoric and national headlines of the anti-ethnic-studies instigators, Precious Knowledge provides a clear-eyed portrait of students, teachers and their community struggling to deal with the nation's most unnerving campus witch hunt in recent memory. Tracing the political roots of the legislative ban -- and the program's own mandate and success to alleviate the long-time achievement gaps among Latino students -- Precious Knowledge's riveting pacing and compelling portraits will astonish, infuriate and inspire viewers.In truth, Precious Knowledge is the type of unique and powerful film that could ultimately shift public perception and policy on one of the most misunderstood education programs in the country.In a balanced but unabashedly passionate film directed by Ari Luis Palos and produced by Eren Isabel McGinnis, Precious Knowledge serves as a remarkable and seemingly more honest counter argument to last year's widely acclaimed Waiting for Superman, the documentary film on charter schools and the failure of public instruction.The stakes in Precious Knowledge are somehow even higher: We meet students who emerge as their own advocates to not only defend their right to a decent education, but their very existence and cultural heritage.The film celebrated its premiere with a sold-out crowd in Tucson in March.With over 50 percent of Latino students failing to graduate nationwide, Precious Knowledge walks the viewers through the relentless battle over several years by headstrong anti-ethnic-studies extremists in Arizona to outlaw Tucson's Mexican American Studies (MAS) program. Based in six Tucson high schools, the MAS program graduates 93 percent of its college-bound students.In the process, Precious Knowledge reveals the ideological and political fervor afoot in Arizona and underscoring the anti-ethnic-studies ban and anti-immigrant measures, which claims the MAS courses promote the "overthrow of the government" and ethnic resentment. At the same time, the film places the founding of the ethnic studies program in the larger historical context of Tucson's long-time struggles by the Mexican-American community for better education and an end to discriminatory policies. A sign from the famed 1969 walkouts, led by Chicano activists, resonates today: "We dare to care about education."No one is more attuned to the political hijinks and hypocrisy than the young students featured in the film -- Pricila Rodriguez, Crystal Terriquez, Gilbert Esparza and Mariah Harvey, among others -- who transform over the course of the film from shy, uncertain kids "in the back of the room" to become engaged and academically-grounded defenders of their program and confident public speakers and organizers in their communities, and ultimately at the Arizona state capitol in Phoenix.For Gilbert, who has grown up in a neighborhood where so many of his peers are "locked up or dead," the MAS program galvanizes his one-time dismal studies. For the first time in his life, he says, "I would go home and read articles over and over again... and started getting A's and B's."For Pricila, whose father has been incarcerated as an undocumented worker, the MAS course rescues her from a freshman drop-out status and sets her onto a college-bound future.Along with the brilliant Jose Gonzales, Curtis Acosta is featured as one of the embattled literature teachers in the Mexican American Studies program at Tucson High School. Engaging and often comic, Acosta appears at first like a Latino version of Robin Williams' portrait of the inspiring poetry teacher in the film classic, Dead Poets Society. By the end of the movie, Acosta's ability to handle the unthinkably stressful task of teaching, defending his class to extremist legislators and the media, and the subsequent tidal wave of hate mail and public hounding, demonstrates his own resiliency and transformation as an extraordinary catalyst for change. His role ranks as one of the best documentary film portraits of a successful public educator ever made.With unprecedented access to the classroom, Precious Knowledge allows the viewer to understand the role of culturally-relevant material and critical pedagogy that challenge the student to read the word, and the world. "The freedom to ask questions," says Acosta, "that are the most pertinent in the way they view the world." But in the capable hands of director Palos, the film doesn't permit the teachers to dodge any element of perceived radicalism, such as the teaching of famed Brazilian educator Paulo Freire's text, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, but places the principles of a culturally-relevant curriculum and its Chicano viewpoint into context. Freire's widely used theories of critical pedagogy have been translated into numerous languages, and are taught at universities around the United States; he received 16 honorary doctorates, including a 1996 honor from the University of Nebraska.Far from any radical agenda, as Tucson Unified School District administrator Dr. Augustine Romero notes, the human portraits unfolding in Precious Knowledge deftly show the MAS program's emphasis on the "idea of love, and not only love for myself, but love for those around me."As one of the most convincing parts of the film, Precious Knowledge also provides plenty of time for anti-Ethnic Studies officials, including former Arizona superintendent of education Tom Horne and and current state superintendent John Huppenthal.A Canadian immigrant who has often invoked his own Jewish cultural legacy as vital to guiding his views on education and historical instruction, Horne tells the filmmakers that the cultural-relevancy-focused curriculum of the Mexican American Studies Program is based on a "primitive part that is tribal."Whether or not one agrees with Horne, who has openly lied in the past about his history of bankruptcy and has the unique distinction of being banned forever from the Securities and Exchanges Commission after he "willfully aided and abetted" securities law violations, no viewer will doubt that Horne's spiraling obsession with the Ethnic Studies Program almost borders on the maniacal and risks statements that are outright falsehoods.Two examples, among many, leap out at the viewer: While first denying at a Senate hearing he has ever been invited to a MAS classroom, Horne backsteps when challenged by a legislator and then admits that he has been invited. Horne's accusation that the Mexican American Studies Program is "dividing students by ethnicity" and preaching ethnic resentment is soundly rebuked by the sheer number of non-Latino students who take the classes, testify at various hearings and protest and eloquently describe to visiting lawmakers and TV reporters about their experience. The blond-haired MAS student Erin Cain-Hodge calmly tells one news report at a Tucson protest on the need to "make a stand" against "this racist bill." At a charged Senate hearing, African-American student Mariah Harvey poignantly explains how the classes engender a sense of "understanding and forgiveness."After being presented with evidence of the MAS program's dramatically increased graduation rates, Horne responds that the program is "not doing any thing right," and "should be abolished." When students exercise their First Amendment rights to protest outside a Horne press conference, he quickly refers to the "rudeness they teach to their kids."Throughout the documentary, Huppenthal and Horne exhibit a hyper-aversion to anyone addressing past social injustices in the United States, especially among the founding fathers. And this is a fundamental difference so profoundly explored in the film: Instead of viewing historic campaigns for civil rights, women's suffrage or child labor laws, for example, as inspiring lessons of change and transformation in the American democratic process, Huppenthal and Horne effectively demand that a censored presentation of American history be taught to Arizona children that casts modern society as colorblind and flawless -- and our founders as infallible.Perhaps this makes sense for Huppenthal, who was educated at a private parochial Catholic school, and refused to send his children to regular public schools, and once lectured university scholars that his own educational principles for children were based on corporate management schemes of the Fortune 500.During the same period as the making of the film, Huppenthal actually served as a featured speaker with the notorious state senate president Russell Pearce at an extremist Tea Party rally in 2009, but never repudiated widespread charges of his own President Obama as a "Nazi." Nor has Huppenthal ever denounced Pearce and his fellow radical Arizona state legislators' aborted efforts to "nullify" federal laws. In the film, Huppenthal, who ran on a 2010 campaign to "stop la raza," takes to the Senate floor and declares "parts of our neighborhoods" have been "nuclear-bombed by the effects of illegal immigration."After visiting Acosta's class at Tucson High School in the film, Huppenthal reports back to a Senate hearing that an ethnic studies administrator has "trashed Benjamin Franklin." In truth, the adviser had only repeated Franklin's very famous "Observation" in 1753 of his concern of too many "tawny" people. (One little footnote: Franklin also disparaged Huppenthal's German ancestors as "the most ignorant stupid sort" who were unable to learn English in that same document.)Such duplicity never seems to bother Horne or Huppenthal, who soon ramp up the power-keg rhetoric of their obsessive campaign with the help of the infamous Russell Pearce, who has openly associated with neo-Nazi activists. After hearing student Mariah Harvey's compelling description of a program that "doesn't teach us to be anti-American," but "embrace America, all of it, flaws and all," Pearce simply charges the program preaches "hate speech, sedition, anti-Americanism."In the gripping build up to the final passage of the HB221 law in 2010 that bans Ethnic Studies, and remains in litigation, Precious Knowledge follows the emerging students leaders and teachers in their unrelenting battle to keep their acclaimed program alive.In the end, Acosta tells community members at a rally, "we have taught you to love."As the inspiring MAS students walk across the graduation stage in their caps and gowns, no one will have any doubts these extraordinary young people have just begun their journey to change their communities and Arizona -- and the nation.Here's the trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W8CXCH99fNQ&feature=player_embedded

“Don’t Get Angry, Get Even” When Do You Start Counting By Rodolfo F. Acuña

2012-01-27T11:12:00.003-06:00

Rough Draft“Don’t Get Angry, Get Even”When Do You Start CountingByRodolfo F. Acuña When the great Muhammad Ali was asked how many sit ups he did, he responded, “I don’t count my sit-ups, I only start counting when it starts hurting, that is when I start counting, because then it really counts, that’s what makes you a champion.” These words resonate in Tucson where Latina/o students are fighting for an education by sitting-in in the office of Tucson Unified School District Superintendent of Schools John Pedicone, walking out of classes, demonstrating, and taking to the streets. Students are dispelling the myth that Mexican Americans do not care about education; they have started counting because it hurts. They know the difference between being warehoused, sitting through classes where teachers go through the motions. They know when the subject matter is relevant; and the teachers believe in what they are teaching. At my own campus at California State University Northridge students are mobilizing. Up until now, a small minority protested the rising cost of tuition, which now tops $5,550 a year, promising to climb another 30 percent next year. Because of the lack of accessibility to education, they are growing disillusioned with our system of government. They don’t believe the promises of President Barack Obama State of the Union. Desperate, many students are dropping out of school. The straw that broke the proverbial camel’s back occurred this week. CSU Chancellor Charles Reed issued a threat to all state campuses that any institution that exceeded its target enrollment by more than three percent would be docked $7 million. The CSUN administration panicked and froze classes, not allowing needy students to enroll in classes, even when professors agreed to take them as an overload. The result has been pandemonium. Many students are unable to get the requisite 12 units for financial and other scholarship aid. This action takes money out needy students’ pockets; the tuition for 12 units and 19 units is the same. Graduation will be deferred by a couple of years. For administrators earning $120,000 - $350,000 annually it is no big deal. But for poor and middle-class students it is a big deal. The freeze has forced many students to start counting. It has dawned on them that they are being shut out of what the Tucson students are fighting for, a college education. Conservatives have always maintained that everyone has an equal opportunity; tragically many poor people believed that the myth. However, this fairytale is being debunked by what is happening in California’s community colleges. Once a safety net where students could attend college almost tuition free and could live close to home and work, this is no longer the case. Although the fees are still affordable at the two year colleges, the campuses have been flooded consequent to the pushdown of students who qualify for the University of California and the California State University systems but can’t afford it. Consequently, the problem for community colleges is not so much tuition but the flood of students that have drowned them. Filled beyond capacity their infra-structures have been inundated, and even when students are matriculated they face the impossible task of getting classes. This situation promises to worsen as the UC resorts to the vigorous recruiting of wealthy foreign and out of state students who are displacing residents. If by this time, we are not counting, we should be because the hurt will worsen. The challenge for students is to develop a strategy. It is not going to do us any good to say I told you so or to get angry. We have to get even. The reason the system will continue as if the crash never happened is because we did not get even. Very few people have gone to jail, and the gaggle of thieves on Wall Street and government were not stigmatized. Talk about class warfare, society differentiates between white and blue collar crime. Pure and simple, we are complicit and let the big ones get away. In Tucson, the rich benefit directly from the destruction of the Mexican American Studies program. Brutalizing immigrants and Latino students is part of the grand strategy to keep Mexicans in their place. The assassination of nine-year old Brisenia Flores in her home sent a chilling to other Mexicans. Shawna Forde, who had ties with the Minutemen and FAIR, the Federation For American Immigration Reform, led the assassins, but the truth be told, the Tucson white elite were complicit, they benefited. Let me be clear, the purpose for the destruction of the MAS program was to intimidate other minorities. African, Native and other Americans were put on notice that they will suffer a similar fate if they protest too loudly. They heard about Mexican American students being forced to stand by while the banned books were boxed and carted away. Students watched in silence, they sobbed. Books had become important to them. In the past I have spoken about Adolph Hitler’s “The Big Lie.” In that instance, the Jews and the gypsies were scapegoated. Hitler used hate to rally the German people. In a similar way, the anti-Mexican and anti-foreign hysteria helps conceal the criminality of ALEC (the American Legislative Exchange Council) that owns the Arizona state legislature and SALC (the Southern Arizona Leadership Council) that controls public and private institutions in southern Arizona. Superintendent Pedicone rose through SALC’s ranks and was its vice-president. Republican politicians have exploited the hatred of Mexicans, using it to their economic and political advantage. The same goes for the Koch Brothers, the Tea Party, the minutemen, and the prison and gun industries, not to mention the bankers who launder money made from selling arms to the Mexican cartels. Politicos such as Attorney General Tom Horn and Arizona Superintendent of Public Instruction John Huppenthal have built their careers by spreading lies and bashing Mexicans. Tolerating them is like speaking respectfully of Hitler. ALEC and SALC leaders are criminals and child abusers. We should not abet their malfeasance by being respectful. Some readers will say, “Rudy, you are going too far!” But am I going too far? Have they ever seen a 14 year old strung out on drugs, or a teenager that has a difficult time in explaining his or her thoughts? Who has created these conditions? Who is to blame? I once told my wife when she was getting frustrated tutoring a second grader, “if Jorge does not learn to read, he will end up in jail.” She started to cry. Have you ever met a second grader who was bad? Because of my early parochial education, I have a strong sense of right and wrong. For me, “sometimes there is no other side.” I have a mind, and as my teachers would tell me, “use it.” It is idiotic to say we are all equal in this country, it is a myth. In my vernacular, the word exploitation is the willful taking advantage of the poor. It is an abomination and cannot be tolerated The wonderful quality about students is that many have retained the sense to be outraged at injustice. Reasoned moral outrage corrects the imperfections of society and achieves justice for all. And, that is precisely why the TUSD cabal is banning books. ALEC, SALC, the Tea Party and their gaggle can’t handle the truth, it is subversive. William Shakespeare’s The Tempest was banned. Why? It is threatening because it talks about colonialism. It is about the Earls of Southampton, investors in the Virginia Company. At court they support a Protestant-expansionist foreign policy. King James opposes it because he does not want trouble with Spain. Eventually this leads James to executed Sir Walter Raleigh. The Tempest is told through the eyes of Caliban, a native of a colonized island. It is about his accusations against the colonial governor, Prospero. Prospero is the colonizer; Caliban, the colonized. Prospero looks at Caliban as being genetically inferior. The story betrays Prospero’s colonial mentality; he has little respect for the natives or the environment. His demeanor resembles that of Superintendent Pedicone and the white establishment of Tucson who regard Mexicans, whether born on this side or the other side of the border as aliens. Rather than use history or literature to correct the imperfections of society, Huppenthal and the majority of the TUSD board chose to censor books. The Tucson cabal believes that it can hide the truth, and thus keep Mexicans in their place. It is similar to the efforts of many former confederate states to erase any mention of slavery as if it had never existed. According to them, African Americans were happy under slavery. It is similar to the efforts of neo-Nazis to deny the holocaust or the Turks’ denial of the Armenian genocide. Their view is if people don’t know about it, it did not happen. Consequently, Mexicans can continue to drop out of school, go to prison, work at minimum wage jobs, and believe in fairy tales. If they learn, they may start counting.

Interactive: Projections for Texas Occupations in 2018

2012-01-19T07:15:00.000-06:00

by Becca Aaronson and Reeve Hamilton | Texas Tribune
January 19, 2012

When Tom Pauken was appointed chairman of the Texas Workforce Commission in 2008, he said, one thing particularly surprised him: “this notion that everybody needs to go to a four-year university and blue-collar jobs are not as good as ‘knowledge industry’ jobs.”

According to the workforce commission, the occupation expected to add the most jobs in Texas between 2008 and 2018 is fast-food services.

The availability of jobs in Texas has been a point of state pride and was — at least, at one time — a cornerstone of Gov. Rick Perry’s pitch to voters. And as Pauken has eagerly pointed out in public speeches, a significant portion of the state’s job offerings don’t require four years’ worth of tuition, which at Texas’ public universities can set you back an average of more than $26,000.

Pauken is calling for a greater emphasis on the skilled trades - many of which only require up to two years of post-secondary work - throughout the education pipeline.

He made this case at a recent higher-education panel discussion held by the Texas Public Policy Foundation, an Austin-based conservative think tank, where he was joined by Texas Higher Education Commissioner Raymund Paredes.

Paredes argued against the de-emphasis on four-year programs. He said that the state’s problem was not of having too many of one type of degree over another, but of needing comprehensive reform. “We need to improve our productivity in all of these areas,” he said of all levels of higher education.

“College is still worth it,” Paredes said. As evidence, he pointed out that people with advanced degrees have lower unemployment rates and most jobs that pay well require some form of post-secondary credential.

But comparing certain jobs may leave some wondering what they got in return for taking on all that student debt.

In 2009, according to workforce commission data, rotary drill operators — a job that primarily requires on-the-job training — could make an average annual wage of more than $72,000 in the Texas oil and gas industry. That’s more than the average wage of a number of professions requiring master’s and doctoral degrees.

“It’s costing us more to educate people,” Pauken told the Tribune. “At the same time, are we educating them for the right fields where the demand is?”

To provide a better sense of what opportunities are out there for present and future job seekers in Texas, we’ve put together the following graphs and database of the workforce commission’s projections.

In the top graphs, you can see the projections for the total jobs by category in 2018, which professions are adding the most jobs and which will experience the most rapid growth.

Below, you can search different professions based on average annual wages, preferred level of education, anticipated growth rate, expected annual job openings and more.

Check out the Graphs on All Occupation Groups in 2018, Occupations Adding Most Jobs, Fastest Growing Occupations

Why the United States Is Destroying Its Education System

2012-01-16T13:14:00.000-06:00

Great piece by Chris Hedges. -Angela

Posted on Apr 11, 2011

By Chris Hedges

A nation that destroys its systems of education, degrades its public information, guts its public libraries and turns its airwaves into vehicles for cheap, mindless amusement becomes deaf, dumb and blind. It prizes test scores above critical thinking and literacy. It celebrates rote vocational training and the singular, amoral skill of making money. It churns out stunted human products, lacking the capacity and vocabulary to challenge the assumptions and structures of the corporate state. It funnels them into a caste system of drones and systems managers. It transforms a democratic state into a feudal system of corporate masters and serfs.

Teachers, their unions under attack, are becoming as replaceable as minimum-wage employees at Burger King. We spurn real teachers—those with the capacity to inspire children to think, those who help the young discover their gifts and potential—and replace them with instructors who teach to narrow, standardized tests. These instructors obey. They teach children to obey. And that is the point. The No Child Left Behind program, modeled on the “Texas Miracle,” is a fraud. It worked no better than our deregulated financial system. But when you shut out debate these dead ideas are self-perpetuating.

Passing bubble tests celebrates and rewards a peculiar form of analytical intelligence. This kind of intelligence is prized by money managers and corporations. They don’t want employees to ask uncomfortable questions or examine existing structures and assumptions. They want them to serve the system. These tests produce men and women who are just literate and numerate enough to perform basic functions and service jobs. The tests elevate those with the financial means to prepare for them. They reward those who obey the rules, memorize the formulas and pay deference to authority. Rebels, artists, independent thinkers, eccentrics and iconoclasts—those who march to the beat of their own drum—are weeded out.

“Imagine,” said a public school teacher in New York City, who asked that I not use his name, “going to work each day knowing a great deal of what you are doing is fraudulent, knowing in no way are you preparing your students for life in an ever more brutal world, knowing that if you don’t continue along your scripted test prep course and indeed get better at it you will be out of a job. Up until very recently, the principal of a school was something like the conductor of an orchestra: a person who had deep experience and knowledge of the part and place of every member and every instrument. In the past 10 years we’ve had the emergence of both [Mayor] Mike Bloomberg’s Leadership Academy and Eli Broad’s Superintendents Academy, both created exclusively to produce instant principals and superintendents who model themselves after CEOs. How is this kind of thing even legal? How are such ‘academies’ accredited? What quality of leader needs a ‘leadership academy’? What kind of society would allow such people to run their children’s schools? The high-stakes tests may be worthless as pedagogy but they are a brilliant mechanism for undermining the school systems, instilling fear and creating a rationale for corporate takeover. There is something grotesque about the fact the education reform is being led not by educators but by financers and speculators and billionaires.”

Teachers, under assault from every direction, are fleeing the profession. Even before the “reform” blitzkrieg we were losing half of all teachers within five years after they started work—and these were people who spent years in school and many thousands of dollars to become teachers. How does the country expect to retain dignified, trained professionals under the hostility of current conditions? I suspect that the hedge fund managers behind our charter schools system—whose primary concern is certainly not with education—are delighted to replace real teachers with nonunionized, poorly trained instructors. To truly teach is to instill the values and knowledge which promote the common good and protect a society from the folly of historical amnesia. The utilitarian, corporate ideology embraced by the system of standardized tests and leadership academies has no time for the nuances and moral ambiguities inherent in a liberal arts education. Corporatism is about the cult of the self. It is about personal enrichment and profit as the sole aim of human existence. And those who do not conform are pushed aside.

“It is extremely dispiriting to realize that you are in effect lying to these kids by insinuating that this diet of corporate reading programs and standardized tests are preparing them for anything,” said this teacher, who feared he would suffer reprisals from school administrators if they knew he was speaking out. “It is even more dispiriting to know that your livelihood depends increasingly on maintaining this lie. You have to ask yourself why are hedge fund managers suddenly so interested in the education of the urban poor? The main purpose of the testing craze is not to grade the students but to grade the teacher.”

“I cannot say for certain—not with the certainty of a Bill Gates or a Mike Bloomberg who pontificate with utter certainty over a field in which they know absolutely nothing—but more and more I suspect that a major goal of the reform campaign is to make the work of a teacher so degrading and insulting that the dignified and the truly educated teachers will simply leave while they still retain a modicum of self-respect,” he added. “In less than a decade we been stripped of autonomy and are increasingly micromanaged. Students have been given the power to fire us by failing their tests. Teachers have been likened to pigs at a trough and blamed for the economic collapse of the United States. In New York, principals have been given every incentive, both financial and in terms of control, to replace experienced teachers with 22-year-old untenured rookies. They cost less. They know nothing. They are malleable and they are vulnerable to termination.”

The demonizing of teachers is another public relations feint, a way for corporations to deflect attention from the theft of some $17 billion in wages, savings and earnings among American workers and a landscape where one in six workers is without employment. The speculators on Wall Street looted the U.S. Treasury. They stymied any kind of regulation. They have avoided criminal charges. They are stripping basic social services. And now they are demanding to run our schools and universities.

“Not only have the reformers removed poverty as a factor, they’ve removed students’ aptitude and motivation as factors,” said this teacher, who is in a teachers union. “They seem to believe that students are something like plants where you just add water and place them in the sun of your teaching and everything blooms. This is a fantasy that insults both student and teacher. The reformers have come up with a variety of insidious schemes pushed as steps to professionalize the profession of teaching. As they are all businessmen who know nothing of the field, it goes without saying that you do not do this by giving teachers autonomy and respect. They use merit pay in which teachers whose students do well on bubble tests will receive more money and teachers whose students do not do so well on bubble tests will receive less money. Of course, the only way this could conceivably be fair is to have an identical group of students in each class—an impossibility. The real purposes of merit pay are to divide teachers against themselves as they scramble for the brighter and more motivated students and to further institutionalize the idiot notion of standardized tests. There is a certain diabolical intelligence at work in both of these.”

“If the Bloomberg administration can be said to have succeeded in anything,” he said, “they have succeeded in turning schools into stress factories where teachers are running around wondering if it’s possible to please their principals and if their school will be open a year from now, if their union will still be there to offer some kind of protection, if they will still have jobs next year. This is not how you run a school system. It’s how you destroy one. The reformers and their friends in the media have created a Manichean world of bad teachers and effective teachers. In this alternative universe there are no other factors. Or, all other factors—poverty, depraved parents, mental illness and malnutrition—are all excuses of the Bad Teacher that can be overcome by hard work and the Effective Teacher.”

The truly educated become conscious. They become self-aware. They do not lie to themselves. They do not pretend that fraud is moral or that corporate greed is good. They do not claim that the demands of the marketplace can morally justify the hunger of children or denial of medical care to the sick. They do not throw 6 million families from their homes as the cost of doing business. Thought is a dialogue with one’s inner self. Those who think ask questions, questions those in authority do not want asked. They remember who we are, where we come from and where we should go. They remain eternally skeptical and distrustful of power. And they know that this moral independence is the only protection from the radical evil that results from collective unconsciousness. The capacity to think is the only bulwark against any centralized authority that seeks to impose mindless obedience. There is a huge difference, as Socrates understood, between teaching people what to think and teaching them how to think. Those who are endowed with a moral conscience refuse to commit crimes, even those sanctioned by the corporate state, because they do not in the end want to live with criminals—themselves.

“It is better to be at odds with the whole world than, being one, to be at odds with myself,” Socrates said.

Those who can ask the right questions are armed with the capacity to make a moral choice, to defend the good in the face of outside pressure. And this is why the philosopher Immanuel Kant puts the duties we have to ourselves before the duties we have to others. The standard for Kant is not the biblical idea of self-love—love thy neighbor as thyself, do unto others as you would have them do unto you—but self-respect. What brings us meaning and worth as human beings is our ability to stand up and pit ourselves against injustice and the vast, moral indifference of the universe. Once justice perishes, as Kant knew, life loses all meaning. Those who meekly obey laws and rules imposed from the outside—including religious laws—are not moral human beings. The fulfillment of an imposed law is morally neutral. The truly educated make their own wills serve the higher call of justice, empathy and reason. Socrates made the same argument when he said it is better to suffer wrong than to do wrong.

“The greatest evil perpetrated,” Hannah Arendt wrote, “is the evil committed by nobodies, that is, by human beings who refuse to be persons.”

As Arendt pointed out, we must trust only those who have this self-awareness. This self-awareness comes only through consciousness. It comes with the ability to look at a crime being committed and say “I can’t.” We must fear, Arendt warned, those whose moral system is built around the flimsy structure of blind obedience. We must fear those who cannot think. Unconscious civilizations become totalitarian wastelands.

“The greatest evildoers are those who don’t remember because they have never given thought to the matter, and, without remembrance, nothing can hold them back,” Arendt writes. “For human beings, thinking of past matters means moving in the dimension of depth, striking roots and thus stabilizing themselves, so as not to be swept away by whatever may occur—the Zeitgeist or History or simple temptation. The greatest evil is not radical, it has no roots, and because it has no roots it has no limitations, it can go to unthinkable extremes and sweep over the whole world.”

“Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition” Surprise, Fear and Fanaticism in Tucson By Rodolfo F. Acuña

2012-01-16T10:28:00.000-06:00

Rough Draft
“Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition”
Surprise, Fear and Fanaticism in Tucson
By
Rodolfo F. Acuña

One of the little pleasures I have in life is waiting for the Saturday mail to bring The New Yorker to my door. Reading the magazine gives me a couple hours of escape; it is well-written and I can never predict the direction its conversations will take.

For instance, this week (Jan 16, 2012) the Inquiring Minds section reviews “The Spanish Inquisition.” The article is introduced by a Monty Python sketch where one of the members of the group, Michael Palin, announces “Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition.”

The author Adam Gopnik explores the history of the institution, relating the lessons to today; taking it from “Torquemada[i] to Dick Cheney, and from Guantánamo to Rome,” asking where were the others “when Giordano Bruno is burned to death…”[ii]

The theme of the Gopnik piece is that society always looks to the past for symbols of cruelty which inevitably are based on “surprise, fear…and fanatical devotion.” The gestapo, the K.G.B., the Stasi share similar profiles. Gopnik includes Guantánamo and the “more than twelve hundred government organizations [in the U.S. that] focus on national-security concerns…they have a forebear in Torquemada and the men in the red hats.” Like in the past, today’s torturers always act with surprise, fear and fanaticism, covering their actions with excuses of regret and necessity.

Gopnik is not an apologist for the Inquisition, commenting on the work of a revisionist historian, he writes, “his mordant point is not so much that the Inquisition doesn’t deserve its reputation for cruelty as that its victims don’t deserve theirs for moral courage.” There is always complicity with cruelty in the name orthodoxy such as in the case of Arizona.

Anti-Semitism, racism, and fanatical nationalism are imbedded in the oppressors’ culture. “The Spanish Inquisition didn’t have any real interest in saving the Jews’ soul; they just wantfirsted their houses and their money.” Thus, the purpose of the Inquisition was not to erase Jewish identity (or that of the Moslems) but to remove them as competitors.

This treachery can be compared to the abolishment of the Mexican Studies program in Tucson – civic leaders really don’t care if Mexicans go to school, just as long as they keep on making money off them and they learn what they want them to learn. Anti-Mexican feelings, racism and fanatical nationalism are imbedded in Tucson’s Torquemada culture. The truth be told, Latino identity a barrier to the inquisitors ends.

Acts of surprise, fear and fanaticism are hidden under the cover of regret and necessity. “The point of an inquisition is to reduce its victims to abstractions, and abandoning the effort to call their pain back to particular life…” Bruno’s sin was that he included a plurality of worlds with equal weight.

Even to this day the Pope says he is sorry that the Inquisition occurred. That is not acceptable to critics who want the Pope to say he is ashamed. Likewise it is not enough for society to say that it is sorry for slavery, and the lynching of blacks, browns and Asians. It is not enough to be sorry for keeping blacks and browns uneducated, society should be ashamed of it, just the same as Americans should be ashamed of Abu Ghraib, the pissing on the bodies of dead soldiers, the abolishment of the Tucson Mexican American Studies program, and the censorship of books.

In typical Torquemada fashion Tucson Unified School District inquisitors, Mark Stegeman, Michael Hicks, Miguel Cuevas and Alexandre Borges Sugiyama abolished the district’s highly successful Mexican American Studies program at the direction of the lord inquisitors in Phoenix. Now they are banning books.

Among the censored books are Leslie Marmon Silko, Rethinking Columbus, William Shakespeare, The Tempest, Paolo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Rodolfo Acuña, Occupied America, Arturo Rosales, Chicano!: The History of the Mexican Civil Rights Movement and Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, Critical Race Theory, in addition to a dozen other books.

Thus far, there has been no comment from the American Civil Liberties Union or progressives in the United States. Apparently they do not see the parallel in what is happening in Tucson, and what happened in South Africa under apartheid, the burning of the books by the Spaniards in Middle America, or, for that matter, Germany in the1920s and 30s.

Censorship is criminal. We live in a world of knowledge; books and education give us access to that knowledge; if we are deprived of it, the inquisitors deny us the right to make rational choices.

Arizona schools have abandoned its mission to educate students; they have intentionally denied Mexican American students access to knowledge. Consequently the Arizona bureaucracy has deliberately kept them in the fields, the mines and the prisons, hoping to deny them alternatives.

The purpose of critical thinking is to give students alternatives and to dispel myths and repel blind allegiance to those who deny them alternatives.

According to the late Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, “Censorship reflects society's lack of confidence in itself. It is a hallmark of an authoritarian regime.”

The motivation of the TUSD Trustees cannot be explained in terms of greed alone. It cannot be rationalized by culture alone. Money and personal gain play a role. “Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition,” but it’s there.

Of the Tucson gaggle the only honest one is Hicks, who is openly a racist and limited intelligence. The failed scholar Stegeman is stuck on the promotion ladder. He’ll never make it to full professor without support of politicos. Sugiyama is a bad scholar and a worse teacher; his only chance for a full time position is to sell his posterior. The pitiful Cuevas just wants acceptance from rich white people in the city.

Monty Python and others can laugh at the fanaticism of the past; however, it is hard to laugh at today’s inquisitors. It is easier to turn the other way, La zorra nunca se ve la cola (The Skunk Doesn’t See Its Tail).

So, what can we do? We have no choice but to “Fight Back!”

[i] Tomás de Torquemada was the first Grand Inquisitor of Spain, appointed by the pope in 1483.
[ii] Giordano Bruno was an Italian 16th century Dominican friar who the Roman Inquisition found guilty of heresy for writing that the sun was not only the center of the universe but a star in a universe of other inhabited planets. Bruno was burnt at the stake.

Profits and Questions at Online Charter Schools

2012-01-15T09:43:00.000-06:00

A must read. What a rip off for parents that buy into these online schools offered by Education, Inc., Pearson, and others. "The pupils work from their homes, in some cases hundreds of miles from their teachers. There is no cafeteria, no gym and no playground. Teachers communicate with students by phone or in simulated classrooms on the Web. But while the notion of an online school evokes cutting-edge methods, much of the work is completed the old-fashioned way, with a pencil and paper while seated at a desk." All part of the larger plan to decimate the public sector. Corporate sector profits on the backs of mostly poor, minority children and their families. The system of testing is moreover the handmaiden to this very conservative, neoliberal agenda. Very sad and very offensive.

Angela

The New York Times
December 12, 2011

Profits and Questions at Online Charter Schools
By STEPHANIE SAUL

By almost every educational measure, the Agora Cyber Charter School is failing.

Nearly 60 percent of its students are behind grade level in math. Nearly 50 percent trail in reading. A third do not graduate on time. And hundreds of children, from kindergartners to seniors, withdraw within months after they enroll.

By Wall Street standards, though, Agora is a remarkable success that has helped enrich K12 Inc., the publicly traded company that manages the school. And the entire enterprise is paid for by taxpayers.

Agora is one of the largest in a portfolio of similar public schools across the country run by K12. Eight other for-profit companies also run online public elementary and high schools, enrolling a large chunk of the more than 200,000 full-time cyberpupils in the United States.

The pupils work from their homes, in some cases hundreds of miles from their teachers. There is no cafeteria, no gym and no playground. Teachers communicate with students by phone or in simulated classrooms on the Web. But while the notion of an online school evokes cutting-edge methods, much of the work is completed the old-fashioned way, with a pencil and paper while seated at a desk.

Kids mean money. Agora is expecting income of $72 million this school year, accounting for more than 10 percent of the total anticipated revenues of K12, the biggest player in the online-school business. The second-largest, Connections Education, with revenues estimated at $190 million, was bought this year by the education and publishing giant Pearson for $400 million.

The business taps into a formidable coalition of private groups and officials promoting nontraditional forms of public education. The growth of for-profit online schools, one of the more overtly commercial segments of the school choice movement, is rooted in the theory that corporate efficiencies combined with the Internet can revolutionize public education, offering high quality at reduced cost.

The New York Times has spent several months examining this idea, focusing on K12 Inc. A look at the company’s operations, based on interviews and a review of school finances and performance records, raises serious questions about whether K12 schools — and full-time online schools in general — benefit children or taxpayers, particularly as state education budgets are being slashed.

Instead, a portrait emerges of a company that tries to squeeze profits from public school dollars by raising enrollment, increasing teacher workload and lowering standards.

Current and former staff members of K12 Inc. schools say problems begin with intense recruitment efforts that fail to filter out students who are not suited for the program, which requires strong parental commitment and self-motivated students. Online schools typically are characterized by high rates of withdrawal.

Teachers have had to take on more and more students, relaxing rigor and achievement along the way, according to interviews. While teachers do not have the burden of a full day of classes, they field questions from families, monitor students’ progress and review and grade schoolwork. Complaints about low pay and high class loads — with some high school teachers managing more than 250 students — have prompted a unionization battle at Agora, which has offices in Wayne, Pa.

A look at a forthcoming study by researchers at Western Michigan University and the National Education Policy Center shows that only a third of K12’s schools achieved adequate yearly progress, the measurement mandated by federal No Child Left Behind legislation.

Some teachers at K12 schools said they felt pressured to pass students who did little work. Teachers have also questioned why some students who did no class work were allowed to remain on school rosters, potentially allowing the company to continue receiving public money for them. State auditors found that the K12-run Colorado Virtual Academy counted about 120 students for state reimbursement whose enrollment could not be verified or who did not meet Colorado residency requirements. Some had never logged in.

“What we’re talking about here is the financialization of public education,” said Alex Molnar, a research professor at the University of Colorado Boulder School of Education who is affiliated with the education policy center. “These folks are fundamentally trying to do to public education what the banks did with home mortgages.”

The online companies can tailor their programs by reducing curriculum and teachers. During a presentation at the Virginia legislature this year, a representative of Connections explained that its services were available at three price points per student:

Option A: $7,500, a student-teacher ratio of 35-40 to 1, and an average teacher salary of $45,000.

Option B: $6,500, a student-teacher ratio of 50 to 1, with less experienced teachers paid $40,000.

Option C: $4,800 and a student-teacher ratio of 60 to 1, as well as a narrower curriculum.

Despite lower operating costs, the online companies collect nearly as much taxpayer money in some states as brick-and-mortar charter schools. In Pennsylvania, about 30,000 students are enrolled in online schools at an average cost of about $10,000 per student. The state auditor general, Jack Wagner, said that is double or more what it costs the companies to educate those children online.

“It’s extremely unfair for the taxpayer to be paying for additional expenses, such as advertising,” Mr. Wagner said. Much of the public money also goes toward lobbying state officials, an activity that Ronald J. Packard, chief executive of K12, has called a “core competency” of the company.

In all, for-profit educational management companies run 79 online schools around the country, according to the study by researchers at Western Michigan University.

Many educators believe there is a place for full-time virtual learning for children whose pace is extremely accelerated or those with behavioral or other issues, like teenage mothers who need to stay home with their babies. But for most children, particularly in the elementary grades, the school experience should not be replaced with online learning, they say.

“The early development of children requires lots of interaction with other children for purposes of socialization, developing collaboration and teamwork, and self-definition,” said Irving Hamer Jr., deputy superintendent of Memphis city schools.

In an interview at K12’s headquarters in Herndon, Va., Mr. Packard said, “We’re here to help children, and that is our overriding purpose and we want to do it as well and efficiently as possible.”

He acknowledged what he called a “degradation” in K12’s test scores, but he argued that they are an inaccurate measure because many students are already behind when they arrive. “The type of child now coming to an online school, 75 percent of those kids coming in are behind more than one grade level,” Mr. Packard said.

He said K12 continues to invest in its curriculum and has developed interventions, like a remedial math program, to help struggling students.

“Kids have been shackled to their brick-and-mortar school down the block for too long,” Mr. Packard has said repeatedly, adding that for the first time, every child, regardless of where he or she lives, has a choice.

Some educators are questioning its value. “It’s choice,” said Thomas L. Seidenberger, superintendent of the East Penn School District in Pennsylvania, which is outperforming Agora and other online schools its students attend. “What about a bad choice?’”

The Cost

The original pitchman for K12 was William J. Bennett, the former education secretary who helped found the company in 2000. At the time, Mr. Bennett said he viewed online schools as a haven for shy children, those worried about being exposed to drugs and even those with “terrible acne.”

The company planned to sell an education package directly to parents who wanted to home-school their children. But within months, K12 had decided to tap into public education dollars.

As the company’s product has become more popular, the cost has soared.

Mr. Bennett, who left the company in 2005, originally said a home-schooling package would cost about $1,000 per student per year. Parents who wanted teacher support would pay more.

Today, K12 receives an average of $5,500 to $6,000 per student from state and local governments. The schools also receive money for federal programs.

Because online schools do not collect every type of financing that goes to traditional public schools, Mr. Packard contends that his company’s schools, on a national average, cost taxpayers 40 percent less per student.

But online schools have negligible building costs and cheaper labor costs, partly because they pay teachers low wages, records and interviews show. Parents, called “learning coaches,” do much of the teaching, prompting critics to argue that states are essentially subsidizing home schooling.

“Any high school student taking economics could immediately recognize the fundamental flaws in their pricing structure,” said John E. Freund III, a Pennsylvania lawyer who represents a number of districts who are losing students to the online schools and the public financing that goes with them.

Because many states prohibit for-profit public education, the management companies for virtual schools run schools under contract with public districts or nonprofit charter schools, which also receive public money. But companies like K12 are almost fully in charge — devising curriculum, hiring teachers and principals and evaluating student performance.

Another way K12 maximizes its income is to establish schools in poor districts, which receive larger subsidies in some states. The company administers one of K12’s newest schools from Union County, Tenn., a mountainous Appalachian enclave where nearly a quarter of the residents live in poverty.

The Tennessee Virtual Academy is technically part of the local school district, which receives more per pupil from the state than most other districts in Tennessee. But of the school’s 1,800 pupils, few are actually from Union County.

Out of the state money, the Union County schools will get an administrative fee of about $400,000. K12 stands to collect almost $10 million to staff and manage the school. Dozens of other Tennessee counties, however, lost state financing when some of their students elected to go to the virtual school.

The online schools have enabled entrepreneurs like Michael R. Milken, whose company Knowledge Universe started K12 a decade ago and who remains an investor, to use education as a source of government-financed business, much as military contractors have capitalized on Pentagon spending.

Mr. Packard reports to investors every year with higher enrollment numbers and sales. On Nov. 15, he announced that the company’s online schools had enrolled more than 94,000 students. “I think online schools are becoming more mainstream,” said Mr. Packard, who was paid $5 million this year.

A sizable portion of the public money collected by K12 is rolled back into generating more business, a common practice by for-profit companies that nevertheless raises questions when the money is intended to educate schoolchildren. K12 spent $26.5 million on advertising in 2010, according to an analysis prepared for The New York Times by Kantar Media.

“Some of the cyber charter schools have fairly aggressive recruitment campaigns,” said Jim Buckheit, executive director of the Pennsylvania Association of School Administrators. “They have vans, billboards, TV and radio ads. They set up recruitment meetings in area hotels and invite parents to come.”

K12 has run thousands of the sessions, where part of the pitch is supplying computers and subsidized Internet connections for qualifying families. Dr. Seidenberger said he was surprised to see ads for online schools in the outfield at Coca-Cola Park, the stadium of the Lehigh Valley IronPigs minor league baseball team.

The Churn

Parents who become interested in K12’s schools can follow up by calling 866 numbers, which connect them to a call center in Herndon.

School employees who have visited the center have described a high-pressured sales environment aimed at one thing: enrollment.

Some workers, called “enrollment pals,” are paid bonuses based on the number of students they sign up, according to former employees knowledgeable of the operations. Mr. Packard’s annual bonus is also partly tied to enrollment.

Because the online schools are public, students cannot legally be denied enrollment. But former K12 employees said the aggressive and impersonal enrollment process lures students who are not a good fit.

“When you have the television and the Xbox and no parental figure at home, sometimes it’s hard to do your schoolwork,” said one Agora teacher, who asked not to be identified because of concerns over job safety.

The constant cycle of enrollment and withdrawal, called the churn rate, appears to be a problem at many schools. Records Agora filed with Pennsylvania reveal that 2,688 students withdrew during the 2009-10 school year. At the same time, K12 continued to sign up new students. Enrollment at the end of the year — 4,890 — was 170 students more than at the beginning, obscuring the high number of withdrawals.

Gary Miron, a professor of education at Western Michigan University who researches for-profit school management companies, called the turnover troubling. “The kids enroll. You get the money, the kids disappear,” he said.

A review of K12 management contracts reveals that the company may still benefit from students who end up leaving. Under its contracts with some charter schools, K12 charges “upfront” fees for books and other supplies.

According to an Agora price list for the 2009-10 school year, K12’s upfront billings for elementary and middle school students were $60 a course for online services, $75 a course for materials and $75 per student for computers. With students frequently enrolled in six courses, the fees could surpass $800.

Under some of K12’s contracts, only a portion of the fees would be returned if students withdrew quickly. Mr. Packard has said the company does not make money if students leave because of the cost of the materials and shipping.

The state audit of the Colorado Virtual Academy, which found that the state paid for students who were not attending the school, ordered the reimbursement of more than $800,000.

With retention a problem, some teachers said they were under pressure to pass students with marginal performance and attendance.

Students need simply to log in to be marked present for the day, according to Agora teachers and administrators.

For most students, attendance is recommended but not mandatory at what are called synchronous sessions — when they can interact online with the teacher. A new grading policy states that students who do not turn in work will be given a “50” rather than a zero. Several teachers said assignments were frequently open for unlimited retakes.

Agora records from last year show that failing students were told they could make up their work. “All students with a course average of 40 to 59 percent were called and told all assignments past due could be made up without penalty,” according to minutes from a school board meeting. Similar calls were going out to students with averages of 0 to 39 percent.

Theresa Henderson, an Agora teacher until June 2010 and the mother of four of its students, said she was among faculty members who requested a stronger policy to dismiss students who were not doing their work.

Several current and former staff members said that a lax policy had allowed students to remain on the rolls even when they failed to log in for days. Officials of the Elizabeth Forward School District in western Pennsylvania complained that Agora had billed the district for students who were not attending.

One of them was a girl who had missed 55 days but was still on the school’s roster, according to Margaret Boucher, assistant business manager at Elizabeth Forward.

The school has cracked down on disengaged students, according to a statement by its director, Sharon Williams, who said a policy adopted last December mandates attendance at online classes for those students who do not log in, repeatedly fail to complete lessons or are failing three courses. She said the school follows state law by removing students who are absent for 10 consecutive days.

Poor attendance and disengaged students have been such a problem that Agora dismissed 600 students last year for nonattendance, 149 of them just before state tests were administered, according to school board minutes.

The Students and Parents

With K12 estimating the market for its schools as high as $15 billion, the company’s manifest destiny is to expand across the United States. Its newest conquest is Tennessee, where the company got legislative approval last May and began holding information sessions in July.

By fall, 1,800 students had enrolled in the Tennessee Virtual Academy.

About 75 of them came from the struggling Memphis city school system, including the children of Denita Alhammadi.

In a neighborhood teetering on the edge of middle class, Ms. Alhammadi has converted her living room into a classroom. Two desks are for her children, Romeo, 13, and Yasmine, 8. Another is for Ms. Alhammadi, a former Army supply officer who is also studying online, through Kaplan University.

Within weeks of attending a K12 information session, Ms. Alhammadi had become parent and teacher, wrapped into one. She spends as much as six hours a day as the official “learning coach” for her children.

Like many parents who move their children to online schools, she had worried about violence. But no single reason leads families to make the switch. The students are a broadly diverse group, ranging from entertainers and athletes in training to children with cancer, seizure disorders, peanut allergies or behavioral problems. Some have been expelled from regular schools. In many cases their parents are simply dissatisfied.

Kathryn Ubiarco, whose son and daughter are also enrolled in Tennessee, said that her daughter’s school in Memphis had not been teaching her to read. “There’s no way to come up with the B that she got in reading last year,” Ms. Ubiarco said. “The child can’t read.” She believes the virtual school curriculum is more rigorous.

A lesson from a middle school world history class focuses on the history of the calendar and the recording of time. Intended to take one hour, the lesson opens online with an illustrated introduction. A video explains how time zones vary around the globe. After reading from a textbook, students define terms in a written journal. Then, the parent helps chart a timeline of the student’s own life.

The student can click on other online resources — flashcards, three timelines, two games and links to more than 20 other Web sites.

Students say the games are fun. They may encounter problems, though, when navigating the links. Of more than 20 links in the history lesson, five were not working on a recent day. Several linked to commercial sites including the History Channel and Yahoo Kids.

Students must score an 80 on an online assessment to move to the next lesson.

Some teachers have complained that it can be difficult to determine whether students are actually doing the work, or getting help from their parents or others. “Virtual schools offer much greater opportunity for students to obtain credit for work they did not do themselves,” said a report in October from the National Education Policy Center, which receives financing from the National Education Association.

Ms. Alhammadi, who runs her tiny school like boot camp, has hidden Romeo’s computer login so she has control. Otherwise, he would skip the lessons and move straight to the online test — a habit cited by critics of K12’s curriculum.

As two frisky cats run back and forth, Romeo raises his hand — a formality required by his mother — and asks to leave the room. He returns with headphones and plugs them into his computer. As he lip syncs Rihanna’s hit “Umbrella” it becomes clear that Romeo is not listening to any lesson. “I concentrate better with my music,” he says.

On his computer screen, a series of multiple choice questions ask him to select the correct answer to algebraic equations using negative numbers. Romeo scores a 67 percent.

When Romeo moves to science, he misses a question on the definition of matter.

“Romeo, Romeo,” his mother says. “If you had been studying appropriately, you would have found out that there are lots of properties of matter. And you got to take all those elements to build matter. Because elements are gas, solids, liquid.”

Romeo is scheduled for a virtual session with his assigned teacher and class at 1 p.m. But when he signs into the class, no one else is there. “Wow, the room is completely empty,” he says. He types, “Anyone here?” There is no response.

The Teachers

The monthly meeting of the Agora Cyber Charter School board of trustees is live on Blackboard, the same platform students and teachers use for class. During the November meeting, an elementary teacher, Jessica Long, placed a checkmark by her name, indicating she wanted to speak. Then she challenged school figures showing its student-to-teacher ratio is 49 to 1.

“I know on the elementary level we have anywhere from 70 to 100,” Ms. Long said. “I don’t know anyone who has 50 students.”

Some teachers said they were initially attracted to K12 by the flexibility of working from home, in some cases allowing them to take care of their own children while teaching.

Gwen Schwartz, an Indiana University graduate who teaches for the Tennessee Virtual Academy, works from her home in a remote area of eastern Tennessee while her children are next door with their grandparents. In addition to saving on child care, Ms. Schwartz can save on commuting costs and clothing.

But many teachers said the job had become less desirable as the company increased enrollment, particularly because pay at many K12 schools starts in the low 30s — low even for online schools. Some class sizes have become unwieldy, they said, requiring 60-hour weeks and compromising instruction.

At Agora, enrollment has reached 8,836, up from 6,323 in May, according to figures released by the school. As of late November, the total number of staff members — 408 — was lower than last year. Some high school teachers said they were managing as many as 270 students, even though they had been told they would have 150. Agora officials said last week that they hired 25 teachers in the past couple of weeks.

Some Agora teachers have been asked to take on extra students at the rate of $1 per student, per day, according to a newsletter from the Pennsylvania State Education Association.

In interviews, former teachers at Ohio Virtual Academy and Colorado Virtual Academy also complained of bigger class loads, with elementary teachers who once handled 40 to 50 pupils now supervising 75. A teacher with an elementary class that size and a 40-hour workweek could devote little more than 30 minutes a week to each student.

Mary Ravanelli, a former teacher at Ohio Virtual Academy, said she oversaw more than 70 students at a time, answering calls from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., updating parents on students’ progress and attending various school outings. “We’d actually meet our students several times a year,” she said.

With teacher salaries and benefits the biggest cost to K12, increasing student-to-teacher ratios is an easy way for the company to increase profits. Ms. Henderson, the former Agora teacher and mother of four students, said the ultimate losers are the children.

“What has happened now in honors literature courses, the teachers are not able to keep up with 300 students, so they’ll just cut curriculum. The kids are losing out,” she said. “This past week my son was exempted from ‘The Great Gatsby’ because of the workload of the teacher.”

Politics

“Choice” is a mantra of the charter school movement, which promotes competition as a way of compelling traditional public schools to improve. The for-profit companies that operate some charter and online schools take the idea a step further by arguing that private business models are more efficient than public school systems.

Together, the groups have formed a lobbying juggernaut in state capitals.

In Pennsylvania, where K12 Inc. collects about 10 percent of its revenues, the company has spent $681,000 on lobbying since 2007. The company also has friends in high places. Charles Zogby, the state’s budget secretary, had been senior vice president of education and policy for K12. In a statement, Mr. Zogby said he still owned a small number of K12 shares, but did not make decisions specifically affecting online schools.

An analysis by the National Institute on Money in State Politics concluded that K12 and its employees had also contributed nearly $500,000 to state political candidates across the country from 2004 to 2010.

One of the industry’s most persuasive promotional tools has been the young children who show up en masse at hearings to support online-school legislation. They are mobilized by groups tied to online schools. Records show that at least some receive industry funding.

When Karen Beyer, then a Pennsylvania state representative, sponsored a bill in 2007 to cut financing to online schools, about 700 people turned out for one hearing. Mr. Freund, the Pennsylvania education lawyer, said the room was “packed with kids.”

“They had on different colored T-shirts representing their cyber schools,” he added.

One of the organizers of such turnouts has been the Pennsylvania Families for Public Cyber Schools. Records show that the group, which gets money both from K12 and Connections Education, has spent about $250,000 on lobbying in the past five years.

Similar family organizations have cropped up across the country.

Former State Representative Stephen Dyer became suspicious when members of the benignly named organization My School, My Choice paraded through his northeastern Ohio district carrying signs attacking him: “Why Won’t Rep. Stephen Dyer let parents choose the best education for their kids?”

The protest was prompted by questions Mr. Dyer had raised over the state’s financing formula for charter and online schools. The group describes itself as a coalition of parents, teachers and employees of the schools. But Mr. Dyer said that his wife questioned the people carrying the signs and found out they were paid temp agency workers.

A telephone call to a toll-free number on the Web site for My School, My Choice was returned by Mark Weaver, a Columbus lawyer and political consultant with Republican ties dating back to the Reagan administration.

Mr. Weaver said the group’s crowning achievement was a 2009 rally against legislation in Ohio that would limit school choice. “We put 4,500 people on the statehouse lawn,” he said. But he declined to answer questions about the group’s leadership and financing.

Documents incorporating the organization provide clues. The forms name one of the group’s founders as Tim Dirrim, a Huntington National Bank employee who serves as board president of the Ohio Virtual Academy, which is managed by K-12 and receives more than $60 million a year from the state. Mr. Dirrim said he knew little about My School, My Choice and was not aware of the campaign against Mr. Dyer.

Much of the Ohio Virtual Academy’s money goes through an account at Huntington National, according to the Ohio auditor’s office. Mr. Dirrim said the banking arrangement was made before he joined the board and that he did not make decisions relating to the bank’s account with the school.

The Results

Mr. Packard has repeatedly delivered upbeat assessments to Wall Street about the progress of K12 Inc. students, even as many schools were performing poorly on state tests.

In a conference in March sponsored by the investment firm Morgan Stanley, Mr. Packard said that “our kids are doing as well or better than the average child in a brick-and-mortar school.”

During an investment analysts call in October, Mr. Packard boasted about results at Agora, calling them “significantly higher than a typical school on state administered tests for growth.” Weeks earlier, data had been released showing that 42 percent of Agora students tested on grade level or better in math, compared with 75 percent of students statewide. And 52 percent of Agora students had hit the mark in reading, compared with 72 percent statewide. The school was losing ground, not gaining it.

Mr. Packard said in a recent interview that he was not aware of the data at the time he made the comments. A spokesman said Mr. Packard was relying on older data.

A Stanford University group, the Center for Research on Education Outcomes, tracked students in eight virtual schools in Pennsylvania, including Agora, comparing them with similar students in regular schools. The study found that “in every subgroup, with significant effects, cyber charter performance is lower.”

Devora Davis, the center’s research manager, said the group’s analysis of Pennsylvania online schools showed that students were slipping. “If they were paired with a traditional public schools student, the public school student kept their place in line, and the cyberstudent moved back five spots,” she said.

An analysis by the Carroll County Public School District in Virginia shows that the 400 students in the virtual program there performed worse than the regular students in 19 of 26 categories on the state assessment test.

The Carroll County superintendent, James Greg Smith, said he was particularly concerned about scores in middle school math, history and social sciences. In seventh-grade math, for example, only 35 percent of the online students passed a state assessment; 68 percent of the traditional students did.

It will be a while before test results are available for students at the new virtual school in Tennessee. Back in Memphis, Ms. Alhammadi is worried that her daughter, Yasmine, is moving too quickly. A computerized analysis shows that, at the rate she is going, Yasmine will be finished with all but one of her classes by March.

Red flags go up if a student is “zapping through like a rocket, lesson by lesson,” according to Tom DiGiovanni, K12’s senior director of product planning. “The teachers are instructed to drop in (by phone) and do a little quiz to kind of test students” to make sure they understand the concepts.

Five miles from Ms. Alhammadi’s home, Ms. Ubiarco has also turned her living room into a classroom. Her daughter Sabrina, 10, is in the fifth grade and her son, K.C., 6, is in kindergarten at the Tennessee Virtual Academy.

Ms. Ubiarco is giving Sabrina a math lesson — about the distributive property — on a white board in the family’s living room.

While his mother focuses on his sister, K.C. is doing his own thing — lying on the carpet crashing cars into Spider-Man and Batman action figures.

For the most part, Mrs. Ubiarco said the switch to online had gone smoothly, although she was initially stumped when she first got the K12 curriculum.

“I called the teacher the other day to find out what a simple predicate is,” she said. “She said it’s the verb. I said why don’t they just say that?”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: December 14, 2011

Tucson’s Sin of Scandal Failing Students by Rodolfo F. Acuña

2012-01-14T09:31:00.002-06:00

Tucson’s Sin of Scandal Failing Students
By Rodolfo F. Acuña -
Rough Draft, 01/13/2012

What is missing in the media’s coverage of the elimination of the Tucson Unified School District Mexican American Studies program is that students were learning and they wanted to go to school. I take this travesty personal. One of the reasons I have stayed in education for over fifty-five years is that I wanted to do something about the dropout problem. I always heeded John Dewey dicta that a student failure was that of the teacher. If students drop out then there is something wrong with the educational system.

Arizona education has many problems: taxpayers do not want to pay for schools and it is dead last in student per capita spending. White parents don’t want their children going to school with Latinos and blacks as well as other working class people, so charter schools have multiplied to “balance” student ethnicity by making it whiter.

Arizona has blatantly avoided federal court orders to desegregate: more than fifty years after Brown v. the Board of Education (1954), the TUSD is still under a federal court mandate to “balance” the schools. The federal government, meanwhile, has poured millions of dollars into Arizona to help pay for integration purposes.

The truth be told, there has been no improvement. The dropout problem remains over fifty percent. As part of an effort to correct imbalances, the federal court in its desegregation plan, included the MAS program, which federal government paid for.

Because I have been a highly successful educator, I have seen that building student identity ameliorates an inferiority complex ingrained by the educational process. Innumerable studies prove that an increase sense of self motivates students to better their skills and allows them to succeed in school.

The reason that I want to improve education is personal. I am not religious, but I always remember the nuns telling me when I saw a person less fortunate to say, “There for the grace of God go I.”

Although I could not do it, I appreciate the work of Fr. Greg Boyle and Homeboy Industries. It hurts me every time I see a gang kid because I realize that as a member of society I bear a responsibility for the outcome. My vocation differs Greg’s and I work with students by giving them an alternative to gangs when they are young. My feeling is every student that goes to college does not end up in a gang.

The TUSD MAS program was contributing to that end. Despite the racist lies of Arizona politicos it is a model to motivate students. And, despite the actions of the TUSD school board, other districts will emulate and study it.

My feelings about the people behind the destruction of the MAS program are that they have no redemption. They are no better than the members of the mafia who do not care about the outcome or hardships they cause as long as they make a profit.

Democracy has been dealt a blow. The actions of these racist has contributed to disillusionment among many students. They have brought about a loss of faith, which is always difficult whether it be in religion or politics. This loss leads to an emptiness and hopelessness. For instance, I know people who as a result of the pedophile scandals in the Catholic Church have not returned to mass.

In ending the MAS program, the state of Arizona has been complicit in condemning many Latino students to failure. Thomas de Aquinas defined scandal as a word or action that is intrinsically evil, and leads to the spiritual ruin of another person. You don’t necessarily have to physically cause someone’s sin, but only be the moral cause of the sin. A sin of scandal is not accidental but premeditated as in the case of Arizona elites.

From the top on down, Arizona officials know that their actions is causing many Latinos to be stigmatized. They know that they are contributing to their dropping out of school and they don’t care.

Mark Stegeman, Michael Hicks, Miguel Cuevas and the newly appointed Alexandre Sugiyama all know it. They are bought men who don’t care about the consequences as long as it fills their pockets.

For them, education is business and it doesn’t much matter if Mexican Americans get an education. As long as people hate Mexicans, it is easier to cash in on their lack of education.

It is a well-known fact that the Tea Party is not a populist movement. It is racist and driven by right wing funding that includes the Koch brothers who Mitt Romney says are the “financial engine of the Tea Party.”

Most Arizonans know the role of ALEC (the American Legislative Exchange Council). The People for the American Way Foundation and Common Cause have published a report documenting the fact that ALEC has inspired and written most anti- Latino and worker legislation in the state. It is at the forefront of anti-labor, anti-healthcare and anti-environmental. It is behind the privatization of schools and prisons.

Major corporations including Coca-Cola, Kraft, ExxonMobil and GlaxoSmithKline are key players in Arizona politics. Two dozen major corporations have sat on ALEC’s board which is insidiously called the “Private Enterprise Board.”

Well aware of the growing Latino population, it is to ALEC’s advantage to keep the state white and Mexicans disenfranchised. Thus, it has sponsored voter suppression bills that potentially disenfranchise tens of thousands of Arizonans.

The report identifies fifty Arizona state legislators who are current ALEC members. These bought politicos wrote and sponsored SB 1070, Arizona’s notorious immigration. It is no accident that privatized prisons are flush with immigrant detainees. Uneducated Mexican Americans also insure future inmate growth. Aside from money to run the prisons, prison labor is competing with free labor.

In Tucson, the Southern Arizona Leadership Council is an ALEC mini-me; an all-white country club whose members overlap with other heavy hitters locally, regionally and statewide. The TUSD superintendent of schools is a former SALC vice-president.

Recently, when Judy Burns, a supporter of the MAS program died, SALC engineered the appointment of Alexandre Sugiyama, a lecturer in Economics at the University of Arizona, to fill her seat. It accomplished its ends by stacking the selection committee.

Sugiyama was obviously selected because he is half Brazilian and half Japanese. He has no ties to the community; he is a lecturer with no publications, or knowledge or interest in education.

His student evaluations are low: “AVOID (reasons): 1. Resents his own job such that he's consistently 15 mins late to 1hr class…” Another “if you choose to take this class with this teacher you are in for a real treat. TORTURE. Sugiyama is such a horrid teacher it is unreal. Do yourself a favor and just say NO.”

As soon as Sugiyama was appointed, he voted with Stegeman and Hicks to replace Cuevas as chair and then with a 4-1 majority abolished MAS. Democracy in action.

Thus far, what is lost are the Latino students and no one gives a damn. Nobody cares if they end up in gangs, as long as they money for the elites -- that is what counts. Fear of ending up in a class with a Mexican will generate more Charter Schools and more dropouts will insure larger prison populations. Everyone makes money.

The disillusionment is not limited to Arizona politicos but includes the federal government. The federal courts have not enforced federal laws. The Obama administration is paralyzed furthering the feeling of abandonment and encouraging TUSD Tea Party Board member Hicks to go around saying that state law trumps federal law.

My mother would say about the gaggle in Tucson, no tienen madre. They are disrespectful; they don’t care about the law, or how many people are hurt by their actions.

I am not as nice as my mother was. I feel much like the people in the Boyle Heights area when the Night Stalker, Richard Ramírez, was terrorizing Los Angeles. They put out signs daring him to come East of the River, and then took care of him when he did.

Hopefully the Tea Party will come to L.A.

How UT Professors Are Like Chefs

2012-01-10T17:31:00.002-06:00

An answer to the citizens of Texas, who pay my salary and lend me their children to educate

By J.P. Olivelle in Guest Columns | The Alcalde
Jan | Feb 2012, Letters on January 9, 2012

“What do you do?” I am asked this question frequently, and often I struggle to answer adequately. Conditioned from our first day as assistant professors, we fall back on academic-speak.

“I do research and teaching.” My friend nods politely with glazed eyes. Once again, I have failed to tell the story of the academy grippingly.

Now the question is asked not by curious friends but by powerful people with agendas. They think they know already: we really don’t do much, and the little we do doesn’t amount to much. They ask questions about the very soul of the modern university.

It is easy to dismiss the questions from those pushing an agenda. But when my friend asks me, “What do you do?” it makes me wonder whether we have answered it to the satisfaction of the good and generous citizens of Texas, whose children we educate. So let me try.

We are theoretical physicists and art historians, philosophers and mathematicians, sociologists and biologists, engineers, geologists, and anthropologists. But I think we can say in five words what we do: we create and disseminate knowledge. No other social institution does that. We create knowledge through our research endeavors, sometimes in teams, but often alone in a lonely quest. We disseminate the knowledge we create through our writings, public presentations, and most importantly, our teaching.

This is the rare gift that students attending major research universities like UT enjoy. They get served by the chefs; they receive knowledge from those who create it. I like to tell my undergraduate students that going to a restaurant is a good parable for the difference between a school and a university. You can sit at the front and eat a dish that is already fully prepared (knowledge between two hard covers). Or you can go into the kitchen and discover how it is made.

This is what students get when they come to UT. The chef serves you in the kitchen; you learn from the masters. Even when we teach what others have discovered, we know how those discoveries took place, and we can get our students to question those discoveries. This is often called “critical thinking.” In other words, how can what you learn permit you to not simply repeat what you have learned, but to create new possibilities? Students learn to question, to look behind the curtain, to go into the kitchen and interrogate the chef.

In a fast-moving world where you really cannot prepare for a job because that job may not be there when you graduate, the education we impart must enable young people to be able to do and enjoy a wide variety of things. We have to prepare them for life, not for a job. And for that they must have the best knowledge we can give them about the world and the sharpest intellectual skills we can instill in them to remake it.

But what do I do? I work with ancient and early medieval texts from India written primarily in the classical language of Sanskrit. Why? Because I want to understand and reveal through my writings how societies and cultures of a different time and place may have lessons for us today. But that is not the only reason (a utilitarian one), nor the most important. Research is based on the innate curiosity of the human mind to go beyond the apparent, to explore what is distant and unfamiliar, whether it is the working of sub-atomic particles, the distant birth of the cosmos, or the way ancient people lived. It is this curiosity that generates experiments in art, music, and scholarship; it is what sets humans apart and accounts for the history of human accomplishments.

This curiosity-driven search for knowledge cannot be recorded on a bottom line of cost and benefit, although many of those bottom lines would not exist without that thirst and search for knowledge. This is what sets the university apart from the corporation.

As I have labored over ancient Indian legal texts, I have critically edited many of them, making reliable texts available to researchers. I have made annotated translations, making them available to both scholars and ordinary citizens. To prepare a critical edition, as I did of Manu’s famous second-century Code of Law, is tedious, time-consuming, and finally exhilarating. To read 50 copies of a work written many centuries ago by hand on country paper or palm leaves in nine different scripts, to note down and compare every variant reading and make a family tree of the manuscripts, and finally to arrive at a critically constituted text that I believe is the closest possible approximation to the original—this is the lonely quest I mentioned earlier. The result, however, is that we gain new insights into how an ancient people governed themselves, the laws by which they lived, and the ways they resolved disputes.

Is research that is unsupported by outside funds or that does not generate profits through practical applications worthwhile? The bottom-line arguments are good for 10-second sound-bites but disastrous for the health of a university. Sometimes when I am feeling down, I get an email from a stranger who has read a translation of mine of an ancient Indian text and wants me to know how much he appreciated it. Although these moments are rare and far between, they tell me that what I am doing is worthwhile.

The centrality of liberal arts, of scholarship in the human sciences, was underlined by perhaps the most gifted technology leader ever: Steve Jobs. “If you’re looking for CEOs of this caliber, you have to look outside the engineering and business schools,” noted a recent eulogizer.

Speaking of what makes Apple products distinctive, Jobs himself disclosed the secret: “I think our major contribution [to computing] was in bringing a liberal arts point of view to the use of computers,” he said. “If you really look at the ease of use of the Macintosh, the driving motivation behind that was to bring not only ease of use to people—so that many, many more people could use computers for nontraditional things at that time—but it was to bring beautiful fonts and typography to people, it was to bring graphics to people … so that they could see beautiful photographs, or pictures, or artwork, et cetera … to help them communicate.

“Our goal was to bring a liberal arts perspective and a liberal arts audience to what had traditionally been a very geeky technology and a very geeky audience.”

To which we all can only say, Amen!

J.P. Olivelle is the Jacob and Frances Sanger Mossiker Chair in the Humanities in UT’s College of Liberal Arts.

Photo credit: iStockphoto.

The Broad Significance of Fisher v. Texas

2012-01-10T17:11:00.000-06:00

By Richard Kahlenberg | The Chronicle of Higher Education
January 8, 2012

In the next few weeks, the U.S. Supreme Court is likely to decide whether or not it will hear a challenge to affirmative action at the University of Texas. The university, whose racial-preference program was sustained in the lower courts, has urged the Supreme Court not to take the case, while opponents of affirmative action have strongly urged that the justices do so.

The case, Fisher v. Texas, presents the question of whether an institution of higher education is allowed to use race in admissions even when the use of “race-neutral” alternatives produce a fair amount of racial diversity by themselves. For several years beginning in the mid-1990s, the University of Texas was banned by a Circuit Court decision from using race in admissions, so it employed two alternatives: a socioeconomic affirmative-action program, and a plan under which students from the top 10 percent of every high-school class in Texas were automatically admitted regardless of standardized test scores.

After the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed the ability of universities to carefully employ racial preferences in the 2003 Grutter v. Bollinger decision, Texas went back to considering race alongside the top-10-percent and class-based affirmative-action programs. White plaintiffs sued, arguing that the use of race was unnecessary and therefore violated Grutter because Texas’s race-neutral plans produced sufficient racial diversity.

In its filing with the Supreme Court last month, the University of Texas made a number of arguments, including one that suggested that the “unique circumstances of UT-Austin,” made the case unworthy of Supreme Court review. Percentage plans only exist in three states: Texas, California, and Florida. Moreover, the latter two states’ laws already prohibit consideration of race in admissions so the legality of racial considerations in those jurisdictions is moot. The “Texas-specific” nature of the controversy “does not merit this Court’s review,” the lawyers argued.

But the larger legal issue at stake – how hard should universities be pushed to explore race-neutral alternatives before resorting to race – is hardly unique to Texas. While the specific mechanism involved in Texas’s top-10-percent plan may not work everywhere (particularly at private institutions with national applicant pools), Texas’s use of socioeconomic affirmative action has widespread applicability and has been shown to produce substantial levels of racial and ethnic diversity.

In a 2004 Century Foundation study, for example, class-based affirmative action produced almost as much racial and ethnic diversity (10 percent black and Latino) as the use of race (12 percent black and Latino) at the most selective 146 institutions. And a 2010 study modeling an economic affirmative-action plan at the University of Colorado at Boulder found that a sufficiently large socioeconomic boost produced even more racial diversity than the use of race. These studies comport with research finding that today, socioeconomic obstacles are far more significant than racial ones in predicting achievement on standardized test scores.

The broad question of better defining how much pressure should be placed on universities to devise race-neutral alternatives is likely to be of particular concern to Justice Anthony Kennedy – the swing justice on today’s Supreme Court – who dissented in the 2003 Grutter case. In Grutter, Kennedy argued that the Court should “force educational institutions to seriously explore race-neutral alternatives.” Likewise, in a 2007 case involving the use of race in K-12 school-integration plans, Kennedy suggested that the individual classification of students by race should be employed only as “a last resort.”

It is little wonder that the University of Texas is making every argument it can to keep Fisher away from the Supreme Court. We will soon know whether its efforts are effective.

Arizona withholds school funding over ethnic studies class

2012-01-09T12:36:00.000-06:00

The state's superintendent finds Tucson's Mexican American studies program again in violation of state law. The program might have to be cut, a school district board member says.

By Stephen Ceasar, Los Angeles Times
January 6, 2012, 4:50 p.m.

Tucson's Mexican American studies program remains in violation of state law, Arizona's public schools chief ruled Friday, ordering that millions in state funding be withheld from the school district until the program is dismantled or brought into compliance.

John Huppenthal, the state superintendent of public instruction, said the Tucson Unified School District program was in violation of a new state law prohibiting ethnic studies classes that are deemed to be divisive.

Among other things, the law bans classes primarily designed for a particular ethnic group or which "promote resentment toward a race or class of people."

Defenders of the program say it does no such thing. They say the classes push Latino students to excel and teach a long-neglected slice of America's cultural heritage: Chicano perspectives on literature, history and social justice.

Huppenthal ordered that beginning in February, 10% of the district's monthly apportionment of state aid be withheld until the program comes into compliance. He did not say the district should eliminate the program but did not offer any suggestions on how it could be changed to comply with state law.

It is the second instance in which Huppenthal ruled that the program violated the law. The first decision, in June, was appealed by the school district. Last week, an Arizona administrative law judge rejected that appeal, affirming Huppenthal's original decision.

The withholding of state funds will also be applied retroactively between August 2011 and January 2012. That money — about $5 million — will be taken out of the district's February allotment, said Ryan Ducharme, an Arizona Department of Education spokesman.

Should the district not bring the program into compliance, the district stands to lose about $14.4 million over the fiscal year, Ducharme said.

The district's governing board can also appeal the decision in Superior Court. The board will discuss the matter in its next meeting on Tuesday, a district spokeswoman said.

"We would find it nearly impossible for them to cure the program," Huppenthal said. "The problems are so widespread and so deep that it would be very difficult. These are decisions they would have to make."

Miguel Cuevas, a member of the district board, said that Huppenthal's decision to withhold funds retroactively took the board members by surprise. They will now review the decision and determine whether Huppenthal was within his legal rights to withhold funding while the district was appealing his first decision.

Cuevas told the Los Angeles Times that because the district would not be able to weather the loss of more than $14 million in state funding, the board would have to consider several options, including the elimination of the program.

"I cannot go down the path of losing $15 million," he said. "That is something I cannot see happen."

The law does not outlaw all ethnic studies courses in Arizona, but was framed in a way to target the Tucson program. The program's opponents — led by Huppenthal, a veteran state senator elected superintendent of public instruction in 2010 — say that by framing historical events in racial terms, the teachers promote groupthink and victimhood.

The classes, Huppenthal said in a statement, assert that "Latino minorities have been and continue to be oppressed by a Caucasian majority."

A separate case pending in federal court contends that the state law is unconstitutional. Eleven teachers and two students have requested an injunction to halt its implementation. A federal judge in Tucson heard arguments on the injunction last month but will soon rule on Huppenthal's motion to dismiss the case.

There's got to be a better way to finance education

2012-01-09T11:40:00.000-06:00

Houston Chronicle
Friday, January 6, 2012

The state of Texas is facing multiple lawsuits over school finance as it heads into the New Year.

It's not as if the litigation was totally unexpected.

School district administrators from across the state were in Austin last legislative session begging the Legislature to address the woefully inadequate public school finance situation.

Not only did state lawmakers fail to address the problems, they cut $5.3 billion from public education and failed to provide additional funding for the 80,000 new students who are added to the school rolls each year.

There is something fundamentally wrong with the way the state conducts business if school districts are regularly forced to spend their money to take the state to court to do right by schoolchildren.

The latest flurry of lawsuits against the state over school finance is the sixth time the issue has landed in court since the 1989 Texas Supreme Court ruling in the landmark Edgewood v. Kirby lawsuit.

The first lawsuit filed this time around was brought by low- and medium-wealth districts that contend the state's funding formula is inequitable.

The second suit was filed by higher-wealth districts that claim the Legislature has failed to adequately fund public education.

The third lawsuit, filed by the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund, contends the state's public education funding system is inequitable for all students and inadequate for English-language learners and low-income students.

And the state's largest school districts filed the fourth lawsuit.

It is unfortunate taxpayers have had to resort to taking state officials to court to fix the problem.

State lawmakers have known for years that the 2006 so-called margins tax, which allowed a broad-based business tax to replace property taxes, was not working, but they did nothing about it.

They allowed the shortfall in revenue to expand until it prompted heavy cuts in public education and forced thousands of teacher layoffs, staff cuts and reductions in many programs.

In the process, many school districts have been forced to set their property tax rates at the maximum allowed by law just to be able to balance this budget.

The state keeps setting the accountability bar higher and higher for public education but cuts funding. State officials boast they were able to balance the state budget without raising taxes, but in doing so they forced school districts to finance lawsuits to take the state to court to get it to do the right thing.

It is unfair and unjust.

UT official resigns after questions raised about ties to startups

2012-01-05T23:27:00.000-06:00

By Kirk Ladendorf | AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Published: 9:49 p.m. Thursday, Jan. 5, 2012

Richard Miller, the University of Texas' first chief commercialization officer, resigned his position last week after being told he must no longer have a financial interest in startup companies that might want to license technology from the school.

Miller, a veteran biotechnology researcher and entrepreneur in California, went to work for UT in September 2010 to help turn more of the school's research discoveries into new jobs, companies and licensing income. As part of his job, he oversaw the work of the Office of Technology Commercialization, which assists companies that are interested in using patented UT technology and negotiates licensing deals with them.

Miller resigned effective Dec. 31 after he was told by UT officials that he could not have a personal and financial involvement in companies that might want to license technology developed at UT.

UT generated $25.6 million in licensing revenue in the most recent fiscal year and completed 29 new licensing and options agreements, according to the commercialization office's website. The school also received 58 U.S. and foreign patents last year.

Juan Sanchez, UT's vice president of research, said there was no active conflict of interest with Miller's involvement with the companies because they had not yet licensed technology from UT. However, Miller "was setting up a scenario in which he would be negotiating with himself, and that would have been a conflict of interest, which we would not allow," Sanchez said.

"We couldn't move forward with his expectation of having a dual role" with the companies, Sanchez said. "It was clear that he would have to divest his interest. The resignation was his call. I would have liked him to remain as chief commercialization officer, but he chose not to."

Sanchez said he instructed Miller in December to divest his interests in three startup companies that he had co-founded with UT faculty members and graduate students. Miller did divest his holdings in the three companies — Wibole, Graphea Inc. and Ultimor — but resigned sometime after that discussion, Sanchez said.

Sanchez said he asked Miller to divest his interest in the Austin companies he co-founded as soon as he learned of Miller's involvement with them.

Sanchez said that, to the best of his knowledge, Miller received no financial gain when he divested his interest in the companies.

Miller could not be reached by the American-Statesman for comment Thursday.

"In his heart ... Dr. Miller is still an entrepreneur and wants to work directly with startup companies in Austin and elsewhere," Sanchez said in a letter announcing Miller's resignation within UT.

Miller arrived in Austin in 2010 with ambitious plans to accelerate the pace of turning technical discoveries into jobs, companies and licensing revenue at the school.

Miller is an experienced biotech entrepreneur in California, and also taught at Stanford University, considered one of the nation's leaders in commercializing technology advances. He was hired by UT at a salary of $310,000.

UT's Office of Technology Commercialization, which Miller oversaw, had been involved with introducing at least two of the companies that Miller co-founded at conferences in which companies seek new investors. The office reported on a Venture Labs Expo at UT in May , at which Miller spoke and where two of the companies, Wibole and Graphea, were given as examples of the kinds of young companies that the Office of Technology Commercialization was working with.

The report said Graphea "was commercializing a patented graphene-based chemistry for high-performance composites."

It also said that Wibole had developed "a technology to improve the performance of cellular networks" and added that "OTC helped Wibole patent its technology."

But Sanchez said this week that UT has no formal ties with any of the companies Miller co-founded because the school has not yet licensed any of its research discoveries to them.

Sanchez said after his conversation with Miller, he asked UT's legal affairs office to provide a detailed talk to employees at the commercialization office on which limitations apply to them in working with customers that seek to license the school's research.

"We needed to make sure that we properly educated people," Sanchez said of the meeting.

Sanchez has asked Dan Sharp, associate director of the commercialization office, to serve as the interim director until a permanent replacement for Miller is found.

On reflection, Sanchez said, UT had a positive relationship with Miller, who he said brought several innovations to the school's commercialization effort.

"I see this as a minor obstacle that we have to overcome, — to find another chief commercialization officer with the same level of experience and enthusiasm" as Miller, Sanchez said. "I am committed — and so is everyone here at UT — that OTC continue to succeed. We are enthusiastic that we will continue to be very proactive in commercializing research."

While he was at UT, Miller pushed for the creation of a so-called embedded fund that would pay for early-stage work for startup companies working to commercialize the school's research work.

He also said it would take time for his ideas of accelerating commercialization in Austin to bear fruit.

"In a year or two, we will know if we can do some big-time stuff," he told the American-Statesman in an interview published in September 2010. "You will be able to feel that you are getting some traction.

"I am expecting to work very hard. In fact, I am already working very hard. The attraction is the possibility of doing something really, really different that is fun to do and that can have a huge impact."

Over the past decade, UT has stepped up its efforts to generate more revenue from technology licensing. Part of the reason is faculty pressure and recruitment of top-level researchers. Both new recruits and existing research faculty have pressed the school's administration to take a more proactive role in tech commercialization.

Pike Powers, an Austin lawyer and veteran economic development activist, said Miller brought new ideas to UT but might not have understood the constraints of working for a public university.

"He was offering some new ideas and thoughts about ways that the University of Texas could be more competitive," Powers said. "I don't think he received as strong a reception as he wanted to receive, so it was frustrating for him. He met with numerous members of the business community, and we advised him to be very careful about what steps he took next and to make sure he had the full support of the business community and the UT administration. But I don't think he ever heard that message to the extent that he should have."

UT-Austin Prepares for Fight Over Tuition Increases

2012-01-05T23:11:00.001-06:00

by Reeve Hamilton | Texas Tribune
January 5, 2011

A group of students taking their cues from the Occupy movement wants the University of Texas System regents to know they won’t take tuition increases without a fight.

At a meeting in front of UT’s iconic tower tonight, the students will settle on a final version of a protest document they hope sparks a larger pushback against the growing cost of higher education.

If 2011 was a rough year for higher education, and UT in particular, the burgeoning Occupy UT group — which takes its name and inspiration from the worldwide phenomenon that began last year — might be an indication that 2012 may not be any easier. One assured flashpoint: how and how high tuition is set.

Forces on both the left and right of the political spectrum are already preparing for battle.

Toward the end of 2011, UT President Bill Powers concurred with recommendations from the university’s Tuition Policy Advisory Committee, made up of students, faculty and administrators, to ask the University of Texas System Board of Regents to increase tuition by 2.6 percent each of the next two years. That’s the maximum the regents, who will make the final tuition decision later this year, said they’d allow.

Adopting the recommendations will mean an extra $127 for in-state students in the coming academic year and $131 in the next. Leaders at UT argue that increases are necessary to avoid immediate cuts to crucial programs.

Not every university in Texas intends to increase tuition next year — the University of Texas at Arlington is a notable example — but it certainly is the trend. And the opposition UT faces from students and others who oppose the price hikes is illustrative of tuition struggles statewide.

Natalie Butler, the UT student body president and a member of the tuition advisory committee, said she hoped the increases would buy the university time to reconsider its approach to funding. “The fact that this current model is not sustainable is not lost on anyone, myself included,” she said.

When the committee’s recommendations were released following a closed-door meeting, many in right-leaning circles that spent much of last year questioning UT’s efficiency and transparency began crying foul. On the conservative Empower Texans blog, writer Will Lutz questioned if the process had violated recent legislative efforts to increase the transparency of the decision-making process regarding student fees. He concluded that while no open-records laws may have been broken, the committee was “ignoring both the intent and spirit” of recent legislation.

UT officials argue that as an advisory body that does not make final decisions on tuition, the committee can meet behind closed doors, allowing members to speak more freely.

Meanwhile, the ostensibly nonpartisan but generally left-leaning members of the nascent Occupy UT movement attended the advisory committee meeting following the announcement of the recommendations to chant their complaints about the proposed increases and the process that led to them.

“We know that this forum is a mere formality,” dozens of students stood up and shouted. “We know that this forum was never a chance to democratically participate in this decision-making process.”

UT President Powers later told the student newspaper The Daily Texan, “I thought the comments were very constructive. It was an interesting theatrical way to make a point. … It doesn’t surprise me that there’s not unanimous agreement on this across the University.”

Trevor Hoag, an assistant instructor at UT and an Occupy UT participant, said — speaking for himself, not the group — that he believes administrators are in “a tight spot” due to state budget cuts. And he said he wants to believe that they are more like-minded than it might seem at first blush. But, Hoag said, “If you’re really standing with us, then what would be the perfect rebuke to the Legislature than to say, ‘You’re going to cut us, but we’re not going to raise tuition. We’re going to buck the trend.’”

The Occupy students’ draft statement catalogs a list of grievances with the university: tuition increases “such that lower- and middle-class students can no longer afford to attend”; students accruing massive student loan debt, “which has led to wide-spread bankruptcy and default”; and an administration that “has leveled no serious rebuke against the legislature of the State of Texas” by demanding the re-regulation of tuition and a return to previous funding levels.

The students also complain that UT has made those decisions, among others, “with practically no democratic input from students, and it will continue to do so until students unite in order to turn the tide.”

Kevin Hegarty, UT’s vice president and chief financial officer, disagreed. He said the opportunities for student involvement in tuition recommendations had increased — the tuition advisory committee held open forums prior to its decision, and several new student budget advisory committees have been established in the last year — but overall student participation had not. “The vast majority of the student body does not seem to want to engage in that particular discussion, but that said, we’ll continue to make the effort,” he said.

Butler, the student body president, agreed, saying she had expected to hear calls to prevent tuition increases at two open advisory committee meetings before the recommendations were finalized. “I was expecting it and didn’t hear it, and that colored my thinking of things,” she said.

Now, the tuition decision rests with the regents, and it’s likely that they will hear opposition from voices on the right and from Occupiers like Hoag, who said, “We just want, if nothing else, manageable student debt.”

Hoag and his compatriots in Occupy UT have big plans. Thus far their strategy has been more event-based, but a physical occupation could be in the works for later in the semester. And they are reaching out to sympathetic groups at other schools, like Texas State University in San Marcos, which has had a small band of occupiers for months.

“Our target is, in some way, to attract others to swell the movement rather than to plead to the masters for more scraps,” Hoag said.

Lost Decade for Educational Progress -- NCLB 10th Anniversary Report

2012-01-04T20:29:00.000-06:00

Here's the link to the Full Report

-Patricia

FairTest NationalCenterfor Fair & Open Testing

For further information:
Dr. Monty Neill (617)
477-9792

Bob Schaeffer (239) 395-6773
For use on or after Tuesday afternoon, January 3, 2012

The federal No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law “failed badly both
in terms of its own goals and more broadly,” leading to a decade
of educational stagnation. That is the central conclusion of a major
new report marking NCLB’s tenth anniversary. President George W. Bush
signed the program into law on January 8, 2002.

The report, “NCLB’s Lost Decade for Educational Progress,”
summarizes data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress
(NAEP) and dozens of independent studies. It was written by staff of
the National Center for Fair & Open Testing (FairTest).

Among the report’s major findings:
- NCLB failed to significantly increase average academic
performance or to significantly narrow achievement gaps, as measured
by NAEP. U.S. students made greater gains before NCLB became law
than after it was implemented.
- NCLB severely damaged educational quality and equity by
narrowing the curriculum in many schools and focusing attention on the
limited skills standardized tests measure. These negative effects fell
most heavily on classrooms serving low-income and minority
children.

- So-called "reforms" to NCLB fail to address many of the
law’s fundamental problems and, in some cases, may intensify them.
Flawed proposals include Obama Administration waivers and the Senate
Education Committee’s Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA)
reauthorization bill

“NCLB undermined many promising reform efforts because of its
reliance on one-size-fits-all testing, labeling and sanctioning
schools,” explained FairTest’s Lisa Guisbond, the new report’s lead
author. “A decade’s worth of solid evidence documents the failure of
NCLB and similar high-stakes testing schemes. Successful programs in
the U.S. and other nations demonstrate better ways to improve
schools. Yet, policymakers still cling to the discredited NCLB model.”

“It’snot too late to learn the lessons of the past ten years.
Now is the time to craft a federal law that supports equity and
progress in all public schools,” added FairTest Executive Director,
Dr. Monty Neill. The Forum on Educational Accountability (FEA), which
FairTest leads, is promoting a comprehensive plan to overhaul NCLB.
The proposal calls for using multiple measures to assess student and
school performance. It also targets resources to improve teaching and
learning. More than 150 national education, civil rights, disability,
religious, labor and civic groups signed theJoint Organizational
Statement on NCLB, which FEA seeks to implement.
- - 30 - -
- the NCLB 10th Anniversary report is posted at
http://fairtest.org/NCLB-lost-decade-report-home

Budget Analysis Documenting the Harm Done in 2011 Legislative Session

2012-01-03T21:39:00.002-06:00

CPPP's Budget Analysis Documenting the Harm Done in 2011 Legislative Session:

A new report from the Austin-based Center for Public Policy Priorities updates the damage inventory resulting from state budget cuts forced through the legislature by the governor and legislative leaders last spring and summer. The December 2011 report by analyst Eva DeLuna Castro notes that “the state budget directly eliminates 5,727 public jobs by 2013, while school districts will lose state aid that would have supported 49,000 jobs.” The report further concludes: “After adjusting for inflation, Texas per-student spending will fall to its lowest point in over a decade. The 2012-13 budget assumes that local property taxes will not rise to offset the decrease in state aid.”

Download the full report.

MALDEF sues Texas over school finance

2012-01-03T18:23:00.000-06:00

This is the case to keep a close watch on, friends.

-Patricia

By Kate Alexander | AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Tuesday, Dec. 13, 2011

Disparities in education funding in Texas have reached levels not seen in two decades and low-income students who are learning English are particularly affected, according to a school finance lawsuit filed Tuesday.

The lawsuit, brought by the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund , is the third in recent months to challenge the constitutionality of Texas' school finance system.

No Central Texas school districts have signed on to the lawsuit, but local parents are slated to join, lawyer David Hinojosa said.

All the pending school finance litigation turns, in part, on whether the state is providing an adequate public education without violating a constitutional prohibition of a statewide property tax.

The lawsuit filed on Tuesday also takes aim at how funding inequities hamstring school districts that are considered property-poor and serve large contingents of English-language learners.

Those inequities have been exacerbated by state budget cuts enacted this spring, many of which hit programs specifically aimed at helping students at risk of failure, according to the lawsuit.

"The state has left many Texas children behind by blatantly defying its constitutional duty to fully support their education. Every Texas child should have the opportunity to go to college, and this lawsuit will ensure that opportunity," Hinojosa said.

For example, the Edgewood school district in San Antonio taxes its property owners at the maximum rate, $1.17 per $100 of assessed property value, which yields $5,472 per student. But the nearby Alamo Heights district levies a tax rate of $1.04 and gets $6,242 per student.

Past court rulings have found a $600 funding gap to be "minimally acceptable," according to the lawsuit, but the funding disparities have increased by two and three times that amount since that time.

Meanwhile, Edgewood has a more challenging student population to educate because 93 percent are low-income, compared with 22 percent in Alamo Heights, Texas Education Agency figures show.

The percentage of English-language learners in Edgewood is almost four times greater than in Alamo Heights' .

Students who face these challenges can achieve on par with their peers if the school districts have the resources to help them, said Julian Vasquez Heilig , a University of Texas education professor. More money — spent the right way — does help English-language learners catch up, he said.

"We do have clear evidence that certain things do increase test scores," said Vasquez Heilig , whose research has found that bilingual teachers and smaller classes to be particularly important for improving test scores for English-language learners.

But others argue that additional spending does not produce better results.

"I don't think that more funding is really the answer," said James Golsan , an education policy analyst for the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a limited-government think tank. "Given our previous track record, I'm really not convinced of that fact."

The fourth and final school finance lawsuit, which is expected this week, will involve the broadest array of school districts.

More than 1.5 million students are served by the school districts that are party to the suit, among them Austin, Dallas and Houston. On Monday , the Hays school board voted to join the case as well.

All four of the challenges will be consolidated for trial next fall in Travis County.

Senator grills UT chancellor, an old friend

2012-01-03T18:22:00.000-06:00

By Ralph K.M. Haurwitz | AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Friday, Nov. 18, 2011

State Sen. Judith Zaffirini, D-Laredo, has known Francisco Cigarroa since he was born. His mother is one of her best friends. His father is her physician.

But Cigarroa, the chancellor of the University of Texas System, didn't alert Zaffirini, who leads the Senate Higher Education Committee, when a controversy erupted early this year over the direction of the system and its governing board.

"And when UT was criticized in particular, you didn't defend UT," Zaffirini told Cigarroa at a hearing held Friday by a special House-Senate panel. "Why not?"

Cigarroa replied that he initially was "trying to put my hands around how quickly this was moving and where it was going."

Indeed, he was navigating a political minefield. The chairman of the Board of Regents had hired an adviser — who was later dismissed — with a job description overlapping some of the chancellor's duties. And some UT regents, along with counterparts at the Texas A&M University System, seemed sympathetic to Gov. Rick Perry's desire to shake up public higher education.

Cigarroa testified that he found other venues to speak his mind, including a gathering of prominent donors, newspaper editorial boards and meetings of the regents where he defended the system's faculty members and scolded board members for micromanagement.

"So in my voice," Cigarroa said, "I spoke out to the best of my abilities."

The exchange wasn't the only moment when the senator put her old friend on the spot during Friday's hearing of the Joint Oversight Committee on Higher Education Governance, Excellence and Transparency, which Zaffirini leads along with Rep. Dan Branch , R-Dallas. Up to now, she has largely defended the chancellor's handling of the higher education debate, which broke out in March after Gene Powell, chairman of the UT regents, hired Rick O'Donnell as special adviser and suggested that college costs could be reduced by offering a $10,000 bachelor's degree akin to the quality of a midlevel vehicle .

Zaffirini noted that when her office requested emails and other records about several higher education proposals promoted by Perry, including bonus pay for faculty members based solely on student evaluations, the A&M System "turned in the documents we requested almost immediately. Nothing was marked confidential. Working with UT, on the other hand, whether with the system or with a particular individual, was incredibly challenging.

"I think I called you, chancellor, what, perhaps five times, saying, 'Where is the information and why aren't we getting it?' And so many of the emails were marked confidential," Zaffirini said.

"We haven't found anything that we consider confidential. Embarrassing? Yes. Controversial? Absolutely. Stupid? Sometimes. But not confidential. And even today we have not resolved which are no longer considered confidential. Why is it so difficult and why is this information still being considered confidential?" she said.

Cigarroa replied that he didn't understand why it was so difficult. "I certainly conveyed your strong concerns to the Office of General Counsel," he said. "I think a complicating factor was that we were under threat of ... a lawsuit by the previous special adviser to the board. I wasn't really an expert to determine what was confidential or not from a legal perspective."

The chancellor said he would convey her concerns again to the system's general counsel, Barry Burgdorf .

"The sooner the better," Zaffirini said, "because we have so much information that I can't ask you questions about because they're marked confidential, and that really ties our hands."

Largest school finance lawsuit in Texas takes shape

2012-01-03T18:18:00.000-06:00

By Kate Alexander | AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Thursday, Dec. 22, 2011

The legal fight over Texas' school finance system is shaping up to become the largest of its kind in state history.

Texas' largest school districts — including Austin, Houston and Dallas — joined the fight Thursday when they and 60 other districts, including Round Rock, filed a lawsuit that claims the method for funding Texas public schools is unconstitutional. It is the fourth such legal challenge filed against the state in recent months.

In all, more than 3 million students go to school in districts that have signed on to one of the four lawsuits. That total exceeds 60 percent of the state's public school population and dwarfs any of the past legal challenges.

"It demonstrates the pervasiveness of the issue," said lawyer David Thompson , who is representing the school districts that filed the latest lawsuit. "It is a problem of statewide magnitude."

The issue, according to the lawsuit, is that the state has run afoul of the Texas Constitution by failing to provide adequate resources to meet the higher academic standards established by the Legislature. At the same time, districts lack "meaningful discretion" to set their own tax rates, as the courts have said is required.

Finally, the system for divvying up the limited state dollars among the districts is inequitable and arbitrary.

More than $5 billion worth of state budget cuts to education enacted by lawmakers earlier this year has exacerbated the problem. Effectively, each Texas student on average is now valued at about $500 less than last year.

"From our perspective, the finance system is broken, and we've been saying that for the last two or three years," Round Rock Superintendent Jesús Chávez said.

The superintendent and the attorneys said the lack of state funding makes it more difficult for schools to perform at high levels, particularly with the increased rigor of new state-mandated achievement tests rolling out this school year.

"We are looking at steadily rising standards and funding that seems to be completely unrelated to what it is we're trying to accomplish," Thompson said.

Thursday's lawsuit involves the widest array of school districts, encompassing as many as 1.6 million students, including about 86,700 in Austin.

"The school board and administration believe that the current school finance system prevents the district from providing an appropriate and adequate education to all students. It is in the best interest of Austin students to seek a remedy within the court system that will ensure the level of funding to which they are entitled by the Texas Constitution," district spokesman Alex Sanchez said.

The other challenges have come from more focused groups of districts, including those that are considered property-wealthy and those on the opposite end with large populations of English-language learners.

About half the school districts in the state are now party to the lawsuits, which are expected to be consolidated and heard in a single trial next fall in Travis County.

Those big numbers might not figure into the court's legal calculus. But they matter to members of the Legislature, who would be tasked with fixing the school finance system if it is ruled unconstitutional, said Ray Freeman , deputy director of the Equity Center, which has spearheaded one of the other lawsuits. That challenge, which focuses on districts that are at the lower end in terms of per-student funding, includes 1.3 million students.

"You have elected officials in every one of these school districts saying that things are bad enough that we need to sue the state," Freeman said.

The current round of school finance litigation is the eighth filed against Texas since 1968.

The issues at the center of today's litigation stem from the Legislature's response to a 2005 Texas Supreme Court ruling that lawmakers had enacted an unconstitutional statewide property tax.

Legislators reduced local school property tax rates by one-third and dedicated more state money to the schools to replace the local money. The state has not maintained that level of school funding in recent years.

They also froze the level of per-student revenue at what each school district was getting in 2005-06 with the intention of coming back in 2007 to make a long-term fix. But lawmakers still haven't fashioned a lasting solution.

In a joint statement announcing Thursday's suit, the lawyers argue that the temporary finance system from 2006 has become "a permanent funding system that assigns different levels of money to students in different school districts without regard for the actual costs of educating a growing and increasingly diverse and poor student population."

For example, neighboring Pflugerville, which joined the Equity Center lawsuit, and Round Rock school districts tax their property owners at the same rate. But Round Rock has almost $700 more per student to spend this school year.

"There's the issue of adequacy, as well as equity," Chávez said. "For Round Rock, certainly the adequacy is very important, having the necessary funds to provide a good education to our students. With the shortage of funds from the state level, that's been put into jeopardy."

2011 marred by test cheating scandals across U.S.

2012-01-03T18:16:00.002-06:00

By Dorie Turner | ASSOCIATED PRESS
Saturday, Dec. 31, 2011

ATLANTA — It was the year of the test cheating scandal.

From Atlanta to Philadelphia and Washington to Los Angeles, officials have accused hundreds of educators of changing answers on tests or giving answers to students. Just last month, state investigators revealed that dozens of educators in 11 schools in Georgia's Dougherty County either cheated or failed to prevent cheating on 2009 standardized tests.

In July, those investigators accused nearly 180 educators in almost half of Atlanta's 100 schools of cheating dating back to 2001 — which experts have called the largest cheating scandal in U.S. history. And at least 20 students have been charged on Long Island with cheating on SAT and ACT college entrance exams by paying someone to take the test for them.

"It's a year in which cheating became a national scandal, a scandal of national proportions," said Bob Schaeffer, a spokesman for the National Center for Fair & Open Testing, which advocates against high-stakes testing. "The Atlanta case forced policymakers and journalists in other jurisdictions to look to see if there's anything similar going on in their backyards."

Schaeffer, who has long followed cheating scandals, said he's seen as many cheating stories in 2011 as in the previous half-dozen years combined. He said there have been confirmed cases of cheating in 30 states and the District of Columbia in the past three years.

Experts say some educators have bowed to the mounting pressure under the federal No Child Left Behind law as schools' benchmarks increase each year toward the ultimate goal of having all children reading and doing math at their grade level by 2014. Teachers in Atlanta reported that administrators created a culture of "fear, intimidation and retaliation" where testing goals had to be met no matter what, according to investigators.

"This problem existed before No Child Left Behind, but NCLB has exacerbated the problem, clearly," said Walter Haney, a retired Boston College education professor and expert on cheating. "I think testing is really important, but the problem has been the misuse of test results without looking behind the test scores to see who and who is not tested."

Federal officials have been saying for more than a year that the law doesn't accurately depict what's happening in schools. Although lawmakers agree the law needs to be fixed, an overhaul has become mired in the partisan atmosphere in Congress.

At President Barack Obama's invitation, states have begun filing waivers to get relief from the law. Under the 11 waivers already filed, states are asking to use a variety of factors to determine whether they pass muster and to choose how schools will be punished if they don't improve. Among the factors that could be used are college entrance exam scores or the performance of students on Advanced Placement tests.

At least 39 states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico have said they will file waivers, though it is unclear how many will be approved.

In Pennsylvania, an investigation continues into irregularities found in 2009 state standardized tests in reading and math. The probe began last summer after a routine forensics report flagged "highly improbable" results in 90 schools across the state. The state education secretary ordered the 50 districts representing the named schools to conduct internal investigations and submit reports to him by Aug. 15. Four months later, the reports are still being analyzed and have not been made public.

Twenty-eight of the flagged schools were in Philadelphia, the state's largest district. District spokesman Fernando Gallard said the system is talking with the state Department of Education over how to move forward with the investigation.

In Washington, federal and city officials are investigating possible cheating in more than 100 schools from 2008 to 2010. The unusually high rate of erasures in those schools came to light after a USA Today investigation of improbable test gains in more than 300 schools in six states and the District of Columbia.

Teach for America: Liberal mission helps conservative agenda

2012-01-03T15:02:00.000-06:00

From Valerie Strauss' blog of the WASHINGTON POST.
-ANGELA

Teach for America: Liberal mission helps conservative agenda
By Valerie Strauss

This was written by Andrew Hartman, who teaches history at Illinois State University. He is the author of Education and the Cold War: The Battle for the American School. This was originally published at jacobinmag.com. It is long but well worth your time.

By Andrew Hartman

The job of the American public school teacher has never been so thankless. In states across America, cutting teacher salaries and pensions has become the most popular method for fixing budget deficits. New Jersey Republican Governor Chris Christie’s deep cuts, for instance, force teachers to contribute a much higher percentage of their salaries to their pensions, while doubling or even tripling their health care contributions and eliminating cost-of-living adjustments. Republican governors Scott Walker of Wisconsin and John Kasich of Ohio took their austerity measures a step further by seeking to abolish collective bargaining rights for teachers. Such legislation is possible because the image of teachers has never been so degraded, especially of unionized teachers, whom Christie routinely refers to as “thugs” and “bullies.”

The liberals of the education reform movement, often more surreptitiously than Michelle Rhee, the overstated former Washington D.C. chancellor of schools during Democratic Mayor Adrian Fenty’s term in office, have for decades advanced negative assumptions about public school teachers that now power the attacks by Christie, Walker, Kasich and their ilk.

This is particularly true of Teach for America (TFA), the prototypical liberal education reform organization, where Rhee first made her mark. The history of TFA reveals the ironies of contemporary education reform. In its mission to deliver justice to underprivileged children, TFA and the liberal education reform movement have advanced an agenda that advances conservative attempts to undercut teacher’s unions. More broadly, TFA has been in the vanguard in forming a neoliberal consensus about the role of public education — and the role of public school teachers — in a deeply unequal society.

In 1988, Princeton student Wendy Kopp wrote a thesis arguing for a national teacher corps, modeled on the Peace Corps — the archetype of liberal volunteerism — that “would mobilize some of the most passionate, dedicated members of my generation to change the fact that where a child is born in the United States largely determines his or her chances in life.”

Kopp launched TFA in 1990 as a not-for-profit charged with selecting the brightest, most idealistic recent college graduates as corps members who would commit to teach for two years in some of the nation’s toughest schools. From its inception, the media anointed TFA the savior of American education. Prior to a single corps member stepping foot in a classroom, The New York Times and Newsweek lavished Kopp’s new organization with cover stories full of insipid praise. Adulation has remained the norm.

Its recent twenty-year anniversary summit, held in Washington, D.C., featured fawning video remarks by President Obama and a glitzy “who’s who” roster of liberal cheerleaders, including John Lewis, Malcolm Gladwell, Gloria Steinem, and TFA board member John Legend. The organs of middlebrow centrist opinion — Time magazine, Atlantic Monthly , The New Republic — glorify TFA at every opportunity. [Education columnist Jay Mathews of ] The Washington Post has heralded the nation’s education reform movement as the “TFA insurgency”— a perplexing linguistic choice given so-called “insurgency” methods have informed national education policies from Reagan to Obama.

TFA is, at best, another chimerical attempt in a long history of chimerical attempts to sell educational reform as a solution to class inequality. At worst, it’s a Trojan horse for all that is unseemly about the contemporary education reform movement.

The original TFA mission was based on a set of four somewhat noble if paternalistic rationales. First, by bringing the elite into the teaching profession, even if temporarily, TFA would burnish it with a much-needed “aura of status and selectivity.” Second, by supplying its recruits to impoverished school districts, both urban and rural, TFA would compensate for the lack of quality teachers willing to work in such challenging settings. And third, although Kopp recognized that most corps members would not remain classroom teachers beyond their two-year commitments, she believed that TFA alums would form the nucleus of a new movement of educational leaders — that their transformative experiences teaching poor children would mold their ambitious career trajectories. Above these three foundational principles loomed a fourth: the mission to relegate educational inequality to the ash heap of history.

TFA goals derive, in theory, from laudable — if misguided — impulses. But each, in practice, has demonstrated to be deeply problematic.

TFA, suitably representative of the liberal education reform more generally, underwrites, intentionally or not, the conservative assumptions of the education reform movement: that teacher’s unions serve as barriers to quality education; that testing is the best way to assess quality education; that educating poor children is best done by institutionalizing them; that meritocracy is an end-in-itself; that social class is an unimportant variable in education reform; that education policy is best made by evading politics proper; and that faith in public school teachers is misplaced.

Take the first rationale: that TFA would enhance the image of the teaching profession. On the contrary, the only brand TFA endows with an “aura of status and selectivity” is its own. As reported in The New York Times , 18 percent of Harvard seniors applied to TFA in 2010, a rate only surpassed by the 22 percent of Yale seniors who sought to join the national teacher corps that year. All told, TFA selected 4,500 lucky recruits from a pool of 46,359 applicants in 2010. [In 2011 the acceptance rate was 11 percent.]

Although many applicants are no doubt motivated to join out of altruism, the two-year TFA experience has become a highly desirable notch on the resumes of the nation’s most diligent strivers. The more exclusive TFA becomes, the more ordinary regular teachers seem. TFA corps members typically come from prestigious institutions of higher education, while most regular teachers are trained at the second- and third-tier state universities that house the nation’s largest colleges of education.

Whereas TFA corps members leverage the elite TFA brand to launch careers in law or finance — or, if they remain in education, to bypass the typical career path on their way to principalships and other positions of leadership — most regular teachers must plod along, negotiating their way through traditional career ladders. These distinctions are lost on nobody. They are what make regular teachers and their unions such low-hanging political fruit for the likes of Christie, Walker, and Kasich.

The second justification for TFA — that it exists to supply good teachers to schools where few venture to work — has also proven questionable. Though the assertion made some sense in 1990, when many impoverished school districts did in fact suffer from a dearth of teachers, the same is not so easily argued now.

Following the economic collapse of 2008, which contributed to school revenue problems nationwide, massive teacher layoffs became the new norm, including in districts where teacher shortages had provided an entry to TFA in the past. Thousands of Chicago teachers, for instance, have felt the sting of layoffs and furloughs in the past two years, even as the massive Chicago Public School system, bound by contract, continues to annually hire a specified number of TFA corps members. In the face of these altered conditions, the TFA public relations machine now deemphasizes teacher shortages and instead accentuates one crucial adjective: “quality.” In other words, schools in poor urban and rural areas of the country might not suffer from a shortage of teachers in general, but they lack for the quality teachers that Kopp’s organization provides.

After twenty years of sending academically gifted but untrained college graduates into the nation’s toughest schools, the evidence regarding TFA corps member effectiveness is in, and it is decidedly mixed. Professors of education Julian Vasquez Heilig and Su Jin Jez, in the most thorough survey of such research yet, found that TFA corps members tend to perform equal to teachers in similar situations —that is, they do as well as new teachers lacking formal training assigned to impoverished schools. Sometimes they do better, particularly in math instruction.

Yet “the students of novice TFA teachers perform significantly less well,” Vasquez Heilig and Jin Jez discovered, “than those of credentialed beginning teachers.” It seems clear that TFA’s vaunted thirty-day summer institute—TFA “boot camp”—is no replacement for the preparation given future teachers at traditional colleges of education.

Putting TFA forward to solve the problems of the teaching profession has turned out poorly. But the third premise for Kopp’s national teacher corps — that it would “create a leadership force for long-term change” in how the nation’s least privileged students are schooled — has been the most destructive. Such destructiveness is directly related to Kopp’s success in attaching TFA to the education reform movement.

In this, Kopp’s timing could not have been more fortuitous. When TFA was founded, the education reform movement was beginning to make serious headway in policy-making circles. This movement had been in the works since as far back as the notorious Coleman Report, a massive 1966 government study written by sociologist James Coleman, officially titled “Equality of Educational Opportunity.”

Coleman contended that school funding had little bearing on educational achievement and, thus, efforts to achieve resource “equity” were wasteful. The Coleman Report became a touchstone for those who argued that pushing for educational “excellence,” measurable by standardized tests, was the best method to improve schools and hold teachers accountable. Chester Finn, an influential conservative policy analyst who worked in the Reagan Department of Education, put his finger on the educational pulse of our age when he wrote that “holding schools” — and teachers — “to account for their students’ academic achievement” was the only educational policy [along with the choice movement] that made sense in a “post-Coleman” world.

With unwavering support from powerful economic and political actors, who almost uniformly understood the state of American public education through the lens of “A Nation at Risk,” a widely publicized 1983 study that argued the failure of American schools was undermining the nation’s ability to compete in an increasingly global economy, education reformers set out to ensure that schools and teachers were held accountable for the achievement of their students, privileged or not. George H. W. Bush, dubbed the “education president,” filled his department of education with advocates of “outcome-based education,” which emphasized “excellence” in contrast to “equity.” Educational progress was to be measured by what students produced (outputs) rather than by what resources were invested in schools (inputs). The TFA mantra — “we don’t need to wait to fix poverty in order to ensure that all children receive an excellent education” — meshed perfectly with this “post-Coleman” zeitgeist.

One of the more salient aspects of the so-called “TFA insurgency” was that it operated from the assumption that more resources were not a prerequisite for improving schools. “Schools that transform their students’ trajectories aspire not to equality of inputs,” Kopp declared, “but rather to equality of outputs.” Instead of more resources, underprivileged students needed better teachers. Reformers thus set out to devise a system that hired and retained effective teachers while also driving ineffective ones from the classroom.

The TFA network has been crucial in shaping efforts to improve the nation’s teacher force. Kopp’s second book, “A Chance to Make History ” (2011), reads like a primer for such reform measures. Kopp is particularly enamored by high-performing charter schools, which succeed because they do whatever it takes to hire and retain good teachers, a zero-sum game that most schools cannot win without more resources — those dreaded “inputs.”

But successful charter schools, Kopp maintains, also stop at nothing to remove bad teachers from the classroom. This is why charter schools are the preferred mechanism for delivery of education reform: as defined by Kopp, charter schools are “public schools empowered with flexibility over decision making in exchange for accountability for results.” And yet, “results,” or rather, academic improvement, act more like a fig leaf, especially in light of numerous recent studies that show charter schools, taken on the whole, actually do a worse job of educating students than regular public schools.

Rather, crushing teacher’s unions — the real meaning behind Kopp’s “flexibility” euphemism — has become the ultimate end of the education reform movement. This cannot be emphasized enough: the precipitous growth of charter schools and the TFA insurgency are part and parcel precisely because both cohere with the larger push to marginalize teacher’s unions.

The TFA insurgency has, from its inception, sold education reform as above politics. The idea is to support ideas that work, plain and simple, no matter their source. But the biography of Michelle Rhee, the prototypical TFA corps member-turned-reformer and the most divisive person in the education reform movement, defies such anti-political posturing.

After serving a two-year stint in the Baltimore Public Schools as one of the earliest TFA corps members, she earned a Master’s Degree from the Harvard University Kennedy School of Government. From there Kopp tapped Rhee to be the founding CEO of The New Teacher Project, a TFA spin-off that sought to revolutionize the teacher accreditation process by helping school districts evade colleges of education. The notoriety she gained in her work with The New Teacher Project enabled her appointment as chancellor of schools in Washington, D.C.

Rhee is adored in elite circles. Regularly feted by Oprah, Kopp touts her as a “transformational leader.” During her short tenure leading the infamously bad D.C. schools, Rhee gained national acclaim for applying, in Kopp’s admiring words, the corporate “principles of management and accountability.”

In contrast to such devotion, teacher’s unions loathe Rhee. Rhee’s heavy-handedness in dealing with the Washington Teacher’s Union conveyed her attitude that a non-unionized teacher force would better serve justice for children, as if children would benefit from their teachers lacking the few remaining benefits accrued by collective bargaining, such as nominal job security and shrinking pensions. Rhee is also disliked by a large percentage of black D.C. citizens, who voted out former Mayor Adrian Fenty in part because of his unqualified support for Rhee’s actions. This included firing four percent of district teachers, mostly black, and replacing them largely with TFA-style teachers, mostly white, whom one astute black Washingtonian labeled “cultural tourists.”

TFA’s complicity in education reform insanity does not stop there. From its origins, the TFA-led movement to improve the teacher force has aligned itself with efforts to expand the role of high-stakes standardized testing in education. TFA insurgents, including Kopp and Rhee, maintain that, even if imperfect, standardized tests are the best means by which to quantify accountability.

Prior to the enactment of Bush’s bipartisan No Child Left Behind in 2001, high-stakes standardized testing was mostly limited to college-entrance exams such as the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT). But since then, the high-stakes testing movement has blown up: with increasing frequency, student scores on standardized exams are tied to teacher, school, and district evaluations, upon which rewards and punishments are meted out. Obama’s “Race to the Top” policy — the brainchild of Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, the former “CEO” of Chicago Public Schools — further codifies high-stakes testing by allocating scarce federal resources to those states most aggressively implementing these so-called accountability measures.

The multi-billion dollar testing industry — dominated by a few large corporations that specialize in the making and scoring of standardized tests — has become an entrenched interest, a powerful component of a growing education-industrial complex.

TFA insurgents support standardized testing not only because they believe it ensures accountability. They also herald testing because it provides evidence that their efforts are working. The schools and districts that achieved celebrity as the reform movement’s success stories did so by vastly improving standardized test scores. In emphasizing testing, though, reformers tend to overlook the obvious incentives that ambitious educators have to manipulate statistics. President Bush appointed Houston Superintendent of Schools Rod Paige as Secretary of Education in 2001 because Paige’s reform measures seemingly led to skyrocketing graduation rates. Not surprisingly, this so-called “Texas miracle,” predicated on falsified numbers, was too good to be true.

More recently, cheating scandals have likewise discredited several celebrated reform projects. In Atlanta, a TFA hotbed, former superintendent and education reform darling Beverly Hall is implicated in a cheating scandal of unparalleled proportions, involving dozens of Atlanta principals and hundreds of teachers, including TFA corps members. Cheating was so brazen in Atlanta that principals hosted pizza parties where teachers and administrators systematically corrected student exams. Following a series of investigative reports in USA Today , a new cheating scandal seems to break every week. Cheating has now been confirmed not only in Atlanta, but also in New York City, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Orlando, Dallas, Houston, Dayton, and Memphis, education reform cities all.

Rhee’s D.C. “miracle” has also been clouded by suspicion: impossibly high wrong-to-right erasure rates indicate that several of Rhee’s “blue ribbon” schools might have cheated their way to higher test scores. Such accusations are nothing new to Rhee. The legend of how she transformed her Baltimore students — a fable resembling the Hollywood drama Stand and Deliver, based on East Los Angeles math teacher Jaime Escalante’s work in helping several of his underprivileged students pass the Advanced Placement Calculus exam — has been called into question by investigative reports that suggest fraud.

That education reformers have long argued that “incentives” are necessary to improve the teaching profession underscores another in a series of ironies that mark the movement. Reformers believe that if teachers are subjected to “market forces,” such as merit pay and job insecurity, they will work harder to improve the education they provide for their students. The need to incentivize the teaching profession is the most popular argument against teacher’s unions, since unions supposedly protect bad teachers.

But, in a predictable paradox, by attaching their incentives agenda to standardized testing, the reform movement has induced cheating on a never-before-seen scale, proving the maxim known as Campbell’s Law: “The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.” In sum, the TFA insurgency’s singular success has been to empower those best at gaming the system.

In contrast to such “success,” the TFA insurgency has failed to dent educational inequality. This comes as no surprise to anyone with the faintest grasp of the tight correlation between economic and educational inequality: TFA does nothing to address the former while spinning its wheels on the latter.

In her writings, nowhere does Kopp reflect upon the patent ridiculousness of her expectation that loads of cash donated by corporations that exploit inequalities across the world — such as Union Carbide and Mobil, two of TFA’s earliest contributors — will help her solve some of the gravest injustices endemic to American society.

Kopp shows some awareness of the absurdities of her own experiences — including a “fundraising schedule [that] shuttled me between two strikingly different economic spheres: our undersourced classrooms and the plush world of American philanthropy” — but she fails to grasp that this very gap is what makes her stated goal of equality unachievable. In short, Kopp, like education reformers more generally, is an innocent when it comes to political economy. She spouts platitudes about justice for American children, but rarely pauses to ask whether rapidly growing inequality might be a barrier to such justice. She celebrates 20 years of reform movement success, but never tempers such self-congratulatory narcissism with unpleasant questions about why those who have no interest in disrupting the American class structure — such as Bill Gates and the heirs to Sam Walton’s fortunes, by far the most generous education reform philanthropists — are so keen to support the TFA insurgency. Kopp is a parody of the liberal do-gooder.

Of course, liberal notions about the potential of education to serve the ends of justice are nothing new to American social thought. Progressive educators since John Dewey have sold their wares as instruments of justice. And yet, education reform has almost always propped up the social order: just as current reform success is calculated by how well students score on standardized tests, the progressive education movement’s most longstanding success story was its pedagogical program for “Americanization.” Educational progress as measured by how well students stack up against conventional standards will always and inevitably reinforce the status quo. Most of the time, schools are little more than engines of social reproduction.

TFA exists for nothing if not for adjusting poor children to the regime otherwise known as the American meritocracy. Kopp’s model for how teachers should help poor students acclimate to the American meritocracy is the Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP), a nationwide network of charter schools. Founded by TFA alums Mike Feinberg and Dave Levin, and currently lead by CEO Richard Barth, a former TFA staff member who also happens to be Kopp’s husband, KIPP now runs over 100 schools, typically in cities that staff a multitude of TFA corps members, such as Houston, New Orleans, and New York City. Many KIPP teachers began their careers in education as TFA corps members, and an even higher percentage of KIPP administrators are TFA alums. KIPP schools are in such high demand that students must win lotteries for the opportunity to attend. The pièce de résistance of Waiting for Superman chronicles one such dramatic lottery drawing.

Slots in KIPP schools are in short supply because, unlike most charter schools, they have a track record of actually improving student performance and of helping poor children gain acceptance into college. Their methodology consists of nothing novel: teachers and students work very hard. But more than that, KIPP students and their families must sign contracts committing to a rigorous program of surveillance — the only way to ensure that underprivileged students overcome lives that otherwise drag them down. As one KIPP administrator described the philosophy: “At every moment, we asked ourselves, what about this moment of the day is or is not fostering college readiness in our students?”

While visiting a KIPP school in New York City early one morning, where fifth graders were busy with drills at 7:00 a.m., Kopp quietly lamented, without a touch of irony, that her own child of the same age was still in bed. Thus, in the KIPP model, we are presented with the solution to the nation’s educational inequalities: for poor children to succeed, they must willingly submit to Taylorist institutionalization. This is made starkly evident in the concluding scene of “Waiting for Superman ,” when young “Anthony,” one of the lucky few, arrives at his charter school with suitcase in hand, since his particular school boards its students. Anthony is rightly ambivalent about giving up his life with his grandparents and friends in order to attend a SEED Foundation school — the prototype in education reform — where 24-hour supervision is the only way to ensure that poor children have a chance at success.

In working to perfect their approach to education, TFA insurgents miss the forest for the trees. They fail to ask big-picture questions. Will their pedagogy of surveillance make for a more humane society? Having spent their formative years in a classroom learning test-taking skills, will their students become good people? Will they know more history? Will they be more empathetic? Will they be better citizens? Will they be more inclined to challenge the meritocracy? Or, as its newest converts, will they be its most fervent disciples? What does it mean that for children born in the Bronx to go to college they must give up their childhoods, however bleak?

I teach at a second-tier state university in the Midwest that houses a large college of education, not exactly TFA’s prime recruiting territory. And yet, every year a TFA representative briefly stops by our campus to sell our students on TFA and encourage them to apply. Three of my best former students have, to my surprise, been chosen TFA corps members. Although I would never begrudge such hard-won personal victories for my students — well-meaning individuals who hail from decidedly non-privileged backgrounds—in the future I am determined to strongly encourage those students interested in becoming TFA corps members to read Paul Goodman’s “Compulsory Mis-Education” (1964), in my opinion the single-best critique of the kind of education that the TFA insurgency seeks to perfect.

Goodman’s disdain for what the corporate-organized society did to young people was first made apparent in his 1959 bestseller, “Growing Up Absurd ,” a response to the “curious” fact that two of the most analyzed phenomena of the 1950s — the “disgrace of the Organized System” and the problem of disaffected youth — were given mutually exclusive treatment. Goodman combined these two popular strands of social commentary — a critique of the bureaucratic society with an analysis of juvenile delinquency — and argued that the former caused the latter.

In Compulsory Mis-Education , Goodman extended this general critique of the “organized society” to a more specific attack on its socialization method: compulsory schooling. Schooling as socialization, which he described as “‘vocational guidance’ to fit people wherever they are needed in the productive system,” troubled Goodman in means and ends. He both loathed the practice of adjusting children to society and despised the social regime in which children were being adjusted to—“our highly organized system of machine production and its corresponding social relations.” For Goodman, compulsory schooling thus prepared “kids to take some part in a democratic society that does not need them.”

Goodman was not against education in the strict sense of the word. For him, the question of education was always of kind. In Goodman’s world, which I imagine as a sort of utopia, those who seek to institutionalize the poor are the enemies of the good. And teachers — real teachers, those who commit their lives (not two years) to expanding their students’ imaginative universes — they are the heroes. I can hardly imagine a better inoculation against the hidden curriculum of liberal do-gooders.

Reflection on Teach for America by David Greene

2011-12-27T20:01:00.001-06:00

Christmas Day, 1914

2011-12-23T09:31:00.001-06:00

I had heard of this story previously but this is the first time that I've seen it in print. Brought tears to my eyes this morning.

Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah,and Happy Kwanzaa everybody. We are all God's children.

May we continue to fight for peace, justice, and transformation in our troubled world and may we cultivate in our families and communities an earth consciousness so that we may reshape our economic system into one that is sustainable and provides equitably for all.

-Angela Valenzuela

Christmas Day, 1914

My dear sister Janet,

It is 2:00 in the morning and most of our men are asleep in their
dugouts -- yet I could not sleep myself before writing to you of the
wonderful events of Christmas Eve. In truth, what happened seems
almost like a fairy tale, and if I hadn't been through it myself, I
would scarce believe it. Just imagine: While you and the family sang
carols before the fire there in London, I did the same with enemy
soldiers here on the battlefields of France!

As I wrote before, there has been little serious fighting of late. The
first battles of the war left so many dead that both sides have held
back until replacements could come from home. So we have mostly stayed
in our trenches and waited.

But what a terrible waiting it has been! Knowing that any moment an
artillery shell might land and explode beside us in the trench,
killing or maiming several men. And in daylight not daring to lift our
heads above ground, for fear of a sniper's bullet.

And the rain -- it has fallen almost daily. Of course, it collects
right in our trenches, where we must bail it out with pots and pans.
And with the rain has come mud -- a good foot or more deep. It
splatters and cakes everything, and constantly sucks at our boots. One
new recruit got his feet stuck in it, and then his hands too when he
tried to get out -- just like in that American story of the tar baby!

Through all this, we couldn't help feeling curious about the German
soldiers across the way. After all, they faced the same dangers we
did, and slogged about in the same muck. What's more, their first
trench was only 50 yards from ours. Between us lay No Man's Land,
bordered on both sides by barbed wire -- yet they were close enough we
sometimes heard their voices.

Of course, we hated them when they killed our friends. But other
times, we joked about them and almost felt we had something in common.
And now it seems they felt the same.

Just yesterday morning -- Christmas Eve Day -- we had our first good
freeze. Cold as we were, we welcomed it, because at least the mud
froze solid. Everything was tinged white with frost, while a bright
sun shone over all. Perfect Christmas weather.

During the day, there was little shelling or rifle fire from either
side. And as darkness fell on our Christmas Eve, the shooting stopped
entirely. Our first complete silence in months! We hoped it might
promise a peaceful holiday, but we didn't count on it. We'd been told
the Germans might attack and try to catch us off guard.

I went to the dugout to rest, and lying on my cot, I must have drifted
asleep. All at once my friend John was shaking me awake, saying, "Come
and see! See what the Germans are doing!" I grabbed my rifle, stumbled
out into the trench, and stuck my head cautiously above the sandbags.

I never hope to see a stranger and more lovely sight. Clusters of tiny
lights were shining all along the German line, left and right as far
as the eye could see.

"What is it?" I asked in bewilderment, and John answered, "Christmas
trees!"

And so it was. The Germans had placed Christmas trees in front of
their trenches, lit by candle or lantern like beacons of good will.

And then we heard their voices raised in song.

"Stille nacht, heilige nacht...."

This carol may not yet be familiar to us in Britain, but John knew it
and translated: "Silent night, holy night." I've never heard one
lovelier -- or more meaningful, in that quiet, clear night, its dark
softened by a first-quarter moon.

When the song finished, the men in our trenches applauded. Yes,
British soldiers applauding Germans! Then one of our own men started
singing, and we all joined in.

"The first Nowell, the angel did say...."

In truth, we sounded not nearly as good as the Germans, with their
fine harmonies. But they responded with enthusiastic applause of their
own and then began another.

"O Tannenbaum, o Tannenbaum...."

Then we replied.

"O come all ye faithful...."

But this time they joined in, singing the same words in Latin.

"Adeste fideles...."

British and German harmonizing across No Man's Land! I would have
thought nothing could be more amazing -- but what came next was more
so.

"English, come over!" we heard one of them shout. "You no shoot, we no
shoot."

There in the trenches, we looked at each other in bewilderment. Then
one of us shouted jokingly, "You come over here."

To our astonishment, we saw two figures rise from the trench, climb
over their barbed wire, and advance unprotected across No Man's Land.
One of them called, "Send officer to talk."

I saw one of our men lift his rifle to the ready, and no doubt others
did the same -- but our captain called out, "Hold your fire." Then he
climbed out and went to meet the Germans halfway. We heard them
talking, and a few minutes later, the captain came back with a German
cigar in his mouth!

"We've agreed there will be no shooting before midnight tomorrow," he
announced. "But sentries are to remain on duty, and the rest of you,
stay alert."

Across the way, we could make out groups of two or three men starting
out of trenches and coming toward us. Then some of us were climbing
out too, and in minutes more, there we were in No Man's Land, over a
hundred soldiers and officers of each side, shaking hands with men
we'd been trying to kill just hours earlier!

Before long a bonfire was built, and around it we mingled -- British
khaki and German grey. I must say, the Germans were the better
dressed, with fresh uniforms for the holiday.

Only a couple of our men knew German, but more of the Germans knew
English. I asked one of them why that was.

"Because many have worked in England!" he said. "Before all this, I
was a waiter at the Hotel Cecil. Perhaps I waited on your table!"

"Perhaps you did!" I said, laughing.

He told me he had a girlfriend in London and that the war had
interrupted their plans for marriage. I told him, "Don't worry. We'll
have you beat by Easter, then you can come back and marry the girl."

He laughed at that. Then he asked if I'd send her a postcard he'd give
me later, and I promised I would.

Another German had been a porter at Victoria Station. He showed me a
picture of his family back in Munich. His eldest sister was so lovely,
I said I should like to meet her someday. He beamed and said he would
like that very much and gave me his family's address.

Even those who could not converse could still exchange gifts -- our
cigarettes for their cigars, our tea for their coffee, our corned beef
for their sausage. Badges and buttons from uniforms changed owners,
and one of our lads walked off with the infamous spiked helmet! I
myself traded a jackknife for a leather equipment belt -- a fine
souvenir to show when I get home.

Newspapers too changed hands, and the Germans howled with laughter at
ours. They assured us that France was finished and Russia nearly
beaten too. We told them that was nonsense, and one of them said,
"Well, you believe your newspapers and we'll believe ours."

Clearly they are lied to -- yet after meeting these men, I wonder how
truthful our own newspapers have been. These are not the "savage
barbarians" we've read so much about. They are men with homes and
families, hopes and fears, principles and, yes, love of country. In
other words, men like ourselves. Why are we led to believe otherwise?

As it grew late, a few more songs were traded around the fire, and
then all joined in for -- I am not lying to you -- "Auld Lang Syne."
Then we parted with promises to meet again tomorrow, and even some
talk of a football match.

I was just starting back to the trenches when an older German clutched
my arm. "My God," he said, "why cannot we have peace and all go home?"

I told him gently, "That you must ask your emperor."

He looked at me then, searchingly. "Perhaps, my friend. But also we
must ask our hearts."

And so, dear sister, tell me, has there ever been such a Christmas Eve
in all history? And what does it all mean, this impossible befriending
of enemies?

For the fighting here, of course, it means regrettably little. Decent
fellows those soldiers may be, but they follow orders and we do the
same. Besides, we are here to stop their army and send it home, and
never could we shirk that duty.

Still, one cannot help imagine what would happen if the spirit shown
here were caught by the nations of the world. Of course, disputes must
always arise. But what if our leaders were to offer well wishes in
place of warnings? Songs in place of slurs? Presents in place of
reprisals? Would not all war end at once?

All nations say they want peace. Yet on this Christmas morning, I
wonder if we want it quite enough.

Your loving brother,

Tom
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The two songs below are about what is described above. The
first song is written by Joe Henry and Garth Brooks, the second by John
McCutcheon.

BELLEAU WOOD

Oh, the snowflakes fell in silence
Over Belleau Wood that night
For a Christmas truce had been declared
By both sides of the fight
As we lay there in our trenches
The silence broke in two
By a German soldier singing
A song that we all knew.

Though I did not know the language
The song was "Silent Night"
Then I heard by buddy whisper,
"All is calm and all is bright"
Then the fear and doubt surrounded me
'Cause I'd die if I was wrong
But I stood up in my trench
And I began to sing along

Then across the frozen battlefield
Another's voice joined in
Until one by one each man became
A singer of the hymn

Then I thought that I was dreaming
For right there in my sight
Stood the German soldier
'Neath the falling flakes of white
And he raised his hand and smiled at me
As if he hoped to say
Here's hoping we both live
To see us find a better way

Then the devil's clock struck midnight
And the skies lit up again
And the battlefield where heaven stood
Was blown to hell again

But for just one fleeting moment
The answer seemed so clear
Heaven's not beyond the clouds
It's just beyond the fear
No, heaven's not beyond the clouds
It's for us to find it here.

CHRISTMAS IN THE TRENCHES

My name is Francis Tolliver, I come from Liverpool.
Two years ago the war was waiting for me after school.
To Belgium and to Flanders, to Germany to here
I fought for King and country I love dear.
'Twas Christmas in the trenches, where the frost so bitter hung,
The frozen fields of France were still, no Christmas song was sung
Our families back in England were toasting us that day
Their brave and glorious lads so far away.

I was lying with my messmate on the cold and rocky ground
When across the lines of battle came a most peculiar sound
Says I, ``Now listen up, me boys!'' each soldier strained to hear
As one young German voice sang out so clear.
``He's singing bloody well, you know!'' my partner says to me
Soon, one by one, each German voice joined in harmony
The cannons rested silent, the gas clouds rolled no more
As Christmas brought us respite from the war

As soon as they were finished and a reverent pause was spent
``God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen'' struck up some lads from Kent
The next they sang was ``Stille Nacht.'' ``Tis `Silent Night','' says I
And in two tongues one song filled up that sky
``There's someone coming toward us!'' the front line sentry cried
All sights were fixed on one long figure trudging from their side
His truce flag, like a Christmas star, shown on that plain so bright
As he, bravely, strode unarmed into the night

Soon one by one on either side walked into No Man's Land
With neither gun nor bayonet we met there hand to hand
We shared some secret brandy and we wished each other well
And in a flare-lit soccer game we gave 'em hell
We traded chocolates, cigarettes, and photographs from home
These sons and fathers far away from families of their own
Young Sanders played his squeezebox and they had a violin
This curious and unlikely band of men

Soon daylight stole upon us and France was France once more
With sad farewells we each prepared to settle back to war
But the question haunted every heart that lived that wonderous night
``Whose family have I fixed within my sights?''
'Twas Christmas in the trenches where the frost, so bitter hung
The frozen fields of France were warmed as songs of peace were sung
For the walls they'd kept between us to exact the work of war
Had been crumbled and were gone forevermore

My name is Francis Tolliver, in Liverpool I dwell
Each Christmas come since World War I, I've learned its lessons well
That the ones who call the shots won't be among the dead and lame
And on each end of the rifle we're the same.

Valley schools in the spotlight

2011-12-19T09:51:00.001-06:00

Districts claim state's funding formula unfairly benefits property-rich areas

By NEAL MORTON/The Monitor
December 17, 2011 9:52 PM

Rio Grande Valley school districts have gained significant presence on litigation against the state’s school finance system, which many claim unfairly disadvantages children in poor and minority-heavy areas like the Valley.
Four districts — Harlingen, San Benito, La Feria and McAllen — received major statewide attention this week after filing a third lawsuit against the state with the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, or MALDEF.
The strength of that case — led by Edgewood schools, which has won prior lawsuits against the state’s public school funding formulas — lies in the assertion that the current system overwhelmingly harms low-income and English Language Learner, or ELL, students, said MALDEF attorney David Hinojosa.
“The data show they are truly struggling much greater than all other students, and that makes (this lawsuit) much more ripe for a victory for these children,” Hinojosa said.
“This is not a lawsuit our clients wanted to bring,” he added. “It’s a lawsuit we were forced to bring once the state raised (student performance) standards and then cut back on funding, making it even worse than it was before.”
Starting next spring, the state will implement a more rigorous school accountability system, which legislators hoped would raise college readiness when they adopted the new standards two years ago.
However, the Legislature this summer gutted public education by more than $5 billion, a move Hinojosa said stacks the deck against struggling students.
The MALDEF suit piles on state data that show low-income and ELL students — whose numbers are growing within Texas schools — already struggle to meet student performance goals.
For example, the state designated 52 percent of all students as “college-ready graduates” in English Language Arts and Mathematics; just 38 percent and 5 percent of low-income and ELL students, respectively, achieved the same recognition.
And while 26.3 percent of all Texas students completed an advanced or dual enrollment course, just 20.4 percent and 11.6 percent of low-income and ELL students, respectively, enjoyed the same opportunity.
“Districts want their students to be held to more rigorous standards,” Hinojosa said, “but the state can’t get away with upping the ante and not putting its chips on the table. That’s what’s happening here.”
His case also includes a claim found in a lawsuit filed by the Texas Taxpayer and Student Fairness Coalition, which has earned popularity among Valley districts.
According to both groups, the state’s funding formulas inexplicably allocate more money to property-wealthy districts than property-poor districts.
Hinojosa looked directly to the Valley to prove that point: in the wealthy Point Isabel school district, where landowners enjoy a tax rate of just $0.95 per $100 of taxable value, schools collect $5,915 per pupil. However, in McAllen, taxpayers pay $1.17 per $100 of taxable value, and yet their schools draw just $5,088 per pupil — an $827 gap.
Similar disparities abound in the state, and nine Valley districts — including Mercedes and Edinburg schools this past week — have joined the Coalition’s lawsuit to narrow the funding gaps.
And experts expect that the Houston-based Thompson & Horton law firm will soon file a fourth lawsuit against the state, largely arguing the Legislature has effectively set an illegal state property tax.
The Sharyland school board this past week joined that effort, and Superintendent Scott Owings said a mandatory drop in school property taxes limited a community’s ability to provide for their children.
“Local communities had decided how much they wanted to support our schools, then that was taken away from them” by lawmakers in 2006, Owings said. “Now we have to start back over, and if we want to build (the tax rate) up again, there’s a cap at it.”
According to some estimates, more than 200 districts in Texas have a tax rate at a legally allowable cap, which Owings argued robbed them of any “meaningful, local discretion.”
Lawyers and school officials expect litigation to last many months before a court decides the fate of Texas’s school finance system.
But Owings said a growing number of lawsuits and districts joining them should send a strong signal.
“It shows to the state and the courts and Legislature that if you have two-thirds of districts in the state actually suing the state … there’s a lot of power to that,” he said. “Perhaps they’ll think, ‘Maybe we are wrong, if so many districts have taken us to court.’”

California politician advocates assassination of Obama and family

2011-12-19T09:33:00.000-06:00

This is extremely sick and disgusting. You can't get access to the examiner so here is what was actually posted and that I was able to access this morning. Such violent, hateful speech should not be tolerated in this country.

-Angela

California politician advocates assassination of Obama and family

Michael Stone, Democrat Examiner
December 18, 2011

Facebook faux pas: California libertarian and Tea Party darling Jules Manson is caught calling for the assassination of President Barack Obama and his children.
On Sunday, many Facebook users were greeted by the shocking spectacle of a California libertarian and Ron Paul supporter by the name of Jules Manson advocating for the assassination of President Barack Obama. Manson, a failed politician, recently ran for and lost a seat on the City of Carson’s City Council last March.

The following is the text of Manson’s racist, treasonous, deplorable post:

“Assassinate the f----- n----- and his monkey children”

Manson posted the disturbing and openly racist call to assassinate Obama and Obama’s children on his own Facebook wall, which was open to the public. Manson, a Ron Paul libertarian, was angry with Obama over a policy matter.

Manson removed the obnoxious post, but numerous Facebook users, outraged by the despicable threat, captured an image of the threat before Manson had the good sense to take it down.

Two hours after making the offensive post, and after being bombarded by hundreds of Facebook users outraged by his racist call to assassinate the leader of the free world, Manson made a bizarre Facebook post, presumably in the hopes of justifying his unjustifiable rant. There Mason argued that using the word “n-----” does not make him a racist. However, most reasonable people would disagree with Manson’s assertion.

One Facebook page, Americans Against the Tea Party, posted a screen capture of the offensive remarks and recived over a 100 angry and outraged comments in a little over an hour. The following is a small sample of those remarks:

I sure hope the Secret Service and FBI get this creep, he is dangerous to everyone! We can thank the Republicans for this brand of extremism.

reported to secret service...who seemed interested enough to ask for the url and a screen shot

‎"And his monkey children" smfh. That part bothers me the most.

I'd like to see how Fox News will defend THIS!

I hope the FBI has seen what he has said and will be showing up at his door soon.

The best way to stick it to idiots like this is vote to re elect Obama and then Warren in 2016.

At the time of posting this story, Manson’s Facebook page had been removed, no doubt as a result of the numerous Facebook users reporting Manson’s vile, disgusting and illegal call to assainate President Obama and his children.

UT System Launches Online Route to Degree Completion

2011-12-13T14:24:00.000-06:00

by Reeve Hamilton | Texas Tribune
December 13, 2011

The University of Texas System is creating a new path to completion for students who attempted but — for whatever reason — have been unable to finish their college degree.

The Finish@UT program, which launched last week, is a selection of UT-System-approved online courses aimed primarily at students between ages 25 and 35 who have already amassed credits toward an undergraduate degree. “Particularly those students who have had various life issues intervene and cannot get to campus on a regular basis,” said Martha Ellis, associate vice chancellor for community college partnerships at the UT System.

So far, three institutions are participating, and each offers a different degree. Students can earn a bachelor of science in university studies degree at UT-Arlington, a bachelor of multidisciplinary studies degree at UT-El Paso or a bachelor of arts in humanities degree at UT-Permian Basin.

Students must apply and be accepted to the institution from which they will ultimately graduate, but once they are in the system, they can take courses from all three.

So far, the program is fairly small. This fall, 18 students were enrolled with the declared intent to graduate at UT-Arlington, 40 at UT-El Paso and 72 at UT-Permian Basin. However, the total course enrollments were significantly higher at each university, which, according to Ellis, indicates “some students are taking more than one class and from more than one institution.”

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This summer, the UT System increased its commitment to developing new options for blended and online learning. UT System Chancellor Francisco Cigarroa’s framework for the future of the system, which was unanimously approved by the board of regents in August, included a $50 million investment in a new Institute of Transformational Learning, which will focus on such issues.

Other institutions in the system have also been investing in online expansion. UT-Arlington, for example, has a deal with Academic Partnerships, a private company owned by Dallas entrepreneur Randy Best that focuses on translating public university programs into online courses.

While somewhat similar in spirit, Ellis said those initiatives are separate from Finish@UT, which has been in development for about two years — one year of planning, followed by another of pilot projects.

In addition to the ability to earn a degree from the highly regarded UT System, Ellis said the primary benefits of the program for students are the flexible scheduling and degree personalization. “We want to know: How can we tailor a degree to get you a quality degree best utilizing the coursework that you’ve taken to date?” she said.

Students need not have begun their studies at a UT System institution, nor do they need to be Texas residents, to participate, and prices vary based on institution. For Texas residents, 12 credits — a full load — will cost roughly $4,448 at UT-Arlington, $2,815 at UT-El Paso and $2,697 at UT-Permian Basin.

While it’s possible that the program could generate revenue at a time of declining state funding, Ellis said that was not the driving force behind the program's conception. “Revenue? Sure, that would be great too,” she said, “but the primary purpose is to meet the needs to the state of Texas with having a trained work force.”

Gingrich on school and work: More than a bad idea

2011-12-13T08:38:00.000-06:00

Disgusting and unbelievable--but yes, true! Give me a break. Repeal child labor laws and turn children into custodians?! This is right out of a Charles Dickens novel. What a mean, cold-hearted soul.

Angela

Gingrich on school and work: More than a bad idea
By Valerie Strauss

This was written by Mike Rose, who is on the faculty of the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies and is the author of “The Mind at Work: Valuing the Intelligence of the American Worker,” and “Why School?: Reclaiming Education for All of Us.”

By Mike Rose

During a Q&A after a recent speech at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, former speaker of the House and current Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich offered “a very simple model” to address income inequality that he said he has held “for years.” The first step is to do away with child labor laws, which, he said, “are truly stupid.” Then in high-poverty schools – schools that, in his words, are failing with teachers who are failing — fire unionized janitors (but retain one master janitor), and hire the kids as custodians. Said Gingrich: “The kids would actually do work, they would have cash, they would have pride in the schools, they’d begin the process of rising.”

As could be predicted, his comment has been generating both incredulity and some support on the Internet. Mr. Gingrich is notorious for making off-the-cuff incendiary remarks, and even his supporters acknowledge his lack of discipline and recklessness. But he said he has held the “model” outlined in his comment for years, and his doctoral dissertation (in history from Tulane University) was on the Belgian education system in the Congo during the last period of colonization, so it’s fair to assume that his ideas about education and work have been developing for some time.

As unusual as his proposal is, it has woven through it several widely accepted ideas: The importance of so-called “soft” job skills (punctuality, cooperation, and the like), the value of involving students in their school, the benefits for young people of work and earning a wage. Every defender of Mr. Gingrich that I’ve read mentions the value of their first job. It could be that Mr. Gingrich is expressing these ideas in a provocative fashion to catch our attention, to stir things up — something he famously likes to do.

Given Newt Gingrich’s identity as a big thinker — “a pyrotechnician of ideas,” as The Economist recently put it — and given his rising status in the GOP presidential candidate contest, we need to take his proposal seriously as reflecting the way he thinks about poverty, school, and work. We need to consider his proposal as well for it reflects assumptions about poor people and economic mobility that are in the air.

Let’s begin with the proposal’s core idea — repealing child labor laws and hiring students as custodians — for if it is meant to shock us into fresh thinking, then we need to see where that thinking leads us. Mr. Gingrich doesn’t limit his proposal to one level of schooling, so it seems to apply to elementary, middle, and high school.

This means that children would be handling disinfectants and cleaning agents and other toxic chemicals, be regularly exposed to unsanitary conditions, and be doing some tasks that are physically demanding. We are not simply talking here about tidying up classrooms, for, except for a supervising janitor, there will be no one else but children to clean bathrooms, and the nurse’s office, and vomit in the hallway. Child labor laws were enacted to protect children from such work.

But, for the sake of argument, let’s imagine that society did decide to sanction custodial labor for children, which would allow us to consider the goal of the proposal: the development of soft job skills leading to a rise up the ladder of economic mobility. Soft job skills are important, to be sure, but most analysts across the ideological spectrum studying the future of work also emphasize the need for literacy and numeracy, computer skill, and some sort of specialized training. The punctual nurse or mechanic who can’t calculate ratios won’t be on the job for long. Mr. Gingrich doesn’t say anything about improving the academic programs of schools in poor communities. Remember, his proposal was in response to a question about solving economic inequality, and he seems to put all his eggs in the soft skills basket.

The job-specific knowledge the children would develop would equip them for entry-level custodial work – work not known for its mobility – and Mr. Gingrich’s proposal would decimate one category of that work, the school custodian. So rather than mobility, we would most likely see more rather than fewer young people stuck in low-skilled, low wage jobs.

There’s one more counter-productive element to this proposal. Many of the school custodians Mr. Gingrich targets live in the communities in which they work, or in similar communities. The loss of their jobs would increase unemployment in working-class communities, and thus increase the threats of poverty Mr. Gingrich is trying to alleviate. Janitors’ kids would make a few bucks, while their parents would have the economic rug pulled out from under them.

Essential to the discipline of history is understanding events in their historical context (like the passing of child labor laws) and understanding the way a single action (like the elimination of a category of workers) can have multiple social and economic effects. Mr. Gingrich touts his bona fides as an historian, but his proposal – even if meant to provoke – reveals a terribly limited historical sensibility.

There is a further problem with Mr. Gingrich’s thinking, the logical error of overgeneralization, in this case assuming that all members of a particular group like poor children share the same characteristics. Sadly, this assumption is not at all specific to Mr. Gingrich’s proposal, but is widespread, one of those troubling ideas in the air.

The fact is that people at the lower end of the income distribution hold a wide variety of attitudes toward work and education and about the work ethic and economic mobility. And there is a long line of social science research that demonstrates that working-class and poor people tend to espouse so-called middle class values about education and work.

Of course poverty is destructive; some poor families are torn apart. Some kids grow up in chaos, lost and angry, and turn to the streets. But these are segments of a varied population. And it needs to be said that such variability exists across class lines; I’ve taught a fair number of students from middle-class and affluent backgrounds who could benefit from an infusion of the work ethic Mr. Gingrich champions.

We have a shameful history in the United States — a country that prides itself on its spirit of egalitarianism — of painting poor people with a single brush stroke and then offering an equally one dimensional solution to their problems. This tendency has led to some damaging social and educational policies, like channeling the children of poor families into low-tier vocational education.

It is worth pondering that the job category Mr. Gingrich targets is custodial work. Of course, he gets to undercut a union in the process — a plus in this campaign season — but why custodial labor rather than having the children help out in the office, or using older kids to tutor or coach younger ones, or creating the conditions for students to develop their burgeoning computer skills in service of the school?

Custodial work is honorable labor and requires knowledge and skill, but it is physical work low on the Department of Labor’s Standard Occupational Classification System. What category of work in the school would middle- and upper-class parents who are in agreement with Mr. Gingrich choose for their children?

Mr. Gingrich sparked outrage over his dismissal of child labor laws, and he also got some support for the common sense notion that work is beneficial for young people. Without dismissing the significance of this back-and-forth, I think it misses the wider sweep of issues worth considering in Mr. Gingrich’s proposal.

There is the revelation of Mr. Gingrich’s simplistic, not just reckless, thinking — at least on topics like this one. There is the issue of the way the poor get represented in contemporary political discourse. There are the twin issues of education and work and who receives what kind of education for what kind of work.

If Mr. Gingrich gets us to think carefully about these issues, then maybe he succeeded after all — though not in the way he intended.

-0-

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By Valerie Strauss | 12:00 PM ET, 11/29/2011

Longer Standardized Tests Are Planned, Displeasing Some School Leaders

2011-12-12T22:43:00.000-06:00

What a disaster!

-Patricia

By WINNIE HU | NY Times
Published: December 9, 2011

Students across New York State will sit longer for high-stakes standardized tests in language arts and math this April compared with past years, education officials indicated Friday, drawing criticism from school leaders and parents who believe that lengthier tests are a move in the wrong direction.

A week after David Abrams, the state’s longtime testing director, was forced to resign after he sent an unauthorized memorandum about lengthening testing to school districts, officials declined to specify how much time they planned to add. Mr. Abrams’s memo said the tests would grow to more than four hours — over several days — for reading, from about two-and-a-half hours now, and to three hours or more for math, from an average of two hours now.

Top officials disavowed the memo and said the increases would not be so drastic. They said Friday that they would send the new times and other details to districts next week.

The annual tests, given to students in grades 3 through 8, will factor into teacher evaluations for the first time this year. Extending test times, state officials said, would enable them to field-test new questions that would not count toward a student’s score but could be used to develop future tests.

Currently, new questions are tested in practice exams given in selected districts. That has raised the concern that students, knowing the tests do not count, do not try very hard, resulting in misleading data. Such inaccurate feedback, these officials say, has contributed to the state’s score inflation in recent years.

The Board of Regents discussed including sample multiple-choice questions in the actual tests at a meeting in December 2010, and the State Education Department issued a memo in March notifying districts that the change would take effect next spring.

But some school administrators and parents say it was not clear from the memo that a result would be longer tests.

Critics assert that more time spent on testing cuts into time for classroom instruction. They also say that lengthier tests penalize younger children who cannot concentrate for long periods, giving an inaccurate assessment of their abilities.

“I think the last thing we want is a test of stamina,” said Richard Organisciak, superintendent of the 11,000-student New Rochelle district in Westchester County. “The thought of a third grader sitting there for three hours — it boggles my mind that he would stay as focused or perform as well on a high-stakes test.”

The stakes are particularly high in New York City, where a top score can help a student gain admission to some of the city’s most coveted middle schools.

Richard C. Iannuzzi, president of New York State United Teachers, the union representing 218,000 public school teachers, said the state should be trying to decrease testing time, not increase it.

“If it becomes a burden on the student and teacher and it takes away from instructional time, then we’ve missed the point altogether,” he said. “We’ve moved away from an instrument that measures and improves student growth, and gotten wound up in the concept of how much data we can collect.”

Nationwide, most states already blend field questions into actual exams taken by students because doing so provides more reliable data about questions, said Brian Gong, executive director of the National Center for the Improvement of Educational Assessment, a nonprofit group that provides support to state education departments. “That’s a very common practice; the SAT also does it,” he said. “It’s the best way to get real data.”

New York’s tests are shorter than those given in some other states: third graders take a 150-minute test in language arts, and a 100-minute test in math, compared with 150-minute to 270-minute tests in other states, with sample questions typically accounting for 10 to 20 minutes, Mr. Gong said. “There are many people asking tests to do more things,” he added, “which technically requires the test to be longer.”

Kathleen M. Cashin, a Fordham University education professor who joined New York’s Regents in March, said there should have been more discussion in the state about increasing test times.

“I think we have too much testing now,” she said. “I mean, is the purpose of education just to identify weaknesses through accountability measures? Or is the purpose to expand the child’s learning with knowledge and vocabulary, and give them the opportunity to discuss and think at a higher level?”

Lisa Siegman, principal of Public School 3 in Greenwich Village, said she would like to see evidence that increasing the length of state tests would help schools like hers to better educate their students. “They’re trying to measure something,” she said, “but I’m not quite sure it connects to what we do.”

Measuring the Impact of Historic Texas Education Cuts

2011-12-12T17:03:00.000-06:00

by Morgan Smith | Texas Tribune
December 12, 2011

Since well before the 2011 legislative session began, one question has dominated conversations about the state budget cuts to public education: How will they affect public schools?

There are many answers.

In March, the Texas Education Agency will release the official numbers on school district employment for the 2011-12 school year, including job losses. The figures will be a reckoning in some ways — the first time the state will actually measure the affect of a historic reduction in financing. But several groups, including nonprofit organizations and professional associations, and at least one lawmaker, would like to have a better idea before then — to help shape their own policies and in some cases to be able to control how the discussion is framed.

The Texas American Federation of Teachers, the state branch of the national teachers association, recently released a survey that showed that budget cuts had resulted in widespread layoffs and low morale among public school employees. Linda Bridges, the branch’s president, emphasized the strength of the study’s findings, but because it was an online survey, she said, it was “unscientific” in nature.

The KDK-Harman Foundation, a private nonprofit, is working with Children at Risk, an education advocacy group in Houston, to conduct a comprehensive study on how schools are managing with less money. Jennifer Esterline, the foundation’s executive director, said a lack of both quantitative and qualitative information on the effects of the cuts prompted the study, which was expected to cost just over $100,000.

After a statewide assessment, the study will focus on 25 districts chosen to represent an array of schools. The goal is to determine which programs, employees and other costs they have chosen to eliminate and how that is affecting the classroom.

“It will allow us to get really deep into what are the kinds of decisions superintendents are having to make,” Esterline said, from learning to do more with less to choosing which programs and employees to cut.

Rep. Dan Huberty, R-Houston, decided to canvass the state’s 1,000-plus school districts after he heard that one superintendent in his area had laid off several teachers and then rehired them once final state budget cut numbers came out.

Huberty’s office is not planning to release the results of the survey publicly, said Maggie Irwin, Huberty’s legislative director. It is more of a “self-imposed interim project,” Irwin said, to help shape his understanding of the budget cuts.

Lynn Moak, whose school finance consulting firm, Moak, Casey & Associates, has kept track of job-loss estimates since the start of the session, said the figure of layoffs could vary widely by source, depending on which employees are counted.

For instance, if only teachers are included, it may be a much smaller number than if all employees are included, because many districts are trying to cut everywhere except in the classroom. Moak said that depending on their financial status, districts may face the greater bulk of their budget cuts for the 2011-12 school year — which could cushion the numbers districts report this year.

Moak cautioned against overstating the effect of less money in public education.

“It’d be incorrect to characterize it as a huge impact, except in the concept of what does it mean for the future,” he said. “It means the Legislature can cut and will cut money to public education if the circumstances are right.”

School Finance Expert Leaving Texas Legislature

2011-12-12T16:45:00.000-06:00

by Ross Ramsey | Texas Tribune
December 12, 2011

After 20 years, Scott Hochberg is bailing out of the Texas Legislature. He says it’s time. He’ll be 59 when he leaves office a little over a year from now. He won’t have to campaign in a newly drawn legislative district, and he’ll get back his nights and weekends.

He’ll leave a hole in the House. Hochberg, a Houston Democrat who started as a House staff member and won his first election in 1992, is an acknowledged wizard at school finance and has a deep well of experience in education issues.

He plays it down, saying: “Holes in the Legislature are kind of like holes on the beach. They fill up pretty quickly.”

What Hochberg is good at is a couple of the most important issues the Legislature will be tackling when it convenes in January 2013. The state’s school finance system is under siege, with school districts joining lawsuits challenging the distribution of education money and budget writers struggling to keep conflicting promises: to fully finance public schools on the one hand and to hold the line on taxes and spending on the other. On the policy front, the perpetual wrestling match over testing and management and education curriculums continues.

Hochberg managed to be in the middle of things without becoming a high-profile partisan like his colleagues Garnet Coleman, Jim Dunnam and Pete Gallego. He said the changes at the Capitol had more to do with politics than with policy. Education experts have been forming and departing the Legislature for decades. Another one — Sen. Florence Shapiro, R-Plano, who heads the Senate Education Committee — is leaving after this term, too. People like them have always arrived to fill the holes.

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But the nature of the place has changed. It has always had partisans, Hochberg said, but they weren’t encouraged.

“What I used to hear an awful lot is, ‘I can’t vote for that because my district will kill me,’” he said. “Certain subject areas were certainly off the table, but there was also this feeling of if we could all get together on something, then we’re all better off politically.”

“Perhaps now there’s more concern, particularly on the Republican side, with what goes on in the primary,” he said. “If that’s where the cover is being sought, I think Republicans are less likely to seek cover from opposing Democrats and more likely to seek cover from some of the socalled kingmakers on their side.”

He remembers a dentist who used to voice his opinions the old-fashioned way — on paper, mailed with stamps. “Literally, the letters were sometimes in crayon or Magic Marker,” he said, “and they started out, generally, with ‘What are you idiots doing down there?’”

With modern technology, that one dentist could look like an army, sending thousands of emails. “He was the only guy who ever saw them,” Hochberg said. “He didn’t have the ability to send them to 20,000 people with the click of a button.”

“I’m really not sure, from a psychological standpoint, that we’ve figured out how to deal with that, and to give it its appropriate weight,” he said. “What it means is that the loud voices can be far louder.”

The Republicans came after Hochberg in 2003, redrawing his district so that — they thought — he’d get beat by a Republican. He responded by campaigning heavily in apartment complexes filled with adult nonvoters, identifying issues important to them and working to turn out the people he identified as political supporters. He got a higher percentage of the vote in the 2004 election than he got two years earlier and remained safe, until now.

His Republican colleagues in the Legislature came after him again this year, drawing a map that put him and Rep. Hubert Vo, also a Houston Democrat, in the same legislative district. The maps currently in place — drawn by a panel of federal judges in San Antonio — have him on safer ground, at least in the partisan sense. But it’s not his old district.

“I’ve got about half a new district,” Hochberg said of the new political maps. “That’s a lot of people to get out and get to know. It takes a while to learn the street corners, the liquor licenses.”

“I started over once, 10 years ago,” he said of his decision to leave. “I kind of know what that’s like.”

New STAAR Test More Challenging Than TAKS

2011-12-12T16:38:00.001-06:00

Visit this link to listen to a short clip on STAAR.

-Patricia

December 12, 2011
by: Jack Williams

Implementation of the state's new accountability exam, the so-called "STAAR" test, is just a few months away, and ups the stakes considerably when it comes to what students and educators need to know.

Dr. Nancy Gregory, who oversees curriculum and instruction at the Houston Independent School District, appears calm as she sits in an office at HISD headquarters. But she admits the new test, which replaces TAKS, is indeed a whole new challenge.

"It's daunting because we know for a fact across the state that when TEA says the tests will be more rigorous — yes, the tests will be more rigorous."

Gregory has been part of the state process to vet questions on the new test, which begins at the end of March. She says TAKS has been a good test, but not hard enough in some areas.

"TAKS is a great improvement over TAAS, but now we have something that is really upping the level of instruction many, many, many levels and that can only be a good thing."

Students will be expected to answer more complex questions on a longer test that requires more high-level thinking. They'll also have less time to complete it, only four hours per test compared to the untimed TAKS test. Gregory says students
will notice a big change in the math and science tests.

"We will have, for the first time, open-ended questions. So instead of having a question with four answer options, it's just a question. The kids have a grid that they work with and they have some work space and they have to do their own thinking without any hints from answer options."

Students will also be required to be proficient in expository writing, not just narrative writing. Universities have complained that high school graduates have the narrative writing down, but fall short when it comes to writing in a more informational style.

"The kids will be writing in 4th grade, sticking with narration, but also writing an expository piece. In 7th grade, narration, but an expository piece. In 9th grade, exposition has been added. In 10th grade, exposition and persuasion has been added.
In 11th grade, it's persuasion and analysis. So the kinds of writing that are now required are tougher than what they've been in the past."

Elementary students in grades 3-8 won't see much of a change when it comes to which subjects they'll be tested on. The changes are more pronounced in high school, where 9th graders will be the first to take the STAAR test in the spring. Current sophomores and upperclassmen will finish high school taking the TAKS. The new tests will also now be end of course exams each year that count toward a cumulative score that has to be met in order to graduate.

Not everyone thinks the new test is a good idea, including Gayle Fallon. She's the head of the largest teacher's union in Houston.

"The biggest problem we've got is it's a significant jump in difficulty in a year to be followed by another year where we're seeing the largest class sizes we've ever seen. We're seeing resources disappear on a daily basis. I'm not saying our teachers can't do it, but it's kind of like saying run this race and we're going to tie both your hands behind your back. Now good luck."

Districts like HISD say they've worked hard to prepare teachers and students for the new test. One thing is still missing. The state hasn't decided on passing standards on the test yet. That should come after the first of the year.

U.S. Senate Hearing on Teacher Quality

2011-12-10T22:17:00.000-06:00

http://sanders.senate.gov/newsroom/news/?id=d85d2f37-33ed-4796-800b-46ccd6161cea

Two proposed acts that are germane to this discussion: The first is by Congresswoman Judy Chu and is called the Equal Access to Quality Education Act http://www.opencongress.org/bill/112-h2902/show

and in the Senate, the Assuring Student Success through Effective Teaching Act http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bill.xpd?bill=s112-1716

Districts Pay Less in Poor Schools, Report Says

2011-12-04T17:07:00.000-06:00

It hasn't just been education "experts" who have stated that within district funding disparities exist, communities have also argued this for years. Glad Dillon made a point of saying that this report does nothing more than confirm what we already know is occurring. I wonder how much money was spent to put this report together and how few dollars will be put into addressing the root of the problem.

-Patricia

By SAM DILLON | NY Times
Published: November 30, 2011

Education experts have long argued that a basic inequity in American schooling is that students in poor neighborhoods are frequently taught by low-paid rookie teachers who move on as they gain experience and rise up the salary scale.

Until now, however, researchers lacked nationwide data to prove it. That changed Wednesday when the Department of Education released a 78-page report.

Its conclusion: Tens of thousands of schools serving low-income students are being shortchanged because districts spend fewer state and local dollars on teacher salaries in those schools than on salaries in schools serving higher-income students.

“Low-income students need extra support and resources to succeed, but in far too many places, policies for assigning teachers and allocating resources are perpetuating the problem rather than solving it,” Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said in a conference call.

The report, Comparability of State and Local Expenditures Among Schools Within Districts, is based on data collected from 84,000 public schools in districts that had to report salary expenditures to receive emergency federal money under the 2009 economic stimulus law, which channeled $100 billion to public education.

The inequities documented in the report began to accumulate within a few years of the passage of the 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act, the main federal law on public schools, which channels money to educate poor children. To prevent them from simply substituting the federal antipoverty dollars for local funds, districts had to show that they were spending at least as much state and local education money in the poor schools getting federal money as they were spending in their more affluent schools.

But a loophole allowed school systems to report educator salaries to Washington using a districtwide pay schedule, thus masking large salary gaps between the higher-paid veteran staffs in middle-class schools and the young teachers earning entry-level pay in poor parts of the district.

A few researchers have documented the problem with statewide data in Florida and some other states, said Cynthia Brown, a vice president at the Center for American Progress, a liberal research group. “But I’m excited because this is the first time that data documenting the problem has ever been collected on a nationwide basis,” she said. “Many of us have known for a long time that in some individual districts the high-poverty schools weren’t getting their fair share of state and local funds.”

Federal officials estimated that although the inequities were widespread, alleviating them would not be costly.

“Providing low-income schools with comparable spending would cost as little as 1 percent of the average district’s total spending,” but the extra resources “would make a big impact by adding between 4 percent and 15 percent to the budget” of schools serving poor students, the department said in a statement.

Newsom Stakes a Claim With Student Protests

2011-12-04T16:53:00.000-06:00

Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom joined a group of protesters on Monday after they disrupted the University of California Board of Regents meeting in San Francisco and conducted a meeting of their own.

By JENNIFER GOLLAN and GERRY SHIH | NY Times
Published: December 2, 2011

Dozens of chanting protesters disrupted a public meeting of the University of California Board of Regents on Monday, driving all but one of the regents from the room.

“What the hell,” said Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom, a regent by virtue of his office, as he flashed a smile and strode past nervous police to mingle with protesters.

While other regents at the meeting in San Francisco huddled behind closed doors or waited at a safe distance on a teleconference call, Mr. Newsom sat forward in his chair, surrounded by students and faculty members railing against a raft of ills: rising tuition, mounting student debt, grim job prospects and accusations of police brutality.

When he finally spoke, Mr. Newsom thanked the protesters for “restoring my faith and confidence in this state and country.” He added, “You have my support.”

And, no doubt, he would like theirs in return.

With the University of California and the California State University systems convulsing over increases in tuition and the ensuing protests at several campuses, Mr. Newsom has staked a position as a populist champion for students, a key part of his base that will be critical if, as expected, he seeks higher office.

“Gavin is speaking from the heart, but it also makes sense for him politically,” said Nathan Ballard, a former press secretary and an aide to Mr. Newsom.

In an interview Thursday, Mr. Newsom said he was deeply alarmed by what he called the dismantling of the U.C. and C.S.U. systems and gently criticized the budget deal struck by Gov. Jerry Brown last year that included steep cuts to financing for both institutions.

“You can’t cut $650 million from both systems and tell me you value the system,” he said. “I believe we could’ve avoided a substantial portion of these cuts.”

He added, “If I were governor, I’d take that as a critique, but I stand by it.”

While Mr. Newsom, 44, has grabbed headlines by criticizing tuition increases and cuts to state spending on education, Governor Brown, a fellow Democrat, has been wrangling for months with the Legislature over a pension overhaul and proposed taxes to help finance education.

Mr. Brown was on vacation last week, and aides had to address criticism that he failed to swiftly address incidents in which campus police used pepper spray and riot batons to quell student protests at Berkeley and U.C. Davis, incidents that were condemned by Mr. Newsom and John A. Pérez, the Assembly speaker and a U.C. regent.

Mr. Newsom told The Sacramento Bee last week that the relationship between a governor and a lieutenant governor was typically “difficult.”

But on Tuesday, Elizabeth Ashford, a spokeswoman for Mr. Brown, said the governor and Mr. Newsom had a “shared concern” over the tuition increases.

“The governor’s position has always been that without additional revenue coming into the state we’re faced with some terrible choices,” she said. “The lieutenant governor is very aware of the very serious fiscal realities that are facing the state.”

Larry N. Gerston, a professor of political science at San Jose State University, said Mr. Brown and Mr. Newsom had fundamentally different aims.

“The easy part is to condemn tuition increases; the harder part is to decide how you’re going to offset those increases with revenue augmentation,” Mr. Gerston said. “Jerry Brown has to be the conductor and make all the pieces come together. Gavin can be a star performer, but he’s just one instrument in a 60- or 70-piece symphony.”

Although Mr. Newsom sees higher education as an issue within his purview as regent, the latitude the governor allows him will be scrutinized because Mr. Newsom has been openly frustrated by the limited scope of his office.

When he briefly ran against Mr. Brown, 73, in the gubernatorial primary last year, Mr. Newsom repeatedly emphasized his youth and questioned the “fire in the belly” of Mr. Brown.

During Mr. Newsom’s campaign for lieutenant governor, “much of Gavin’s support came from the younger generation,” Mr. Ballard said. “He’s certainly speaking to a demographic that will help him in the future.”

In fact, advisers who cultivate Mr. Newsom’s social media presence are quick to note that the majority of his followers on Twitter and those who “like” his Facebook page are young.

Mr. Newsom’s supporters say that he has always backed students’ causes, and that his outspokenness underscores his integrity and his image as an iconoclast.

In 2004, Mr. Newsom riled elders in his party when, as mayor of San Francisco, he issued marriage licenses to same-sex couples despite a state ban.

“He’s always had a ‘damn the political torpedoes’ attitude and a willingness to take on tough issues,” said Peter Ragone, a close political adviser to Mr. Newsom.

As the matter of tuition increases and cuts to education spending has gained prominence nationwide, Mr. Newsom has stocked his official Web site with press releases calling for more transparency around spending decisions.

At Monday’s regents meeting, he declined to sign a petition calling for state lawmakers to close corporate tax loopholes, among other proposed changes in the tax code, but pledged his support for the initiatives.

“I think it’s a lot better than any signature," Mr. Newsom said, adding that he was working with Mr. Brown to devise various changes in tax laws.

Mr. Newsom is not the only U.C. regent to express support for students. On Monday in Los Angeles, for example, Sherry Lansing and Eddie Island met with protesters for 45 minutes after the latter disrupted the regents’ conference-call meeting there. And Ms. Lansing, the board chairwoman, has said she intends to march with student demonstrators in Sacramento early next year to protest cuts in education spending.

But in some ways, the lieutenant governor’s support for the uprising, including students’ demands for higher taxes on the wealthy, may seem like a peculiar undertaking. He recently bought a $2.2 million home in Kentfield, and his business and investment holdings made him the richest of the state’s top elected officials in 2010, according to the most recent financial disclosures available from the California Fair Political Practices Commission.

Some observers, however, say his years in politics have allowed Mr. Newsom to cultivate an unusually approachable demeanor.

“He has a much broader role than the typical regent,” said George Marcus, a U.C. regent who is the founder and chairman of Marcus & Millichap, one of the largest commercial real estate brokerage firms in the country. “He is much more accustomed to dealing with different groups of people. Some regents are more inclined to interact with students than others.”

John Vigna, a spokesman for Mr. Pérez, said Mr. Newsom was casting himself as a liaison between the students and the regents, who are under intense scrutiny.

“I think that he does have a needle to thread here,” Mr. Vigna said. “The risk is you identify the problem and never figure out what the solution is.”

Plan to Close or Restructure 21 Chicago Schools Draws Quick Reaction

2011-12-04T16:27:00.000-06:00

By REBECCA VEVEA | NY Times
Published: December 3, 2011

Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s education team made its first attempt at improving struggling schools last week, and the negative reviews came quickly. State legislators and community leaders called the proposed closing or restructuring of 21 schools “very troubling” and said administrators were violating the intent of a new state law.

Chicago Public Schools designated 10 schools for turnaround — a controversial process in which existing staff members are fired and changes are made in the school’s curriculum and learning climate. Four elementary schools will be closed, two high schools will be phased out, and six schools, one of which will also begin phasing out, will share buildings.

About 7,800 students will be affected by the proposed changes, and more than 600 teachers and other employees could lose their jobs. All the designated schools are on the city’s South and West Sides.

Legislation signed in August by Gov. Pat Quinn requires the district to follow a strict timeline for school closings and requires public comment at nearly every step of the process. The district is allowed to set the guidelines for determining which schools are subject to turnaround or closing. District officials are relying on academic achievement as the key factor in those decisions.

But academic performance at the designated schools varies widely. For example, the school district is proposing a turnaround at Pablo Casals Elementary School, where 62 percent of the students met or exceeded state standards in math and reading. At the same time, they also plan to turn around Fuller Elementary School, which had just 37 percent of students meeting or exceeding standards.

Oliver Sicat, the district’s chief portfolio officer, said administrators were careful to take action only at schools where students had a better option nearby.

“Our recommendations are to close schools where we feel like we can put our students in a better seat now,” Mr. Sicat said.

Members of the Chicago Educational Facilities Task Force, a state entity that monitors Chicago Public Schools’ compliance with the new law, said the proposed guidelines were too vague and the process was not transparent enough to satisfy the law’s requirements.

Representative Cynthia Soto, Democrat of Chicago, one of the bill’s sponsors, said, “We need explanations, specific explanations” for the decisions to close or restructure the schools.

Becky Carroll, the school district’s chief communications officer, said the district had “followed every single requirement” of the new law.

Ms. Carroll said school officials had held more than 40 meetings with community groups and elected officials, in addition to two public meetings required by the law. She estimated that 60 more meetings would be held by February, when the Board of Education is scheduled to vote on the proposed actions.

But members of the task force said the public comments fell on deaf ears; no formal revisions were made to the draft criteria before district leaders finalized them at the end of November.

In a written statement, Karen Lewis, president of the Chicago Teachers Union, called the proposed changes “the same old, ineffective policies couched in new and exciting public relations boosting language.”

Mary Filardo, executive director of the 21st Century School Fund, a nonprofit advocacy group, said the district’s guidelines “enable them to close whatever they want.” Ms. Filardo helped draft the law governing the school board’s decision-making process.

Under the guidelines, more than 140 schools were eligible to be closed, and district leaders said there could have been many more on the list.

“We could not do the entire city in one year,” said Jean-Claude Brizard, the Chicago Public Schools chief executive.

Andrea Lee, a member of the educational facilities task force and an education organizer for the Grand Boulevard Federation, said the Bronzeville community on the South Side had been disproportionately affected by school closings and turnarounds. She said 24 schools had closed in the past several years, and this year six area schools are affected.

Ms. Lee said the passage of the new law had initially made her cautiously optimistic, but she was “not that optimistic anymore.”

In Another Blow to Public Schools, Hochberg Leaving Legislature

2011-12-04T15:43:00.000-06:00

"The House will dearly miss its resident nerd"
This sums it up well.

-Patricia

by Abby Rapoport | Texas Observer
Friday, December 02, 2011

Scott Hochberg was none too happy that everyone called him a nerd. "You can't think of something to call me?" he groused more than once. But it was hard to think of anything else to call the state legislator with his messy white hair, glasses and encyclopedic knowledge of school finance law. In a House chamber of cheerleaders and quarterbacks, he often proved that knowing the facts and doing your homework could actually bring power and influence. As the chairman of the Appropriations Subcommittee on Education and the vice chair of the Public Education Committee, Hochberg seemed a living example of Revenge of the Nerds.

Until last session, when he watched helplessly as the Texas House chose to make unprecedented cuts to public education, and the leadership shut him out of school finance negotiations, making cuts less equitable across the state.

So maybe it's not a huge surprise that today Hochberg announced he won't seek re-election after almost 20 years in the state Legislature.

Hochberg is one of 25 incumbents so far to announce they aren't coming back. But his decision may have the most widespread impact, particularly for education advocates. The funding mechanisms around public schools and universities are mind-boggling complicated and irrational. Hochberg was the undisputed expert on how the laws worked. He often tangled with the Texas Education Agency, following up on how policy was actually getting implemented. He spent much of his time on the floor translating and explaining the rules to less-informed colleagues. Because education has traditionally been a bipartisan area, Hochberg often had Republicans sponsoring his bills in the Senate and supporting him in the House—most notably working with Public Education Committee Chair Rob Eissler, R-The Woodlands.

Last session, however, everything blew up. With an ultraconservative Republican super-majority and a $27 billion budget shortfall, things turned nasty fast. Spectators watched Hochberg's and Eissler's friendship implode as the two men battled on school finance plans.

Hochberg was kept out of the closed door meetings on school finance and ultimately had almost no say in the plan the House backed—a plan that cut the same percentage from all school districts, despite vast funding inequalities. He had little say on the Appropriations Committee, where lawmakers ultimately decided to cut $5.4 billion from public schools. Then, adding insult to injury, the Legislature passed redistricting maps that put Hochberg in a district with fellow Democrat Hubert Vo. While those maps have now been redrawn by federal courts, it's hardly shocking to think Hochberg's downtrodden.

In his announcement, Hochberg writes, "My decision should not be thought of as any commentary on the current political environment, the challenges ahead, or, for that matter, the disappointment of soon having to endure the designated hitter rule when watching hometown Houston baseball."

But regardless of his reason, Hochberg's departure leaves an enormous gap in education expertise—at a time when the Legislature can least afford it. The 82nd legislative session was bleak, but the 83rd will likely be worse. Next time around, lawmakers will actually have to deal with the state's structural deficit and tax-policy problems, which means figuring out a better system to pay for public schools. Meanwhile, they'll probably also have to figure out a new way to distribute money to the schools. School districts across Texas are suing the state in several different lawsuits around both inadequacy and inequity in funding.

Rep. Jimmie Don Aycock, R-Killeen, is clearly the chosen member to take the reins from Hochberg, but it's bound to be a tough job. During the session, it fell to Aycock to try, unsuccessfully, to pass a fiscal matters bill containing school finance language. While Aycock is undoubtedly smart and eager, he's only in his third term. Hochberg had the trust of his colleagues, that he both understood all sides and would explain the policy options fairly.

The House will dearly miss its resident nerd.

Texplainer: Could Universities Undergo Sunset Review?

2011-12-02T08:18:00.000-06:00

Great response from Texas Tech: “We have a sunset review; it’s just not called sunset review. Every two years we come down here and try to justify what we’re doing.”

-Patricia

Hey, Texplainer: Could the state’s public universities go through the so-called sunset review process, forcing them to periodically defend their existence to state legislators?

The issue came up at a November hearing of the Joint Oversight Committee on Higher Education Governance, Excellence and Transparency, a group formed earlier this year amid tense debate over the operations of higher education institutions in the state.

A co-chair of the committee, state Sen. Judith Zaffirini, D-Laredo, cited a recommendation from the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a conservative think tank whose higher education proposals she has openly opposed, that was delivered to legislators prior to the recent legislative session. It called for lawmakers to “study the feasibility, the pros, and the cons of placing universities under sunset review.”

Most state agencies go through the high-stakes process every 12 years. Their operations are scrutinized and the Legislature decides whether they should continue to operate. If legislators don't act to keep an agency in sunset alive, it shuts down.

“If the Legislature were to adopt such a recommendation, how would your universities in your system be impacted?” Zaffirini asked a group of university system chancellors who had been invited to testify on matters of governance.

As might be expected, the chancellors didn’t go for the idea.

University of Houston System Chancellor Renu Khator said it was “not doable.” Texas Tech University System Chancellor Kent Hance, a former legislator, said, “We have a sunset review; it’s just not called sunset review. Every two years we come down here and try to justify what we’re doing.”

That the discussion was even occurring surprised some in the higher education community. Michael McClendon, an education policy expert from Vanderbilt University, has been retained by the Texas Coalition for Excellence in Higher Education, an organization that sprang up in opposition to the TPPF’s proposals. He said it struck him as “illogical,” at a time when universities must increasingly look to private dollars to fund their activities, that they might have to do so with the caveat that they might not exist in a few years. “What right-minded donor would give to that organization?”

Lee Jackson, the chancellor of the University of North Texas System, expressed reluctance to proclaim that universities should be exempt from the sunset process — after all, as a state representative in 1979 he had disagreed with the State Bar of Texas that it should be exempted.

Higher education might be different. Usually, Jackson said, when an agency is sunsetted — a nice way of saying shut down — its functions are transferred to another agency. But because of accreditation requirements, among other issues, the students at a university that was eliminated through the sunset review process could not simply or easily be transferred and would most likely be left in the lurch.

“If the question were asked … could the state of Texas use our time better evaluating our progress, I would say yes,” Jackson said.

That’s what the recommendation was driving at, according to Thomas Lindsay, who arrived as director of the TPPF’s Center for Higher Education after the proposal was made. “The idea behind it is pretty common sense,” he said. “As an entity created for and paid for by the taxpayers, it, like all other state entities, should be reviewed.”

The intent was not to shut down the universities, he said, adding that it was “unfortunate” if that was the impression that had been given. And if a sunset process were in place, he does not believe it would shutter universities. “The purpose of education is not something that’s going to go out of style, so it’s not looked at as a way to abolish them,” he said. “If any entity can [defend its existence], institutions of higher education would be those.”

Lindsay said the TPPF is currently examining different ways to review universities as they piece together what will ultimately be their recommendations for the 2013 legislative session.

Those proposals, when they come, will likely be pored over carefully by the higher education community both in Texas and elsewhere. “I think some people look to Texas with befuddlement,” McClendon said. “They understand that the questions being asked there are being asked everywhere, but some of the solutions being raised seem a bit extreme.”

Bottom line: Technically, it's feasible, but university leaders and some higher education experts say it's not realistic.

Robin Hood an Accepted Reality for Texas Schools

2011-12-02T08:03:00.000-06:00

by Morgan Smith | Texas Tribune
December 2, 2011

When David Thompson is asked about Texas’ long history of school finance litigation, he likes to make a Harry Potter analogy.

“There are common characters, common themes, consistent plot thematic issues that run through all the books,” said Thompson, a lawyer. “But every one of them has a specific focus.”

Now, one phrase is conspicuously absent from the discussion: Robin Hood. The state’s practice of collecting portions of property tax revenue from wealthier districts and redistributing it to poorer ones, also known as “recapture,” was a rallying cry for districts challenging the school finance system in a lawsuit that made its way through the courts from 2001 to 2005.

Though Robin Hood has been a political flash point since its inception in 1993, it has now become settled law. After it survived a high-profile effort at repeal during the 2003 legislative session, a decision from the Texas Supreme Court in 2005 “pretty much dashed” any expectation that the law could be overturned, said F. Scott McCown, who presided over the case in the lower courts as a state judge in 2002.

The state received just over $1 billion in payments in 2010 from more than 300 Robin Hood school districts, according to Texas Education Agency data.

By the end of the year, there will most likely be at least three lawsuits filed against the state relating to how it finances public schools, one led by Thompson. But none of the plaintiffs — not even the group formed primarily of school districts that contribute revenue under Robin Hood — have said their goal is to overturn the law.

“We’re not asking to alter or repeal that provision,” said Rickey Dailey, a spokesman for the Texas School Coalition, which represents property-wealthy school districts that send money back to the state.

Dailey said the districts would instead argue that the state has failed to dedicate enough money to public education to meet increasingly strict accountability standards, and that it has created an unconstitutional statewide property tax because it has left them with little choice in how to spend local taxes or whether to raise them.

“We’re all resigned to the fact that, until the state does something to pull the many school districts that are tax-poor to a minimally adequate level, Robin Hood is going to be here,” said David Webb, the chief financial officer of Deer Park, a wealthy district near Houston that has given back about $578 million since the law was enacted.

While wealthy districts may not have chosen to highlight concerns with Robin Hood as a part of their lawsuit, they still struggle with its consequences — and many have devised ways to get around it, like creating private foundations to help support their schools.

Asking voters to approve higher taxes, some of whose receipts go to poorer schools, is “really a nonstarter,” said Superintendent Kevin Brown of San Antonio's Alamo Heights Independent School District, which has given about $300 million of its property tax revenue to the state since 1993.

But districts hoping for a school finance solution beyond Robin Hood will most likely be disappointed, said McCown, who is now the executive director of the Center for Public Policy Priorities, a liberal research group that supports Robin Hood.

“This very court would have to reverse itself,” he said, “and it doesn’t solve anybody’s problem.”

The state needs the money it receives from wealthy school districts to help finance education for the rest, said Pat Forgione, who was superintendent of the Austin Independent School District from 1999 to 2009 and was a chief witness for the districts fighting Robin Hood last time. The Austin district still sends more to the state through Robin Hood than any other. In 2011 those payments will amount to $111 million — more than three times what the second-highest-contributing district, Plano, in Collin County, will give up.

“They don’t know how to deal with Robin Hood because now Robin Hood isn’t just $100 million anymore,” Forgione said of state lawmakers. “It’s hard to give up that.”

Texas education board opts to stay out of dispute over new tests

2011-11-27T17:44:00.001-06:00

By TERRENCE STUTZ | Austin Bureau, Dallas Morning-News
November, 17 2011

AUSTIN — State Board of Education members indicated Thursday they will not get involved in a dispute over the new high school end-of-course exams and how much they must count toward student grades in the 12 subjects that will be tested beginning this year.

Several board members said they were unwilling to modify a law passed by the Legislature that says the new test must count for at least 15 percent of the final grade in each of the core subjects.

Under the 2007 law, high school students must get a passing average on the three end-of-course tests in each of four subject areas — English, math, science and social studies — to receive a diploma. The law also spells out how the test results will be calculated into the final grade in each course.

School superintendents across the state have complained that the testing law is unclear about how such things as course credits, grade-point averages and class rankings should be determined after inclusion of the end-of-course test scores — and the Texas Education Agency has been reluctant to issue guidelines on the 15 percent requirement.

State Board of Education member Thomas Ratliff, R-Mount Pleasant, proposed Thursday that the board adopt a rule that students failing an end-of-course test still be given credit for a course if they had a grade of 70 or better in the course — exclusive of what they scored on the end-of-course exam for the subject.

His proposal was backed by superintendents, who argued that it would maintain local control of grading policies in school districts and allow students who met all passing standards in the course except for the final test to still get credit for their work.

“I can’t find a school superintendent who is not in favor of this proposal,” Abilene ISD Superintendent Heath Burns told the board in voicing support for Ratliff’s plan. “This is a change that needs to happen.”

But several board members said they could not favor such a move, particularly since a similar effort in the legislative session earlier this year failed.

“The Legislature had a purpose in mind, that students have to pass these exams to get a diploma,” said board member Terri Leo, R-Spring. “You need to go to the pink house [state Capitol] if you’re having problems with this requirement and not ask us to lower standards. This would lower the bar for students when we’re supposed to be raising it.”

Board member David Bradley, R-Beaumont, said the proposed change would send the wrong message to students and teachers.

“The state is just asking for some accountability, just 15 percent,” he said. “This initiative will send a message to dumb down our standards. Everybody will get a trophy and nobody will fail.”

Ratliff rejected the notion that the proposal would diminish standards, saying, “What we’re trying to do is protect kids who are passing their class as determined by 180 days in a school year and not four hours on a test.”

With less than a majority of board members inclined to take action, Ratliff said he would set aside his proposal for now.

“My goal was to raise awareness of this issue so that we could see the unintended consequences of the law,” he said.

Ratliff noted that some school districts have already revised their grading policies so that any failing grade on an end-of-course test will be converted into a score of 69, making it impossible for a student to fail a class solely on the basis of the test score. Students would still have to get passing averages on each group of tests to earn a diploma.

Big expansion, big questions for Teach for America

2011-11-27T16:18:00.000-06:00

By CHRISTINE ARMARIO | AP – 7 hrs ago

MIAMI (AP) — In a distressed neighborhood north of Miami's gleaming downtown, a group of enthusiastic but inexperienced instructors from Teach for America is trying to make progress where more veteran teachers have had difficulty: raising students' reading and math scores.

"These are the lowest performing schools, so we need the strongest performing teachers," said Julian Davenport, an assistant principal at Holmes Elementary, where three-fifths of the staff this year are Teach for America corps members or graduates of the program.

By 2015, with the help of a $50 million federal grant, program recruits could make up one-quarter of all new teachers in 60 of the nation's highest need school districts. The program also is expanding internationally.

That growth comes as many districts try to make teachers more effective. But Teach for America has had mixed results.

Its teachers perform about as well as other novice instructors, who tend to be less successful than their more experienced colleagues. Even when they do slightly better, there's a serious offset: The majority are out of the teaching profession within five years.

"I think ultimately the jury is out," said Tony Wagner, a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and an instructor to the first class of TFA corps members.

Teach for America teachers work with not just the poor, but also English language learners and special education students. They provide an important pipeline of new teachers. But critics cite the teachers' high turnover rate, limited training and inexperience and say they are perpetuating the same inequalities that Teach for America has set to eradicate.

"There's no question that they've brought a huge number of really talented people in to the education profession," said Kati Haycock, president of The Education Trust, which advocates on behalf of low-income and minority children, and a longtime supporter of TFA.

But, she said, "Nobody should teach in a high poverty school without having already demonstrated that they are a fabulous teacher. For poor kids, education has to work every single year."

___

Wendy Kopp started Teach for America while studying public policy at Princeton. For her senior thesis, she developed a plan to place top college graduates in the poorest schools. She sent the plan to dozens of Fortune 500 executives. Within a year, she had raised $2.5 million and had 2,500 applications.

Over the past 20 years, thousands of recent college graduates have taught for two years in some of the most challenging classrooms in hopes of helping close the achievement gap. Applications have doubled since 2008. Foundations have donated tens of millions.

With Teach for America's guidance, groups are being established in India, Chile and other places with deep educational inequalities.

Many countries, including those where students perform higher in math and reading, send the strongest and most experienced teachers to work with the lowest performing students. The U.S. has done the reverse. There are nearly twice as many teachers with fewer than three years' experience in schools where students are predominantly low income and minority.

Family income is one of the most accurate predictors of how well a student will perform. Just 18 percent of low-income eighth-grade students, for example, scored as proficient or above in reading on the 2011 National Assessment of Educational Progress.

"When we started this 20 years ago, the prevailing notion backed up by all the research was socio-economic circumstances determine educational outcomes," Kopp said in an interview with The Associated Press. "We've seen real evidence it does not have to be that way."

How to overcome the challenges of poverty is at the center of the debate over education reform, with an increasing focus on effective teaching.

Highly effective teachers are hardest to find at the least advantaged schools.

"The reality, particularly in urban centers in America, is they aren't there," said Tim Knowles, director of the Urban Education Institute at the University of Chicago, who served as the founding director for Teach for America in New York City.

___

Teach for America believes it can create a corps of such teachers in a short time.

Research, however, shows that beginning instructors improve with experience.

A Harvard study of students in Texas found that a teacher's level of education, experience, and scores on licensing exams have a greater influence on student performance than any other factor. North Carolina research on teacher training programs, including Teach for America, showed that elementary students taught math by a first-year teacher lose the equivalent of 21 days of schooling compared with students who had teachers with four years of experience.

If inexperienced teachers don't perform as well, then why pair them with students who struggle the most?

"When they started, we were staffing our high poverty schools ... with anything that breathed," said Haycock. But, she added, "Saying their solution is better than what came before it is not to say it's the right thing."

Wagner noted that his master's degree in teaching from Harvard hardly prepared him for the challenges of being a first-year teacher. "Unless and until we have a dramatically different system, and a universally high quality system for preparing teachers, I think TFA is a stop gap, and an important one," he said.

___

Most who apply for Teach for America have not studied education or thought about teaching, but consider it after speaking with a recruiter or program graduate.

For Ryan Winn, it was a picture of a recruiter's third-grade class in Phoenix that persuaded him to apply. The recruiter told him that half the students were expected to drop out by the eighth grade.

"That struck me as incredibly unfair and I was upset about it," said Winn, a teacher this year in Memphis, Tenn.

At Holmes Elementary in Miami, the classrooms of Teach for America teachers are filled with posters reminding students of the ambitious goals set for them.

"I have to make a change," said Michael Darmas, a first-year teacher at Holmes. "I have to make a difference."

Teach for America training starts with thick packages of readings and then five weeks co-teaching a summer class, usually in an urban school district, with students who have fallen behind and are taking remedial coursework in order to advance to the next grade.

The fledgling teachers are overseen by another instructor. That could be a more veteran public school teacher, or current or former Teach for America corps member.

"It was a real steep learning curve," said Sarahi Constantine Padilla, a recent Stanford University graduate teaching at Holmes.

When the summer is over, teachers are sent to their assigned districts, which pay up to $5,000 to Teach for America for each corps member they hire, in addition to the teacher's salary. Many don't find out exactly what they'll be teaching until shortly before school begins.

In interviews with nearly two dozen Teach for America corps members, many described classroom triumphs. Several also acknowledged feeling dubious about their abilities as first-year teachers.

"I struggled personally with my ability to be effective, and I think the gains my kids achieved were largely in spite of me," said Brett Barley, who taught in the San Francisco Bay area. "I thought the key thing I was able to bring to them was communicating the urgency of the predicament they faced and having them buy in to the idea they could be successful."

Most of the fourth-graders Barley taught entered reading and writing at second-grade levels. About 30 percent weren't native English speakers; two were classified as blind.

"The biggest challenge was trying to learn on the job to meet all the kids at their different skill levels," Barley said.

In her book, "A Chance to Make History," Kopp tells the stories of several Teach for America teachers who achieved remarkable success in the classroom. But it's not hard to find teachers who come out with a very different story about their experience.

Megan Hopkins, a Spanish major in college who was placed in Phoenix as a bilingual teacher, said she did not receive any training on teaching English language learners.

"I had no idea how to teach a child to read," Hopkins said. "I had no idea how to teach a second language learner to read in Spanish, much less in English. After five weeks of training, I really had no idea what I was doing. I felt that was a big disservice to my students."

Teach for America encouraged her to set a goal of advancing her students 1 1/2 grade levels. She didn't know how to go about building such a measurement, but was able to develop one with other teachers.

Hopkins said she was praised "up and down" for increasing student reading levels, but she questioned the results. One student, a native Spanish speaker, could read fluently in English, "but if you asked him what he read, he had absolutely no idea."

___

Teach for America, in its own review of external research, concludes that its teachers achieve student gains that are "at least as great as that of other new teachers." In some studies they do better, and in others they do worse.

Teach for America gathers information on how its teachers are performing, but does not release any data to the public. "We just don't feel it's responsible to show," Kopp said. "There are so many flaws in our system."

One consistent finding is Teach for America's high turnover rate. According to the organization, 33 percent of its graduates are still teaching. But in many districts, retention rates are significantly lower. A study published last year from North Carolina, for example, found that after five years, 7 percent of Teach for America corps members were still teaching in the state.

Kopp and others at Teach for America note turnover rates are high across low-income schools. But among teacher preparation programs, Teach for America has one of the highest.

She said requiring a two-year commitment is critical to attracting high quality candidates. The main reason Teach for America teachers leave the classroom, Kopp said, is because they want to have a bigger impact. Sixty percent of the program's graduates are still working in education, whether it's in policy, or for a nonprofit or government agency, according to TFA.

Throughout their time with Teach for America, corps members are frequently told about the organization's "theory of change." It's the idea that, no matter what field they ultimately enter, they will remain committed to fixing educational inequalities.

Many of the graduates interviewed for this story did leave teaching.

Hopkins, the Phoenix teacher, earned a doctorate in education and has focused much of her research on English language learners.

"But what if their theory of change would encourage their teachers to stay in the classroom as a form of change, as a form of leadership in the field of education?" she asked.

___

At Holmes Elementary, much is at stake.

If the state isn't granted a waiver from the federal education law known as No Child Left Behind, the school could close unless it significantly improves math and reading scores on Florida's standardized assessment.

"I like the pressure," said third-grade teacher Daniel Guerrero. "It makes me want to stay up late and make sure everything is ready."

Assistant Superintendent Nikolai Vitti says clustering Teach for America teachers together has worked in other district schools and he hopes to attract more beyond their two-year commitment.

Davenport, the assistant principal and a program alumnus, said that will depend on whether corps members feel valued.

"If they don't feel that opportunity to exercise their abilities," he said, "they won't be compelled to stay."

Texas Schools Face New Rules on Financial Hardship

2011-11-27T11:04:00.000-06:00

This history behind this legislation is sickening.

-Patricia

by Morgan Smith | Texas Tribune
11/23/2011

The Texas Education Agency has released new guidelines that set tough thresholds for school districts hoping to take advantage of special legal exemptions passed by the Legislature and intended to help schools cope with significant budget cuts.

A school district's declaration of “financial exigency” is necessary to trigger many provisions of Senate Bill 8, including those that allow districts to streamline mid-contract employee terminations and avoid seniority-based layoffs in certain circumstances. The law, passed during the special session, left it up to the Commissioner of Education to establish a minimum standard for such declarations, which were previously largely in the hands of local school boards.

The rules released Wednesday give several scenarios that allow districts to claim financial exigency — but they are so rigorous that it’s likely that only a small number of districts will actually meet the any of the standards, says Jackie Lain, an associate executive director at the Texas Association of School Boards. The conditions include a funding reduction of more than 10 percent per student or more than a 20 percent decrease in its fund balance.

To put that in perspective, the $4 billion reduction to public education funding during the past legislative session has most districts seeing a 6 percent cut during the first year of the biennium and not more than a 9 percent cut in the second year. Districts vary widely in how much they've used of their fund balances, which amount to emergency savings accounts.

"Before SB8 there weren’t any standards for declaring financial exigency and the bill required the commissioner to adopt minimum standards," says Janice Hollingsworth, who is the interim director of the agency's financial audit division.

Among the other conditions are a decline in enrollment by more than 10 percent over the past two years, an unforeseen natural disaster requiring significant expenditures in excess of 15 percent of a district’s yearly budget, and “any other circumstances approved in writing” by the commissioner of education. Hollingsworth says the commissioner maintained some discretion to anticipate any unforeseen circumstances the other conditions didn't account for.

What the new guidelines mean in practice, says Lain, is that districts may be forced to go through more expensive processes to lay off employees, whose salaries typically make up about 80 percent of their annual budgets, instead of being able to take advantage of the more efficient practices lawmakers approved during the session.

“The thresholds seem to be overly high without any explanations,” Lain says. “How the commissioner uses the discretion will determine if the rules are overly prescriptive, or properly restrictive.”

The TEA will have a period of public comment on the rules. Hollingsworth says they are "subject to change" depending on the feedback the agency receives.

For-Profit, Alternative Teaching Programs Are Booming

2011-11-27T10:57:00.000-06:00

Reps. Villarreal and Eissler get to the core of why there's such a "boom" in for-profit teaching programs: for-profit, monied interests strong arm those who would want anything otherwise. If you undermine pre-service teachers' access to curriculum, don't be surprised when they struggle in the classroom.

In Texas, where certain outspoken parents oppose racialized histories out of fear of "indoctrination", they should be asking how these teachers that draw primarily from personal experience void of any preparation on how to create a learning process that allows students to develop their own voices and identities is anything different.

-Patricia

by Morgan Smith and Nick Pandolfo, The Hechinger Report
November 27, 2011

DENTON — One afternoon in mid-November, Jeff Arrington scattered 80 paper gingerbread men labeled with numbers across the floor of his high school disaster-response class.

The numbers corresponded with the severity of injuries ranging from burns to hysterical blindness. His students had to categorize the “men” based on the level of medical attention each required.

Arrington, in the middle of his third month of teaching at the Advanced Technology Complex in the Denton Independent School District, has a background well suited to the subject. He was a police officer for six years — he turned in his badge on Sept. 12 and began teaching the next day.

He is earning his teaching certificate through an online, for-profit alternative certification program, a nontraditional route to teaching that is becoming more common in Texas. Such programs, which can offer certification in three months to two years, are booming despite little more than anecdotal evidence of their success. They draw candidates like Arrington who bring valuable life experience, but there are concerns about how they will perform as teachers, especially since they are more likely to end up in poor districts teaching students in challenging situations.

More than 110 alternative certification programs — including iteachTEXAS, which Arrington is completing, and nonprofits like Teach for America — produce 40 percent of all new teachers in Texas, according to an analysis of Texas Education Agency data by Ed Fuller, a Penn State University education professor and former University of Texas researcher.

For-profit programs dominate that market: Every year since 2007, the two largest companies, A+ Texas Teachers and iteachTEXAS, have produced far more teachers than any other traditional or alternative program. While virtually all paths to the classroom have seen declines since 2003, according to Fuller’s analysis, for-profit alternative certification programs have grown by 23 percent. (While the percentage has increased, the actual number of for-profit alternative certificates granted has decreased since the 2009 economic recession.)

Other states have begun allowing for-profits to enter the alternative teacher training market, but Texas has done so to the greatest extent, according to Emily Feistritzer, president of the National Center for Alternative Certification. Earlier this year, New York began permitting private entities like the American Museum of Natural History and Teach for America to grant teaching certificates and master’s degrees, but they are nonprofits. Some states, like Illinois, require that any alternative routes to the classroom be connected to the university system.

IteachTEXAS, begun in 2003, is the first for-profit, non-university based alternative certification program to expand across state lines, with the newly created iteachU.S. operating programs in Louisiana and Tennessee. Additional offshoots will soon come to Michigan and at least two other states.

Diann Huber, president of iteachU.S., said the program’s goal is to provide a new career opportunity for people who have been laid off in other industries, like auto workers in Michigan, who may be able to use their knowledge to teach high-need subjects like math and science.

Texas began experimenting with alternative certification programs in the mid-1980s. Then, the state “didn’t regulate who was operating private programs, and people saw that was a way to make a fast buck,” said Rae Queen, the president of the Texas Alternative Certification Association, who also runs a for-profit alternative certification program in San Antonio. Queen said the state now has a much more rigorous application and audit process for certification programs. In 2008, the state also instituted a minimum grade-point average of 2.5 for all teaching candidates.

Still, Queen said the reputation of for-profit programs suffers. “There are some companies out there that say ‘you want to be a teacher, start today,’” she said, “and they’ve done that through their own advertising campaigns.”

Some traditional educators believe that for-profits, which typically charge around $4,000 for a program leading to certification, accept applicants with little regard for demand or how they might perform in the classroom. “The for-profits will take anyone,” said Nell Ingram, director of the Dallas Independent School District alternative certification program, adding that her program will not offer courses in subjects that are not in demand.

Principals offer mixed reviews of teachers hired from for-profit programs. Most say those teachers succeed in the classroom at the same rate as traditionally certified ones, but others report that they seem less prepared.

Bettejean Gosnell, who earned her certificate through iteachTEXAS about seven years ago and teaches special education in Argyle, said she was the alternative certification “poster child,” a former Nabisco employee whose busy life drew her to online teacher certification courses. But while she said the program “worked out perfect” for her, she said it did not support her once she was in the classroom.

“I remember thinking that I wanted constructive criticism,” Gosnell said, “and I wasn’t getting it.”

The state’s most recent effort to regulate the industry came in the last legislative session, when Rep. Mike Villarreal, D-San Antonio, offered a bill that would require potential teachers to spend at least 15 of the mandated 30 hours of practice teaching in classrooms.

The bill struggled to pass — in the end, a watered-down version made it through — because of opposition from some in the for profit industry, who went after it, Villarreal said, because of their interest in “having as much flexibility as possible to deliver a very simple curriculum with limited time commitment” to process clients.

Vernon Reaser, president of A+ Texas Teachers, testified against the bill at a hearing in March. Reaser said it could have unforeseen practical consequences that could burden school districts and would not necessarily raise the quality of teachers in the classroom.

Reaser, who did not return further requests for comment, supported the changes to the bill that ultimately passed.

Evaluating teacher-training programs — regardless of whether they produce teachers through alternative or traditional routes — is “one of the toughest areas to get ahold of,” said Rep. Rob Eissler, R-The Woodlands, who has headed the Public Education Committee in the Texas House since 2007.

Eissler said for-profit programs were no more likely to turn out less-qualified teachers than their nonprofit competitors. “Like anything else,” he said, “there are some that are really good and some that aren’t as good as the others.” He said there is a need for the state to study which programs are getting the best results. Right now, Eissler said, “most of what we know is anecdotal.”

The state’s recent $4 billion reduction in public education spending has led to hiring freezes and layoffs in many districts. Some in the education community still question whether for-profits will be motivated to produce new teachers without a corresponding demand.

Queen said her program tries to avoid churning out graduates who will not get jobs by working with school districts to identify their greatest needs. She frowns upon applicants who she senses want to teach because they think it is easy.

“I will tell them they need to go out and substitute teach and spend time in a classroom,” she said, “and they end up self-selecting. They’ll come back and say, ‘This is not at all what I thought teaching would be — you are right.’"

Thanksgiving in America by Felipe de Ortego y Gasca

2011-11-27T10:40:00.000-06:00

THANKSGIVING IN AMERICA
From The National Hispanic Reporter, November 1991; posted on the Deming Headlight, November 25, 2010.

By Felipe de Ortego y Gasca

Publisher and Editor-in-Chief, The National Hispanic Reporter, Scholar in Residence and Professor of English, Communications, and Information Studies, Graduate School of Library and Information Studies, Texas Woman’s University in Denton.

In most enterprises, moments of thanks- giving take place for safe arrival or deliverance. The story about the first Thanks-giving in America credits the Pilgrims at the Massachusetts Bay Colony celebrating their safe arrival at the Atlantic frontier of the “new world”.

That band of Pilgrims set sail from Plymouth, Eng¬land, on September 15, 1620 on the Mayflower with 103 religious dissenters on board. Their original destination was the Virginia colony, but they put to at Cape Cod on November 19, and set foot on Plymouth rock (Massachusetts) on December 21 (December 11, Old Style).

It is recorded that these Pilgrims came to America to escape religious persecution in England; they actually came to practice Puritanism, a religious fundamentalism of intolerance that eliminated parliamentary government in England between 1649 and 1660.

The Pilgrims who came to America were not just simple religious conservatives persecuted by the King and the Church of England for their unorthodox beliefs. They were political revolutionaries who meant to over throw the English monarchy and did in 1649. Noble as their victory was, Puritan tyranny simply replaced royal tyranny.
But in 1620, the Pilgrims at Plymouth Colony were outcasts who could not fit into English mainstream society. They regarded their Wampanoag Indian benefactors as their enemy, as noted in the Plymouth Thanksgiving sermon of 1623 by Mather the Elder who gave special thanks to God for the devastating plague of smallpox that destroyed the majority of the Wampanoag Indians. He praised God for eliminating “chiefly young men and children, the very seeds of increase, thus clearing the forests to make way for a better growth.

To the Pilgrims, the Indians were heathens and, therefore, instruments of the Devil. Squanto, the only educated Wampanoag among the Indians, was regarded as merely an instrument of God set in the wilderness to provide for the survival of the Chosen Elect–the Pilgrims.

Records are not very clear about when the Pilgrims celebrated that first Thanksgiving. And stories about that first Pilgrim thanks- giving have been embroidered with touches of Indian charity helping those Pilgrims through their first rough winter in America.

But at that first Thanksgiving at Plymouth Plantation in 1621, Pilgrim friendship was feigned and the peace offered tenuous. A generation later when the population shift favored the whites. Puritans slaughtered Indians genocidally in the conflict that has become known as King Philip’s War, after which King Philip of the Indians was beheaded and the Wampanoags sold into slavery. So much for the myth of harmony about that first Thanksgiving.

The myth of that first Thanksgiving actually came into being during the 19th century when the national goal of assimilation emerged as a way to homogenize a diversity of people into a unified nation through a common national (albeit mythical) history.

But the Pilgrim Thanksgiving of 1621 was not the first thanksgiving in America. In 1513, Juan Ponce de Leon proclaimed thanksgiving when his crew put ashore on what is now St. Augustine, Florida. In his account of the Conquest of Mexico, Bernal Diaz notes a moment of thanks¬giving in 1519 joined by Cortez and his men for safe passage to what is now Veracruz, Mexico.

A story of thanksgiving is told about Panfilo de Narvaez and his expedition to Florida in 1526. Another story of thanksgiving is told about Coronado and his men, taking place on the banks of the Rio Grande near present-day San Elizario, Texas, in 1540 near what is today El Paso. And on September 8, 1565, Don Pedro Menendez declared a day of thanks before beginning construction of St. Augustine, Florida. Stories of thanksgiving abound.

Mention is made here and there in American history about a national day of thanksgiving. On October 3, 1863, for example, Abraham Lincoln proclaimed a day of thanksgiving . And in 1905, Theodore Roosevelt issued a proclamation declaring November 12 as a day of thanks¬giving. Not Thanksgiving Day.

Thanksgiving Day did not actually become a national holiday until December 26, 1941, with House Joint Resolution 41 (77th Congress, 1st Session) declaring the 4th Thurs¬day in November as Thanksgiving Day.

Thanksgiving is a day all Americans commemorate. But Thanksgiving is not a proprietary holiday. The Pilgrims didn’t invent it. Nor did the Spanish. But when we think of the first thanksgiving we need to look at the forgotten (some would say “neglected”) pages of American history. For the history of the United States during the period when its lands were Spanish is as much a part of American history as is the history of the period when its lands were English.

More importantly, perhaps, is to remember that as a national holiday, Thanksgiving Day is of recent origin, belonging to the children of the 20th century. It’s time to recommemorate Thanksgiving Day as a day of hope for the American children of the 21st century.

Copyright © 1991 by the author. All rights reserved.

.

n+1: Bad Education

2011-11-26T23:46:00.001-06:00

Malcolm Harris lays out the student loan debt crisis that we're in. It mirrors the pre-crisis housing market:

"The loans and costs are caught in the kind of dangerous loop that occurs when lending becomes both profitable and seemingly risk-free: high and increasing college costs mean students need to take out more loans, more loans mean more securities lenders can package and sell, more selling means lenders can offer more loans with the capital they raise, which means colleges can continue to raise costs. The result is over $800 billion in outstanding student debt, over 30 percent of it securitized, and the federal government directly or indirectly on the hook for almost all of it."

The way that the working class is getting denied "debt opportunities," if you will, that are available to the middle class that has had greater opportunity in securing four-year college degrees, is through the for-profits like the University of Phoenix or Kaplan. Check out these statistics and this narrative that suggest very real scamming that is taking place currently:

"While the debt numbers for four-year programs look risky, for-profit two-year schools have apocalyptic figures: 96 percent of their students take on debt and within fifteen years 40 percent are in default. A Government Accountability Office sting operation in which agents posed as applicants found all fifteen approached institutions engaged in deceptive practices and four in straight-up fraud. For-profits were found to have paid their admissions officers on commission, falsely claimed accreditation, underrepresented costs, and encouraged applicants to lie on federal financial aid forms. Far from the bargain they portray themselves to be on daytime television, for-profit degree programs were found to be more expensive than the nonprofit alternatives nearly every time. "

Despite this, corporate interests that include The Washington Post Co. University of CA Regent Richard Blum (husband to Senator Dianne Feinstein) means that this for-profit sector is among the fastest growing one in higher education.

The growing debt amount is staggering foreshadowing the possibility of massive default. However, Federal policy via Student Loan Asset-Backed Security (or SLABS)has insulated investors to date. As long as the status quo prevails, universities can keep simply raising tuition costs. However from the consumer side, a $200,000.00 education-related debt should very well provide something to show for it at the end of the day. And it should minimally command a labor market advantage that will actually allow them to get out of debt. A more despairing, if growing scenario, is highly indebted class of college graduates that must go into greater debt to pay off student loans. And student debt is particularly punishing:

"Not only is it inescapable through bankruptcy, but student loans have no expiration date and collectors can garnish wages, social security payments, and even unemployment benefits. When a borrower defaults and the guaranty agency collects from the federal government, the agency gets a cut of whatever it’s able to recover from then on (even though they have already been compensated for the losses), giving agencies a financial incentive to dog former students to the grave."

Another trend is the hiring of top-level, very highly paid administrators with concomitant dips in instruction and student services:

"If current trends continue, the Department of Education estimates that by 2014 there will be more administrators than instructors at American four-year nonprofit colleges. A bigger administration also consumes a larger portion of available funds, so it’s unsurprising that budget shares for instruction and student services have dipped over the past fifteen years."

All very sobering and concerning.

-Angela

n+1: Bad Education

The Project On Student Debt estimates that the average college senior in 2009 graduated with $24,000 in outstanding loans. Last August, student loans surpassed credit cards as the nation’s single largest source of debt, edging ever closer to $1 trillion. Yet for all the moralizing about American consumer debt by both parties, no one dares call higher education a bad investment. The nearly axiomatic good of a university degree in American society has allowed a higher education bubble to expand to the point of bursting.

Since 1978, the price of tuition at US colleges has increased over 900 percent, 650 points above inflation. To put that number in perspective, housing prices, the bubble that nearly burst the US economy, then the global one, increased only fifty points above the Consumer Price Index during those years. But while college applicants’ faith in the value of higher education has only increased, employers’ has declined. According to Richard Rothstein at The Economic Policy Institute, wages for college-educated workers outside of the inflated finance industry have stagnated or diminished. Unemployment has hit recent graduates especially hard, nearly doubling in the post-2007 recession. The result is that the most indebted generation in history is without the dependable jobs it needs to escape debt.

What kind of incentives motivate lenders to continue awarding six-figure sums to teenagers facing both the worst youth unemployment rate in decades and an increasingly competitive global workforce?

During the expansion of the housing bubble, lenders felt protected because they could repackage risky loans as mortgage-backed securities, which sold briskly to a pious market that believed housing prices could only increase. By combining slices of regionally diverse loans and theoretically spreading the risk of default, lenders were able to convince independent rating agencies that the resulting financial products were safe bets. They weren’t. But since this wouldn’t be America if you couldn’t monetize your children’s futures, the education sector still has its equivalent: the Student Loan Asset-Backed Security (or, as they’re known in the industry, SLABS).

SLABS were invented by then-semi-public Sallie Mae in the early ’90s, and their trading grew as part of the larger asset-backed security wave that peaked in 2007. In 1990, there were $75.6 million of these securities in circulation; at their apex, the total stood at $2.67 trillion. The number of SLABS traded on the market grew from $200,000 in 1991 to near $250 billion by the fourth quarter of 2010. But while trading in securities backed by credit cards, auto loans, and home equity is down 50 percent or more across the board, SLABS have not suffered the same sort of drop. SLABS are still considered safe investments—the kind financial advisors market to pension funds and the elderly.

With the secondary market in such good shape, primary lenders have been eager to help students with out-of-control costs. In addition to the knowledge that they can move these loans off their balance sheets quickly, they have had another reason not to worry: federal guarantees. Under the just-ended Federal Family Education Loan Program (FFELP), the US Treasury backed private loans to college students. This meant that even if the secondary market collapsed and there were an anomalous wave of defaults, the federal government had already built a lender bailout into the law. And if that weren’t enough, in May 2008 President Bush signed the Ensuring Continued Access to Student Loans Act, which authorized the Department of Education to purchase FFELP loans outright if secondary demand dipped. In 2010, as a cost-offset attached to health reform legislation, President Obama ended the FFELP, but not before it had grown to a $60 billion-a-year operation.

Even with the Treasury no longer acting as co-signer on private loans, the flow of SLABS won’t end any time soon. What analysts at Barclays Capital wrote of the securities in 2006 still rings true: “For this sector, we expect sustainable growth in new issuance volume as the growth in education costs continues to outpace increases in family incomes, grants, and federal loans.” The loans and costs are caught in the kind of dangerous loop that occurs when lending becomes both profitable and seemingly risk-free: high and increasing college costs mean students need to take out more loans, more loans mean more securities lenders can package and sell, more selling means lenders can offer more loans with the capital they raise, which means colleges can continue to raise costs. The result is over $800 billion in outstanding student debt, over 30 percent of it securitized, and the federal government directly or indirectly on the hook for almost all of it.

If this sounds familiar, it probably should, and the parallels with the pre-crisis housing market don’t end there. The most predatory and cynical subprime lending has its analogue in for-profit colleges. Inequalities in US primary and secondary education previously meant that a large slice of the working class never got a chance to take on the large debts associated with four-year degree programs. For-profits like The University of Phoenix or Kaplan are the market’s answer to this opportunity.

While the debt numbers for four-year programs look risky, for-profit two-year schools have apocalyptic figures: 96 percent of their students take on debt and within fifteen years 40 percent are in default. A Government Accountability Office sting operation in which agents posed as applicants found all fifteen approached institutions engaged in deceptive practices and four in straight-up fraud. For-profits were found to have paid their admissions officers on commission, falsely claimed accreditation, underrepresented costs, and encouraged applicants to lie on federal financial aid forms. Far from the bargain they portray themselves to be on daytime television, for-profit degree programs were found to be more expensive than the nonprofit alternatives nearly every time. These degrees are a tough sell, but for-profits sell tough. They spend an unseemly amount of money on advertising, a fact that probably hasn’t escaped the reader’s notice.

But despite the attention the for-profit sector has attracted (including congressional hearings), as in the housing crisis it’s hard to see where the bad apples stop and the barrel begins. For-profits have quickly tied themselves to traditional powers in education, politics, and media. Just a few examples: Richard C. Blum, University of California regent (and husband of California Sen. Dianne Feinstein), is also through his investment firm the majority stakeholder in two of the largest for-profit colleges. The Washington Post Co. owns Kaplan Higher Education, forcing the company’s flagship paper to print a steady stream of embarrassing parenthetical disclosures in articles on the subject of for-profits. Industry leader University of Phoenix has even developed an extensive partnership with GOOD magazine, sponsoring an education editor. Thanks to these connections, billions more in advertising, and nearly $9 million in combined lobbying and campaign contributions in 2010 alone, for-profits have become the fastest growing sector in American higher education.

If the comparative model is valid, then the lessons of the housing crash nag: What happens when the kids can’t pay? The federal government only uses data on students who default within the first two years of repayment, but its numbers have the default rate increasing every year since 2005. Analyst accounts have only 40 percent of the total outstanding debt in active repayment, the majority being either in deferment or default. Next year, the Department of Education will calculate default rates based on numbers three years after the beginning of repayment rather than two. The projected results are staggering: recorded defaults for the class of 2008 will nearly double, from 7 to 13.8 percent. With fewer and fewer students having the income necessary to pay back loans (except by taking on more consumer debt), a massive default looks closer to inevitable.

Unlike during the housing crisis, the government’s response to a national wave of defaults that could pop the higher-ed bubble is already written into law. In the event of foreclosure on a government-backed loan, the holder submits a request to what’s called a state guaranty agency, which then submits a claim to the feds. The federal disbursement rate is tied to the guaranty agency’s fiscal year default rate: for loans issued after October 1998, if the rate exceeds 5 percent, the disbursement drops to 85 percent of principal and interest accrued; if the rate exceeds 9 percent, the disbursement falls to 75 percent. But the guaranty agency rates are computed in such a way that they do not reflect the rate of default as students experience it; of all the guaranty agencies applying for federal reimbursement last year, none hit the 5 percent trigger rate.

With all of these protections in place, SLABS are a better investment than most housing-backed securities ever were. The advantage of a preemptive bailout is that it can make itself unnecessary: if investors know they’re insulated from risk, there’s less reason for them to get skittish if the securities dip, and a much lower chance of a speculative collapse. The worst-case scenario seems to involve the federal government paying for students to go to college, and aside from the enrichment of the parasitic private lenders and speculators, this might not look too bad if you believe in big government, free education, or even Keynesian fiscal stimulus. But until now, we have only examined one side of the exchange. When students agree to take out a loan, the fairness of the deal is premised on the value for the student of their borrowed dollars. If an 18-year-old takes out $200,000 in loans, he or she better be not only getting the full value, but investing it well too.

Higher education seems an unlikely site for this kind of speculative bubble. While housing prices are based on what competing buyers are willing to pay, postsecondary education’s price is supposedly linked to its costs (with the exception of the for-profits). But the rapid growth in tuition is mystifying in value terms; no one could argue convincingly the quality of instruction or the market value of a degree has increased ten-fold in the past four decades (though this hasn’t stopped some from trying). So why would universities raise tuition so high so quickly? “Because they can” answers this question for home-sellers out to get the biggest return on their investments, or for-profits out to grab as much Pell Grant money as possible, but it seems an awfully cynical answer when it comes to nonprofit education.

First, where the money hasn’t gone: instruction. As Marc Bousquet, a leading researcher into the changing structures of higher education, wrote in How The University Works (2008):

If you’re enrolled in four college classes right now, you have a pretty good chance that one of the four will be taught by someone who has earned a doctorate and whose teaching, scholarship, and service to the profession has undergone the intensive peer scrutiny associated with the tenure system. In your other three classes, however, you are likely to be taught by someone who has started a degree but not finished it; was hired by a manager, not professional peers; may never publish in the field she is teaching; got into the pool of persons being considered for the job because she was willing to work for wages around the official poverty line (often under the delusion that she could ‘work her way into’ a tenurable position); and does not plan to be working at your institution three years from now.

This is not an improvement; fewer than forty years ago, when the explosive growth in tuition began, these proportions were reversed. Highly represented among the new precarious teachers are graduate students; with so much available debt, universities can force graduate student workers to scrape by on sub-minimum-wage, making them a great source of cheap instructional labor. Fewer tenure-track jobs mean that recent PhDs, overwhelmed with debt, have no choice but to accept insecure adjunct positions with wages kept down by the new crop of graduate student-workers. Rather than producing a better-trained, more professional teaching corps, increased tuition and debt have enabled the opposite.

If overfed teachers aren’t the causes or beneficiaries of increased tuition (as they’ve been depicted of late), then perhaps it’s worth looking up the food chain. As faculty jobs have become increasingly contingent and precarious, administration has become anything but. Formerly, administrators were more or less teachers with added responsibilities; nowadays, they function more like standard corporate managers—and they’re paid like them too. Once a few entrepreneurial schools made this switch, market pressures compelled the rest to follow the high-revenue model, which leads directly to high salaries for in-demand administrators. Even at nonprofit schools, top-level administrators and financial managers pull down six- and seven-figure salaries, more on par with their industry counterparts than with their fellow faculty members. And while the proportion of tenure-track teaching faculty has dwindled, the number of managers has skyrocketed in both relative and absolute terms. If current trends continue, the Department of Education estimates that by 2014 there will be more administrators than instructors at American four-year nonprofit colleges. A bigger administration also consumes a larger portion of available funds, so it’s unsurprising that budget shares for instruction and student services have dipped over the past fifteen years.

When you hire corporate managers, you get managed like a corporation, and the race for tuition dollars and grants from government and private partnerships has become the driving objective of the contemporary university administration. The goal for large state universities and elite private colleges alike has ceased to be (if it ever was) building well-educated citizens; now they hardly even bother to prepare students to assume their places among the ruling class. Instead we have, in Bousquet’s words, “the entrepreneurial urges, vanity, and hobbyhorses of administrators: Digitize the curriculum! Build the best pool/golf course/stadium in the state! Bring more souls to God! Win the all-conference championship!” These expensive projects are all part of another cycle: corporate universities must be competitive in recruiting students who may become rich alumni, so they have to spend on attractive extras, which means they need more revenue, so they need more students paying higher tuition. For-profits aren’t the only ones consumed with selling product. And if a humanities program can’t demonstrate its economic utility to its institution (which can’t afford to haul “dead weight”) and students (who understand the need for marketable degrees), then it faces cuts, the neoliberal management technique par excellence. Students apparently have received the message loud and clear, as business has quickly become the nation’s most popular major.

When President Obama spoke in the State of the Union of the need to send more Americans to college, it was in the context of economic competition with China, phrased as if we ought to produce graduates like steel. As the near-ubiquitous unpaid internship for credit (in which students pay tuition in order to work for free) replaces class time, the bourgeois trade school supplants the academy. Parents understandably worried about their children make sure they never forget about the importance of an attractive résumé. It was easier for students to believe a college education was priceless when it wasn’t bought and sold from every angle.

If tuition has increased astronomically and the portion of money spent on instruction and student services has fallen, if the (at very least comparative) market value of a degree has dipped and most students can no longer afford to enjoy college as a period of intellectual adventure, then at least one more thing is clear: higher education, for-profit or not, has increasingly become a scam.

We know the consequences of default for lenders, investors, and their backers at the Treasury, but what of the defaulters? Homeowners who found themselves with negative equity (owing more on their houses than the houses were worth) could always walk away. Students aren’t as lucky: graduates can’t ditch their degrees, even if they borrowed more money than their accredited labor power can command on the market. Americans overwhelmed with normal consumer debt (like credit card debt) have the option of bankruptcy, and although it’s an arduous and credit-score-killing process, not having ready access to thousands in pre-approved cash is not always such a bad thing. But students don’t have that option either. Before 2005, students could use bankruptcy to escape education loans that weren’t provided directly by the federal government, but the facetiously named “Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act” extended non-dischargeability to all education loans, even credit cards used to pay school bills.

Today, student debt is an exceptionally punishing kind to have. Not only is it inescapable through bankruptcy, but student loans have no expiration date and collectors can garnish wages, social security payments, and even unemployment benefits. When a borrower defaults and the guaranty agency collects from the federal government, the agency gets a cut of whatever it’s able to recover from then on (even though they have already been compensated for the losses), giving agencies a financial incentive to dog former students to the grave.

When the housing bubble collapsed, the results (relatively good for most investors, bad for the government, worse for homeowners) were predictable but not foreordained. With the student-loan bubble, the resolution is much the same, and it’s decided in advance.

In addition to the billions colleges have spent on advertising, sports programs, campus aesthetics, and marketable luxuries, they’ve benefited from a public discourse that depicts higher education as an unmitigated social good. Since the Baby Boomers gave birth, the college degree has seemed a panacea for social ills, a metaphor for a special kind of deserved success. We still tell fairy tales about escapes from the ghetto to the classroom or the short path from graduation to lifelong satisfaction, not to mention America’s collective college success story: The G.I. Bill. But these narratives are not inspiring true-life models, they’re advertising copy, and they come complete with loan forms.

Image: Plans for a new athletic center at Ithaca College. From msidesign.com.

The 'Thing' Economy and the 'Care' Economy | | AlterNet

2011-11-21T21:46:00.000-06:00

Economics and caring are rarely seen together though it's completely sensible that they should be. In this 2003 piece, Fred Block maintains that "What we need are new policies that can reintegrate these two warring economies into one unified structure that is efficient in producing quality things and quality care. This requires abandoning the foolish notion that whatever is good for General Motors or General Dynamics is good for the whole society." This undercuts the neoliberal assumption that Americans can use the free-market to arrive at solutions for social problems (i.e., the problem of inadequate care) since the thing economy is what has significantly contributed to the crisis of care. This piece gives us language for challenging our business-like, high-stakes accountability systems from a perspective of care. -Angela

AlterNet
The 'Thing' Economy and the 'Care' Economy
By Fred Block, AlterNet
Posted on November 10, 2003, Printed on November 21, 2011

http://www.alternet.org/story/17146/the_%27thing%27_economy_and_the_%27care%27_economy

The newest conventional wisdom insists that voters are angry because the economy is bad. However, through the last 30 years of ups and downs in the unemployment rate, there really haven't been any periods of great economic satisfaction. Sure, a few years ago, we had the great internet bubble when both computer geeks and financial types got rich quickly, but most families still struggled with too little money, too little time and too much debt. Of course, rising unemployment and cutbacks in government spending make everything worse, but it has been a long time since people were optimistic that their children would enjoy greater financial security than they had.

The problem with current efforts to recycle the Clinton-era slogan, "It's the economy, stupid," is that we really have two different economies. The first is the one that economists always talk about; we can call it the "thing economy" that produces computers, petroleum, autos and missiles. The thing economy is the envy of the world since we have successfully harnessed science and technology to make marvelous machines with greater and greater efficiency.

The second economy is the "care economy" in which people take care of each other and of the natural environment. The care economy includes child raising, childcare, care for elderly relatives, education, health, pensions for the elderly, the criminal justice system, religion and the arts, and all of our expenditures to protect the environment.

To be sure, these two economies are interdependent and interconnected. Without people who are educated, healthy, and sane, we couldn't produce all those marvelous things. And if the thing economy were not efficient, we wouldn't be able to feed and clothe all of the people who are working in the care economy. And, of course, our official economic accounts treat these two economies as though they are one; they do not even attempt to measure their relative size.

If they did, the results would be surprising. The care economy is huge. It is well known that our statistics on Gross Domestic Product completely exclude the unpaid labor that both men and women do in the home-meals, laundry, care for children, and home and yard maintenance. Estimates suggest that the value of this activity could add close to another 50 percent to total GDP, especially if one also includes all the hours spent in volunteer activity and community endeavors. If one adds to this the 13 percent of GDP that we spend each year on medical care, the 6-7 percent of GDP that we spend on every form of education and training, the 7-8 percent that we spend on pensions for the elderly, as well as the billions that we spend on the criminal justice system, funding the arts and religious institutions, and protecting the environment, it seems clear that both in dollar value and in cumulative hours, the care economy is at least as large as the thing economy.

But here is the problem. The strategies that we have been following to increase efficiency in the thing economy often do not work to make the care economy work better. Even worse, there are several ways in which the growth and development of the thing economy actually undermine the care economy. And undermining the care economy means that we end up getting lower quality education and health care for each dollar we spend. It also means a growing "care deficit": Millions of people are not getting either the care they need or are getting caught in a fierce time bind as they juggle to balance work responsibilities and care responsibilities. It is quite possible that this systematic undermining of the care economy is what is making people irritable and angry -- both in "good" economic times and in "bad."

The obvious way in which the development of the thing economy undercuts the care economy is through the misorganization of time. Several generations ago, we had a simple way of coordinating the two economies. Men worked in the thing economy and women worked -- usually for no or little compensation -- in the care economy. This system "worked" to produce high quality care, but at an enormous cost -- women's opportunities were severely restricted. Hence, this system fell apart as women pressed for equality and the thing economy pulled millions of women into both part-time and full-time jobs. Now, we have the social ideal that all adults should be in the paid labor force until retirement age. Average annual hours of paid work by women have risen dramatically, while those for men have barely changed. The consequence is that millions of families are incredibly harried and are constantly forced to shortchange their care responsibilities.

These intense time pressures have huge costs. The continuing stress of balancing work and family takes a huge toll on our mental and physical health and is linked to rising rates of substance abuse. Moreover, the strains on family life make it harder to keep relationships together. And then, rising divorce rates and ever smaller household units lead to even further time pressures as the vicious cycle intensifies.

All this produces the second undercutting dynamic -- unproductive cost cutting. We have all become more dependent on paid workers to produce some of the care that we need for ourselves and other family members. But when the principles of efficiency from the thing economy are applied to this part of the care economy, the results are often disastrous. In the thing economy, we can keep labor costs down and press workers for more output without sacrificing quality by using increasingly sophisticated technologies. When we do this in the care economy, we get diminishing quality of care. For example, badly paid and badly trained childcare workers or nursing home workers usually produce poor quality care because technology is largely irrelevant. And the resulting institutional failures generate other kinds of costs, from toddlers who do not get the kind of stimulus they need, to the elderly who suffer medical complications because of abuse and neglect. And, of course, worrying about the poor quality of institutional care becomes another huge source of stress.

The last undercutting dynamic can be called "unproductive spillovers." It is most obvious in our system for providing health care (and also evident in many of our environmental problems). While our scientists and physicians have made some extraordinary advances, it is apparent that transferring the for-profit model of the thing economy into the health sector has produced a variety of negative consequences. We have more than 40 million people who lack health insurance and many others whose access to health care is highly uncertain. We also know that the multiple levels of administration and bureaucracy add enormous inefficiencies and drain resources that could be used to provide more and better patient care. Finally, the uncoordinated and often chaotic system for delivering health care both undermines the quality of care and has become another huge time drain for families. Hundreds of thousands of patients are forced to become experts on their own diseases and on the health care system just to find their way to quality care.

The only way these serious problems of the care economy currently enter our political debates is through the issue of whether private or public provision of services is preferable. But privatization is not the solution; in health care and nursing homes, it is part of the problem. Yet it is also obvious that public provision is not a panacea; there are plenty of examples of poor quality public care.

The real problem is that we have imagined that if we get the thing economy organized properly, then the care economy will take "care" of itself. But this is an illusion; the logics of the thing economy are systematically undermining the effectiveness of the care economy.

What we need are new policies that can reintegrate these two warring economies into one unified structure that is efficient in producing quality things and quality care. This requires abandoning the foolish notion that whatever is good for General Motors or General Dynamics is good for the whole society. The string of recent corporate scandals should be a sufficient reminder that when markets are left on their own, small groups of insiders can become enormously rich at everyone else's expense. Who benefits, for example, from the extraordinary success of one giant retail chain that is famous for its low wages and miserly employee health care plan? Certainly not the communities that are forced to subsidize this corporation by providing health care to the firm's large number of uninsured employees. Certainly not the competitors who are being forced into bankruptcy because they are more decent towards their employees. It is both inefficient and immoral for society to give corporations free reign to engage in these destructive forms of cost shifting.

And, in fact, we have abundant evidence that firms can be highly profitable while providing their employees with decent wages and access to quality care. Many of our most dynamic and innovative firms have, in fact, created caring communities for their employees -- attending to the difficulties of balancing work and family, supporting the ongoing development of employee skills, and facilitating improvements in employee health behavior. These policies could and should be pursued more generally since a unified economy would benefit from the enhanced productivity of well-cared-for employees.

But skeptics will immediately note that we live in an era of tight budgets -- can we really afford to create this unified economy? Yes, and in fact, it is actually both realistic and urgent because effective care foregone in the short term means higher costs in the long term. When we fail at early detection with physical and mental illnesses, we obligate ourselves to pay much larger costs down the road. When our schools fail large numbers of young people, we end up paying down the road to expand our prison system. Economizing on these types of care is the purest instance of false economy; it is penny wise, pound foolish.

We already spend so much on the care economy that we cannot afford to keep making the same mistakes. Think, for example, of the health care dollars that we spend each year to respond to work-related stress. Wouldn't it make more sense to try to save a large portion of those outlays by taking steps to reduce the amount of job-related stress? Or think of the not-so-hidden epidemic of addiction to prescription drugs; wouldn't it be better to create a more caring and less stressful society where fewer people were tempted to "solve" their problems through the magic of chemistry?

What is involved in creating this unified economy? A full road map is not possible here, but we can identify three basic principles that should guide the process of unification. All of these principles depend, in turn, on the recognition that the regulation of market activity is absolutely indispensable if we are to create a humane and effective economy. This fundamental truth has been obscured by thirty years of celebratory rhetoric about the magic of free markets and the extraordinary gains that come from the individual pursuit of self-interest. But the lesson of our most recent series of corporate scandals is that the pursuit of self-interest quickly degenerates into criminality in the absence of effective systems of regulation. If we are to remain a civilized society, we have to abandon the fashionable rhetoric of "deregulation" and recognize that government regulators -- whether they are meat inspectors, bank auditors, enforcers of labor standards, or even tax collectors -- are actually quiet heroes defending our society from the insidious threat of runaway greed.

Hence, the first principle emphasizes the importance of regulations that protect and strengthen the care economy. We have constructed such regulations on occasion -- most recently when Congress passed the Family and Medical Leave Act -- but each effort encounters fierce resistance from those who claim that it is both unfair and economically irrational to impose any new costs on private businesses. But it is also wrong that businesses be allowed to impose costs on their employees that undermine the care economy as, for example, when employees are unable to honor their commitments to children and aging parents. As with any regulations, the task is to find the proper balance of these conflicting interests, but to do this, we have to abandon the fantasy that the care economy can survive without being nurtured and supported. For example, we desperately need rules that would keep large firms from expanding their market share by pushing labor costs and benefits to the lowest levels possible.

The second principle centers on the urgent need to reorganize our society's way of managing time. Both the thing economy and the care economy depend on human beings who are constrained by the scarcity of time. Whatever startling gains have been made in productivity, we haven't extended the 24-hour-day by a single second. And new technologies like the cell phone and e-mail are increasingly eliminating the divide between work time and private time. It is hardly controversial that the resulting time squeeze has become a pervasive source of misery and stress in our society. But despite many creative ideas for reconstructing our time economy, we have made very little progress because of a continuing reluctance to impose any new costs on employers. And yet this is extremely shortsighted since employees who were less stressed by problems of time management would certainly be more productive.

Finally, we have to change our way of thinking about the true requirements for quality care. The fashion for some time has been to think that health and education, for example, are just businesses and that tough systems of cost accounting and the use of performance indicators such as the number of patients treated or student test scores will get us the results we want. But the triumph of this bean-counting approach has resulted instead in rushed medical appointments where patients are allowed to discuss only one concern per visit and classrooms where teachers have no time to cultivate curiosity and love of learning because they must teach to the next round of standardized tests. The techniques of the thing economy simply don't work for producing quality health care and education. We have to return to the individual -- the patient or the student -- and figure out ways that each client, working in close cooperation with trained professionals, other clients, and volunteers, can become healthier and wiser.

Much more work has to be done to translate these principles into concrete policy proposals that could be debated in the political arena. And even more effort will be required to overcome the resistance to meaningful reform. But there is great leverage that comes from recognizing the problem of the divided economy and creating a positive vision of a unified economy in which the creation of quality care and the making of things are no longer in conflict. The result would be a moral economy that could reconcile our desire to prosper with our deepest moral and spiritual impulses.

Fred Block teaches economic sociology at the University of California at Davis. He is also a senior fellow with the Rockridge Institute.

© 2011 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/17146/
[w2]

Study challenges IDEA charters' success claims

2011-11-20T15:40:00.001-06:00

To get a complete picture of the picture that is getting portrayed here, check out Ed Fuller's commentary on his blog: http://fullerlook.wordpress.com/2011/11/15/are-idea-charter-schools-a-good-idea-for-austin/

Important comment that he makes:

Regardless, it does not matter what the intentions of IDEA are. The fact remains that IDEA systematically enrolls students who are more advantaged than students remaining in the local public schools. This directly CONTRADICTS the claim by IDEA that they educate “underserved” students. In fact, IDEA has STILL NOT communicated how they define “underserved” students.

Critics need to consider that he uses the state's own data [2010 Academic Excellence Indicator System (AEIS)] to draw comparisons on the extent to which IDEA students are as "socioeconomically disadvantaged" as proponents say that they are.

Finally, in my view, there are serious questions and issues of governance. It is simply problematic to move toward any system that eliminates those structures about which parents have a vote. In fact, it is anti-democratic.

-Angela

Study challenges IDEA charters' success claims
By Melissa B. Taboada and Laura Heinauer

AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF

Updated: 10:47 p.m. Tuesday, Nov. 15, 2011

Published: 10:32 p.m. Tuesday, Nov. 15, 2011

IDEA Public Schools, which has basked in accolades for its highly ranked schools and has set its sights on revamping and running some of the Austin school district's most academically troubled campuses, might have an overrated reputation for teaching challenging populations, new research has found.

A study by a Pennsylvania State University researcher shows that the charter operator, which has 10 campuses in Texas, enrolls fewer English language learners and few students who are economically disadvantaged and need special education services. In contrast to IDEA's claims that all of its graduates enroll in college, the study found that 35 percent of IDEA ninth-graders withdraw by 11th grade.

Tom Torkelson, founder of IDEA, said the report has not been peer-reviewed and said the author — former University of Texas professor Ed Fuller — has a history of opposing charter schools. Torkelson said state data show 91.8 percent of IDEA's class of 2009 completed high school in four years.

Austin district Superintendent Meria Carstarphen, who has argued that the proposed partnership would boost academic offerings in East Austin, said Tuesday that Fuller's study isn't what she'd expect from professional scientific research. "He made no pretense about his purpose, and it wasn't to be objective," she said.

Fuller's study, "Is IDEA a good idea for Austin ISD?", was given exclusively to the American-Statesman on Tuesday by education labor groups that question the planned partnership with the charter group, which would use its own staff to teach and manage two or three East Austin campuses.

Fuller, now an associate professor and executive director of the Center for Education Evaluation and Policy Analysis at Penn State, has researched the Austin district in the past. The study is part of a broader body of research on high-performing charter schools in Texas and was funded by the Texas Business and Education Coalition and the Texas American Federation of Teachers, of which Education Austin is an affiliate.

The analysis given to the Statesman on Tuesday focuses on the South Texas charter school from the 2007-08 to the 2010-11 school year. Fuller's study concludes that IDEA's success should be questioned because the charter:

• Starts with a student body that includes lower percentages of students who are economically disadvantaged, are enrolled in bilingual education or have other special needs than the enrollment of surrounding school districts.

• Sends only 65 percent of its students to college. (His report had no comparable figure for other districts.) Although all of IDEA graduates go on to college, more than a third of students who are enrolled in ninth grade leave the charter school by 11th grade. Fuller considered students who left for any reason, arguing that state completion rates cited by Torkelson don't consider students who leave for reasons such as a change to home schooling or private school.

• Outperforms area high schools because the charter sheds lower-performing students , increasing "scores at the school and district levels even if the remaining students made no increase in achievement," the report said.

"No matter how you measure it, they actually have fewer underserved students than the schools that are in the same market that they serve," Fuller said Tuesday.

Fuller also found that fifth-grade students are less likely to enroll in IDEA if they are poor. "If they're going to enroll in East Austin, that's who you need to serve is the poor kids," he said. Fuller said his concern is that the charter is "just going to segregate by ability and further concentrate kids in doomed schools."

Torkelson said IDEA analyses show that students admitted to IDEA schools didn't pass the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills at higher rates than students attending other area public schools. About 19 percent of students enrolling at IDEA in sixth through 10th grades previously failed reading and math exams in 2011; the average for the region was closer to 15 percent, Torkelson said.

Torkelson said he agrees with one point in Fuller's report: "that IDEA is higher performing and that our students achieve amazing results."

"We believe that our results are a product of hard work and great teaching," Torkelson said. "The report implies, without sufficient evidence, that the only explanation for our results is factors outside the control of the school."

Torkelson said Fuller's claims that the charter skims the best kids from area districts is unfounded. Torkelson said representatives go door to door in low-income neighborhoods to inform students about the school, then hold an admission lottery.

Finally, fewer IDEA students are in special education because of successful early intervention by IDEA educators, Torkelson said.

Josie Duckett, a spokeswoman with the Texas Charter Schools Association, criticized Fuller's work, saying he leaves out individual academic growth measures that "would go a long way toward telling the true story about how well these schools are preparing kids."

"If attrition is something we need to look at, then we will — and in fact we already do plan to take a deeper dive in terms of our own data," Duckett said. "Ultimately, presenting data like this in a biased fashion isn't helpful," she said.

Trustee Sam Guzman, who represents neighborhoods IDEA would focus on, said he thinks Fuller's study unfairly attacks the charter operator. "I don't have a problem with people raising questions about IDEA or anything other option or program that we explore, but I would hope that people would be fair and open-minded in doing so," Guzman said.

Officials with Education Austin, which represents about 4,000 district workers, said they want to be sure any partnership focuses on better education for children.

"The (district's) motivation is the ability to appear innovative," said Ken Zarifis, the group's co-president.

Education Austin, which asked its parent labor group to share Fuller's findings, also has been putting together a proposal to run a charter school within the district.

mtaboada@statesman.com; 445-3620

lheinauer@statesman.com; 445-3694

Find this article at:

http://www.statesman.com/news/education/study-challenges-idea-charters-success-claims-1971526.html

Parents hear Austin school district proposal for all-girls, all-boys middle schools

2011-11-20T12:21:00.000-06:00

By Ciara O'Rourke | AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Saturday, Nov. 19, 2011

Parents weighed in Saturday morning on an Austin school district proposal to open two single-gender schools in their attendance zones, a move administrators believe could help improve some students' academic performance.

The district's $11.1 million proposal calls for putting the children at Pearce and Garcia middle schools in East Austin.

Boys would attend one school, and girls would attend the other, though the preliminary plans have not specified which campus would hold which school. The schools would serve 650 boys and 650 girls in grades six through eight. The proposal is part of a larger effort to improve the district's facilities.

Debra Clarke, an art teacher at Sims Elementary School who attended Saturday's community forum, said she supports the proposal in part because it helps girls become stronger and more independent without boys to distract them.

"It gives you that confidence," said Clarke, who attended Texas Woman's University.

Paula Rogers, who has two students at Sims Elementary School, urged administrators to ensure that children would not just have teachers of the same gender, but who also shared the same racial background. Rogers said she isn't necessarily in favor of single-gender schools, but she said she's willing to try it because she thinks the district has failed in teaching black children.

Trustees plan to vote on the proposals in December, though Superintendent Meria Carstarphen said it could be as late as 2013-14 before the single-gender schools open if they approve the plan.

"It depends on how ready we feel," she said.

Trustee Cheryl Bradley, who represents the area that includes the schools, said, "We're more concerned with doing it right than how fast we do it."

Other details, such as whether and when students from other attendance zones would be able to attend the schools, are also unknown.

Carstarphen said the district would start with students in the attendance area and then could expand to other zones, potentially using a lottery system to admit students.

The district's current single-gender school — the Ann Richards School for Young Women Leaders — opened in 2007 and takes applications from students from across the district.

In June, the Galveston-based Moody Foundation announced that it is giving the Austin district $4.6 million for the creation of a boys school that could open in 2013-14.

The Ann Richards school has earned the state's highest academic rating, but a University of Texas researcher challenged the school's success in a paper published in the journal Science in September.

In "The Pseudoscience of Single-Sex Schooling," co-author Rebecca Bigler, a University of Texas psychology and women's and gender studies professor, argued that single-sex schools don't improve student performance any more than coeducational schools. Bigler said that high test scores were the result of the selective admissions policy and that single-sex education was not a wise investment of taxes.

District officials have countered that there also is a significant body of research that supports single-sex education. Carstarphen said that not all single-gender designs work. The district has pulled together best practices from a number of schools, she said, including Ann Richards.

Bradley, who initially presented the idea of introducing single-gender schools in the area to Carstarphen, called the proposal an "opportunity to help with the distractions that can plague some schools."

Visiting a South Austin middle school last summer where some summer school classes were divided by gender, Bradley said she saw a calmer, more attentive classroom than the classes that were coed.

Some parents at the forum asked why teachers don't already have the higher expectations that Carstarphen said she'd like to create at the proposed single-gender schools. Keisha Jones, who has two students in the district, said that if students had the right support from teachers and administrators, they could be successful regardless of the gender of the student body.

"Fixing the system takes a lot longer than helping this vertical team," Carstarphen said, referring to the elementary, middle and high schools in the LBJ and Reagan high school zones. "In the meantime, we can do a much better job at Garcia and Pearce."

corourke@statesman.com;

512-392-8750

Texas Teachers Say Classes Growing, Layoffs Widespread

2011-11-17T14:51:00.000-06:00

Check out the findings from Texas AFT's study on "Destructive Budget Cuts Hitting Students and Teachers Hard"

-Patricia

by Morgan Smith | Texas Tribune
November 17, 2011

Since the Legislature's intention to cut $5.4 billion from public education became a reality, one question has dominated the conversation: just how bad will it be?

Not everyone comes up with the same answer. But the Texas American Federation of Teachers, the state branch of the nationwide teachers' association, has released the results of a web survey that reports extensive teacher layoffs, increasing class sizes and deteriorating work environments.

Here's a quick run through their results, which included 3,549 respondents, about 82 percent of whom identified as educators. (And remember, this is a web survey, not a scientific poll.)

· 92 percent said their district had eliminated positions — most reported between 10 to 50.

· 85 percent said the positions eliminated included teachers.
· 79 percent reported cuts to student programs including pre-K, special education, electives, and athletics.

· Tutoring was the program respondents most frequently reported as cut

· 87 percent said that class sizes had increased at both the elementary and secondary level.

The survey also asked respondents about their schools' climate for students, teachers, and staff — and how that compared to the year before. 81 percent said it was "worse" or "much worse," and 72 percent described it as "stressful and taxing."

The survey confirms the impact that the budget is having an impact on classroom instruction, Texas AFT president Linda Bridges said, adding that its results show that Gov. Rick Perry has been "spinning a tale" about balancing the budget without harming public education. She said that her organization planned a follow up survey in the spring, and noted that because of the way school districts have structured their budgets, most of the worst cuts are still to come.

As the new school year progresses, expect many more attempts at quantifying the effects of the budget cuts in public education.

Two DREAMers ponder their futures

2011-11-13T12:23:00.001-06:00

Loren Campos and Juana Garcia were brought to the U.S. by their parents. They have educations, but they can't work in the U.S.

By Dave Harmon | AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Saturday, Nov. 12, 2011

Loren Campos graduated from the University of Texas in May with a degree in civil engineering. He said he waited until the last minute to buy his cap and gown and class ring.

"Graduation was the last thing that I wanted to think about," he said. "That was a difficult thing to go through."

It's a familiar sentiment among undocumented students. Graduation means confronting the fact that they have earned college degrees that they can't use in the United States.

For now, the 22-year-old Campos is sharing an apartment in Northeast Austin with two friends and selling cosmetics from out of his apartment. He's also active in the University Leadership Initiative, a group for undocumented students.

"I cannot work with my degree," he said. "I cannot get a driver's license."

He says he's watched other undocumented friends graduate from college, "and a lot of them go back to working low-wage jobs. ... It's just a waste of talent. It doesn't make sense to be investing in the education of students without having some sort of return on that investment."

The Texas Dream Act requires students to file paperwork to become legal residents. Campos did that in 2003, when he was 14. His sister, a U.S. citizen, is sponsoring him, and he figures he'll have to wait another seven years before his case is reviewed. That's because the number of people trying to legally immigrate with help from family members who are U.S. citizens dwarfs the limited number of visas issued each year.

And the waiting time depends on a complicated formula based on the immigrant's country of origin and their relationship to the person sponsoring them. According to the U.S. State Department website, Mexican citizens who are being sponsored by siblings and applied for visas in 1996 are just now eligible to get visas.

Campos said his mother brought him to Texas when he was 11 and his sister was 16. They entered the country with tourist visas and overstayed them. He said he begged his mother to take him back to Mexico within a few weeks of arriving in Houston. His mother refused.

He remembers being teased for carrying around a Bible-size Spanish-English dictionary in school while he was in English as a second language classes. By eighth grade, his English was good enough that he was put in regular classes. He applied to the engineering magnet program at Booker T. Washington High School — "just trying to take advantage of the opportunities that were given to me," he said — and quickly jumped into extracurricular activities like the robotics club, the math club and the soccer team.

To earn money, he worked as a baggage handler for a charter bus company that catered to Mexicans, and he worked at restaurants as a waiter, busboy and dishwasher.

He's the only member of his immediate family who is still undocumented — his two sisters married U.S. citizens and became permanent residents, followed by his mother, who was sponsored by one of his sisters. He said his mother is studying for the test to become a U.S. citizen.

He'd like to stay in the United States and design buildings that can withstand earthquakes. He's heard stories of the 1985 Mexico City earthquake from family and friends, and the earthquake in Haiti "inspired me to do something about it and contribute somehow."

"I grew up with the idea that America was the land of opportunity," he said. "I've basically grown up in this country; I don't know another country."

Juana Garcia was born in a village called Juan Aldama, in the state of Zacatecas in Central Mexico — a place she can't find on a map.

"I don't know the geography of Mexico, actually," she said.

She was a year old when her parents brought her to the United States. Now 21, she has no memories of Mexico.

Her father started coming to the United States when he was a teenager, working in Dallas restaurants. When she was born, her father didn't want to be separated from his first child and persuaded her mother to join him in the U.S.

They settled in Chicago, where all of her mother's family had migrated, then moved to Arlington when Garcia was 12. At each stop, her parents found work — her father operated forklifts in a warehouse and cooked in a hotel restaurant, while her mother cleaned hotels and malls and now works at a dry cleaner.

Garcia, who qualified for free and reduced school lunches, did well in school, taking Advanced Placement courses and singing in the choir. Growing up, she hid the fact that she was undocumented from friends, classmates and teachers — until her junior year of high school, when she was forced to confide in someone.

The choir had received a coveted invitation to sing at the American Choral Directors Association conference in Miami, all expenses paid. Excitement about the trip built all year, she said, as the choir rehearsed for the performance. Then her parents said no. She didn't have a driver's license, and they were afraid she'd be detained at the airport.

She had to tell her choir teacher that she couldn't go — and she had to tell her why. "It was so hard for me, because I had never told anyone face to face," Garcia said. "I remember I cried a lot over it." She said her teacher was supportive, which gave her confidence to speak up when she got to college.

Garcia finished in the top 10 percent of her class, went to community college for two years, then transferred to UT last year. She joined University Leadership Initiative and now serves as its social committee chairwoman. She was part of a group that traveled by bus to Washington to tell their story to U.S. senators, urging them to pass a federal DREAM Act. She said "coming out" in such a public way was liberating.

"Being around so many people that have done it already gives you a sense of comfort," she said. "You feel better not having to hide something. You shouldn't have to hide, because it's not your fault."

At times, she said, she's resented her parents' decision to bring her to the United States. When her younger brother and cousins — who are U.S. citizens by birth — would go to Mexico to visit relatives every summer, she stayed home. When her high school friends were learning to drive, she was reminded that she can't get a driver's license. When her college friends began getting summer internships and doing semesters abroad, she swallowed her jealousy.

"I've had my moments," she said, sipping a drink in a West Campus Starbucks, "but I'm glad I'm here."

And now, with a year to go before she gets her degree in elementary education, she knows she won't become an elementary school teacher unless Congress passes the DREAM Act.

"It's a very depressing idea because it's getting really close," she said.

UT Faculty Productivity Gets High Marks in New Report

2011-11-13T11:51:00.003-06:00

Check out Musick's full report, "An analysis of faculty instructional and grant-based productivity at the University of Texas at Austin"

-Patricia

by Reeve Hamilton | Texas Tribune
November 13, 2011

Despite the arguments of critics in recent months, Marc Musick, the University of Texas at Austin’s College of Liberal Arts associate dean of student affairs, makes the case in a new faculty productivity report that his institution provides “an incredible return on investment for the state.”

Using data from the 2009-10 academic year made public by the University of Texas System this summer, Musick found that UT professors generated revenue of more than twice their compensation of $257 million in state funds for salary and benefits. By combining the amount of money paid by the state via a student enrollment-based formula and external funding for academic research, Musick concluded that the UT faculty generated about $558 million in total revenue for the university.

Musick’s report is the latest in a series of similar productivity studies that have been released over the course of a year marked by questions about the effectiveness of the state’s higher education system. The studies have come from a variety of sources using differing methodologies and reaching a wide range of conclusions, some of them strikingly negative. The latest release comes at a time when many of the key players in the state’s ongoing debate over higher education are poised to take the discussion on how to measure faculty productivity to a national level.

The topic became a hot-button issue in the spring, due in large part to a set of seven controversial proposals for higher education written by Austin businessman Jeff Sandefer in 2008 and promoted by Gov. Rick Perry and the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a conservative think tank of which Sandefer is a board member.

On Friday, Sandefer and others tied to the TPPF are participating in a higher education conference in Washington, D.C., put on by the Cato Institute, a prominent national conservative organization. According to information the institute posted online about the event, “One key question the conference will take on is how to assess the productivity of faculty members, including examining the groundbreaking — and highly controversial — efforts recently undertaken in the state of Texas."

An early December closed-door gathering in Indianapolis organized by UT President Bill Powers for the presidents and provosts of public universities in the Association of American Universities, an elite organization of research institutions, will also tackle the subject. “In particular, I would like to explore how we might foster richer deliberations about higher education productivity than we have seen recently in Texas and other states,” Powers wrote in his invitation.

While Musick’s new study demonstrates a high level of faculty productivity at the university, he acknowledged that it omits key elements of professors’ workload. “All it’s doing is measuring two things that the faculty do,” he said. “It’s measuring grants and its measuring teaching. But faculty do lots of different things. The data we have are extremely limited in what they can tell us.”

Still, Musick saw in the data opportunities to encourage more productivity. He recommends enhancing offerings for faculty mentorship, since the strongest-performing faculty tend to be more experienced. He said the number of students in some mid-size classes could be increased without sacrificing quality, freeing up resources for more of the smaller classes that students prefer. He also recommended that the university provide greater incentives for professors to pursue grants and more assistance with their submissions so that less of their time is spent on paperwork.

Most importantly, Musick said, faculty need to be evaluated based on accurate, comprehensive data that conveys their productivity over time as opposed to a single year.

“I completely agree with the idea of going out and getting data and analyzing it,” said Musick, who also released a report on university efficiency in September, “but it’s got to be helpful, it’s got to be thoughtful, its got to be done in the right way to make sure we are finding the truth and not just doing what’s easy to find quick answers.”

Undocumented students grateful to Perry for defending in-state tuition law

2011-11-13T11:49:00.000-06:00

I do believe in giving credit where credit is due, Governor Rick Perry. The most credit though goes to the students themselves. This is the group that has inherited the social justice agenda, passion, and acumen of the Mexican American Civil Rights struggle. I have said this for a long time. Even if painful, as this struggle frequently is, this is the most hopeful, exciting, and truly promising movimiento in our community. Many of these are my students and they are exceptional. United We Dream!

Angela

Undocumented students grateful to Perry for defending in-state tuition law
'DREAMers' at UT have formed a group that fights to keep Texas law intact and pushes for federal Dream Act
By Dave Harmon

AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF

Updated: 1:34 a.m. Sunday, Nov. 13, 2011

Published: 9:29 p.m. Saturday, Nov. 12, 2011

In a nondescript room on the University of Texas campus, about 20 students chattered and laughed before Daniel Olvera called the meeting to order.

One by one, they introduced themselves: the mechanical engineering major who's building a computer program that analyzes MRI images of the heart; the music major who has played his viola in Carnegie Hall; the student who got his engineering degree, then decided to follow his heart and enroll in the School of Social Work.

They are the children of hotel housekeepers, restaurant cooks and construction workers. Some of them already have bachelor's or master's degrees from UT. But they can't legally drive to a job interview, and they couldn't legally accept a job if it were offered.

They are the undocumented students who have become central figures in this year's Republican presidential debates. Brought into the United States as children, they have gone through Texas public schools (a 1982 U.S. Supreme Court ruling allows them to attend public schools from kindergarten to 12th grade for free) and taken advantage of a state law that lets them attend Texas colleges and universities and pay in-state tuition.

Olvera and the others in the group call themselves DREAMers, named for the 2001 law commonly referred to as the Texas Dream Act that qualifies them for in-state tuition — and for the Development Relief and Education for Alien Minors Act, the federal bill they hope will one day pass and allow them to legally live and work in the United States. More than 16,000 of them were attending community colleges and universities across the state last year — including 612 at UT — and many of them are flocking to campus groups that have formed a growing national network aimed at fighting for undocumented students.

Gov. Rick Perry's opponents have used the law to slam him, saying he's being soft on illegal immigration. They point to the fact that at UT, non-Texas residents pay about $22,700 per year more than in-state students, or about $91,000 over four years. Perry has defended his record on border security and immigration enforcement but caused a stir among conservatives in one debate when he said that anyone who disagreed with Texas' law was "heartless."

In a Sept. 22 debate in Florida, Perry defended the law by saying: "We need to be educating these children because they will become a drag on our society. This was a state issue, Texans voted on it, and I still support it greatly." Many in the crowd booed. His opponents pounced.

"Why should they be given preferential treatment as an illegal in this country?" asked Rick Santorum.

Mitt Romney said: "That kind of magnet draws people into this country to get that education. It makes no sense."

Perry's defense of the law has made him more popular among undocumented students, who have soured on President Barack Obama because they believe he's broken his promise to pursue immigration reform.

"I may disagree with Rick Perry on a lot of things, but I do want to thank him because he passed (the law) and he's gotten a lot of heat about it and he hasn't backed down," said Olvera, the 22-year-old president of the University Leadership Initiative, a campus group made up of current and former undocumented immigrants.

Qualifying for tuition

Former state Rep. Rick Noriega, who introduced the Texas Dream Act in the state Legislature in 2001, said the idea for the bill grew from a meeting he had with Rosendo Ticas, an undocumented Nicaraguan immigrant who was mowing lawns in Houston but wanted to go to college to become an airline mechanic. Ticas told Noriega he couldn't afford the higher tuition charged to international students.

Noriega, a Houston Democrat, said he asked the University of Houston to do an anonymous survey in his inner-city district to see how many others were in Ticas' situation, and the study found so many of them that Noriega decided to file what would become House Bill 1403.

Noriega said he remembers seeing undocumented students from around Texas descend on the Capitol to testify in favor of the bill at a committee hearing.

"The committee room was packed, and the committee didn't leave until way past midnight to hear every story from every one of these kids," said Noriega, who now heads Avance, a San Antonio nonprofit aimed at helping low-income families prepare their children for school. "And I can tell you there wasn't a dry eye in the committee room. They passed it out of the committee that night on a unanimous vote."

Noriega said the business community helped give the bill the push it needed to reach Perry's desk. Groups such as the Texas Association of Business and the Dallas Chamber of Commerce came out in support, he said, arguing that the bill would help create a better-educated workforce. Only four lawmakers out of 181 voted against it. Noriega said Ticas went to college and is now a mechanic for Continental Airlines. He also became a U.S. citizen, Noriega said.

To qualify for in-state tuition, students have to fill out an affidavit promising to apply to become legal residents as soon as they are able to. They also have to graduate from a Texas high school that they attended for at least three consecutive years before graduation. U.S. citizens, by comparison, can receive in-state tuition after living in Texas for one year.

For the fiscal year that ended Aug. 31, 2010, the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board counted 16,476 students who had filled out the affidavits — or about 1 percent of the total enrollment in Texas colleges and universities, said coordinating board spokesman Dominic Chavez. About 12,000 of them attended community college.

Being considered Texas residents by the education system also allows undocumented students to compete for Texas Grant money, the taxpayer-funded awards given to students who show financial need. The state gave out more than 68,000 Texas grants in fiscal year 2010 totaling $274 million; Chavez said 2,156 grants totaling $7.8 million went to undocumented students — about 3 percent of the money. "They're just like any Texas resident. Some get (the grants); some don't," he said.

Chavez said undocumented students paid about $33 million in tuition and fees in 2010. "In-state tuition is not a free ride," he said.

But the idea that undocumented students are taking coveted slots at public universities — and getting taxpayer-funded grants to pay for their schooling — angers people like Maria Martinez, executive director of the Immigration Reform Coalition of Texas.

Chavez said she has a daughter at Texas A&M University at Galveston who didn't qualify for Texas Grant money, and some of her daughter's friends are from out of state and are paying significantly more than undocumented students.

"I think that's a travesty, that we have someone who can get a job here, but we favor people who can't work here," Chavez said. "I just think it's backwards."

The bill passed in a different political environment. It came before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks brought more focus on securing the nation's borders and before the economic meltdown and subsequent recession. Since 2001, opponents have tried to overturn the in-state tuition law during every legislative session — and have failed each time.

Rep. Charles Perry, R-Lubbock , filed a bill to nullify in-state tuition earlier this year. The bill never got out of the House Education Committee, he said, explaining that lawmakers were more focused on the state budget crisis during the session. He said Republicans will file similar legislation when they return in 2013.

Perry, who isn't related to the governor, said that because the law doesn't give students the right to legally work after graduation, the state has "not made a good investment" by giving them a tuition break. He also sees it as a magnet for more illegal immigration.

"If we continue to provide things for noncitizens, ... there's a heck of an incentive to draw folks in," he said.

Rick Perry's defense of the law has drawn the ire of many conservatives, along with groups like the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Immigration Studies, which opposes illegal immigration.

Perry has called it a states' rights issue, but "when a policy induces illegal immigration, it becomes more than a states' rights issue," said Jon Feere, legal policy analyst at the center. "If Texas lays out the welcome mat for illegal immigrants, it affects the whole country.

"I just don't see why a student from Oklahoma should pay a higher tuition than a student from another country who happens to be in the country illegally," Feere said. "American citizens should come before illegal aliens."

Open about their status

Olvera was 11 when his mother brought him to Texas from Mexico, along with his brother and two sisters. He assimilated quickly in Houston public schools, going from English as a second language classes to regular classes to advanced placement classes. Now he's at UT, studying government and education and hoping to become a social studies teacher and work in underprivileged areas. Like his undocumented friends, Olvera can't get a driver's license and can't legally work to help pay for college. Scholarships and internships are mostly out of reach because of his immigration status.

Most of the UT DREAMers are open about their immigration status. When they speak in public, they often give their full names, followed by "I am undocumented and unafraid." They are politically sophisticated after years of lobbying state lawmakers at the Capitol and members of Congress in Washington. And like their peers, they are fluent in social media and using the Web to promote their cause.

The UT group has 30 to 40 active members, Olvera said. At one of their regular weekly meetings late last month, the 20 or so students and supporters of the group discussed the political ramifications of being used as an attack line by presidential candidates.

Julieta Garibay, the group's 31-year-old founder, warned the group that opponents of the law in the Legislature are likely to have the votes they need to reverse it in 2013.

But they won't let that happen without a struggle, she said.

"We're here for the long fight," Garibay told them. "We're here because we believe in this with all our heart."

Garibay said she was 12 when her mother brought her and her older sister to Austin from Mexico City, fleeing an abusive husband and the city's suffocating pollution. Garibay and her sister both graduated from Anderson High School. It was 1998, three years before the Texas Dream Act passed.

Garibay said she decided to return to Mexico to study nursing. During two years at the University of Guanajuato, she said, she was constantly criticized for being too outspoken, for dressing and talking like an American.

"I realized it wasn't my home anymore. Austin was my home," she said.

When she returned to Texas — she said she was driven across the border in a vehicle that was waved through by customs agents — she heard about a pilot program that allowed undocumented students to attend college, and got her associate degree from Dallas Community College.

The Dream Act allowed Garibay to fulfill her dream of attending UT. She put herself through the nursing program by waiting tables and baby-sitting and went on to get her master's in nursing.

The knowledge that she couldn't work as a nurse in the United States because of her undocumented status was a big part of her decision to start the University Leadership Initiative in 2005. Garibay, her sister and her mother were the first members. An additional 10 or 12 people joined the effort after they sent a message to other groups that had immigrant members, she said.

They met every week or two, she said, and started with a petition urging members of Congress to support a federal DREAM Act. And she and other members decided they could only be effective if they were open about the fact that they were undocumented. "There was a lot of fear," she said, but her mother supported her. "She said, 'You have to fight for what you believe in. Nobody else will do it for you.'"

The UT group is now part of a national network — called United We Dream — that emerged from the early battles for in-state tuition a decade ago.

Undocumented students in California, New York and other states began organizing to push for access to higher education, and those groups began connecting and supporting each other as each state debated the issue. Today, Texas is one of 12 states that give in-state tuition to undocumented immigrants.

In 2003, the groups organized under a new banner, the United We Dream Coalition, to push for a federal DREAM Act. Each time the legislation was introduced, students from across the country would descend on Washington to lobby Congress. But year after year, they've watched it fall short. One year, Garibay said, she left all three of her degrees at Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison's office in protest.

The trips to Washington led to more cross-pollination and a realization by the far-flung groups that they needed a national organization.

United We Dream launched in 2008, and Carlos Saavedra, who said he was brought to Massachusetts from Peru at age 12 and obtained legal residency a few years ago, became its first staffer.

Today, United We Dream has eight staff members and relies on donations from individuals and foundations to finance its work — which largely consists of supporting and organizing a national network that has grown to about 40 groups with 5,000 to 6,000 members, said Saavedra, the group's national coordinator.

DREAMers from around the country are gathering in Dallas for their national congress, which ends today . During the two-day gathering, Saavedra said, they will elect new leaders, attend panel discussions, decide what next year's campaign will be and attend training sessions on such topics as building new groups and media relations.

"Our theme for this year is Dream Nation, because we're growing so much," Saavedra said. "It's a good problem to have."

dharmon@statesman.com; 445-3645

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Interactive: A state-by-state look at voter ID laws for 2012 elections

2011-11-08T22:10:00.001-06:00

Check out the interactive map of the states where voter ID laws go into effect in 2012here

This is crazy!

-Patricia

By Mary Mahling and Carla Uriona
Friday, November 04, 2011

When Mississippi decides on Initiative 27 next week, voters will determine whether or not they’ll have to show photo identification the next time they go to the polls. The election on Nov. 8 will be the final act of what has been a dramatic year for voter ID laws. According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, dozens of states considered either passing new voter ID rules or tightening existing provisions to require not just an ID but a photo ID. In the first category, Kansas, Rhode Island and Wisconsin enacted new laws. In the second category, Alabama, South Carolina, Tennessee and Texas tightened laws already on the books. The voter ID push came largely from Republicans, who say the rules are necessary to prevent voter fraud. Meanwhile, Democratic governors in Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, New Hampshire and North Carolina vetoed voter ID laws, calling them an unfair burden on voters who may not have driver’s licenses or other forms of government-issued identification.

It is important to note that even in some states where identification is required, voters without the requisite ID can still cast a ballot that will be counted. In Michigan, for example, a person without an ID can vote on the spot if he or she signs an affidavit, and several other states have similar failsafe systems for voters without ID. Voters who lack the requisite ID are advised to check with their state or local election officials to confirm whether they can still cast a ballot.

Despite Cuts, UT-Arlington Won't Increase Tuition

2011-11-08T22:05:00.001-06:00

The article notes that, "UT-Arlington has experienced significant growth — thanks, in part, to the bolstering of its online offerings. This fall, enrollment reached an all-time high of 33,439 students, a 34 percent increase from five years ago. Under the current funding system, more students draw more state dollars."

Keywords: ONLINE OFFERINGS. The article also mentions savings generated from a hiring freeze and "voluntary departure of some faculty and staff."

-Patricia

by Reeve Hamilton | Texas Tribune
November 8, 2011

Despite shrinking state support, University of Texas at Arlington President Jim Spaniolo signaled today that his school would not raise tuition in the upcoming 2012-2013 academic year.

Since tuition deregulation in 2003, UT-Arlington has increased its price tag every year. The average annual tuition rate has risen from $4,123 in the 2001-2002 academic year to $9,292 this year. And that's where it will remain next year. Additionally, the annual rate for room and board at the school will stay steady at $7,554.

"Because we’re concerned about affordability, about the uncertain economy, about shrinking financial aid at the federal and state level, we wanted to make a statement to our students," Spaniolo told the Tribune.

Spaniolo made his recommendation Tuesday evening to UT-Arlington's tuition review committee, a group made up primarily of students. The institution's official request to the University of Texas System regents is not due until December, but Spaniolo anticipates that the usual consultation process that goes into it will be smoother than normal given this opening bid. The UT System regents had told institutions that they could request tuition increases of up to 2.6 percent for undergraduates and 3.6 percent for graduate students.

This is not necessarily meant to be a model for other institutions to follow, Spaniolo said. "We think that our circumstances are such that we can afford to do this, not that we have extra money," he said. For example, UT-Arlington has experienced significant growth — thanks, in part, to the bolstering of its online offerings. This fall, enrollment reached an all-time high of 33,439 students, a 34 percent increase from five years ago. Under the current funding system, more students draw more state dollars.

The university generated savings this year through a staff hiring freeze and the voluntary departure of some faculty and staff. Also, officials anticipate significant revenues from a large real estate development project next to campus that will bring in shops, student housing, and a special events arena.

Still, UT-Arlington is one of the institutions vying to be the state's next public top-tier university. That takes money, and money is tight. In 2001-2002, state support made up 45 percent of the school's revenue. This year, it only makes up 21 percent.

"We feel at the end of the day we’ll be ahead of the game taking this approach as opposed increasing tuition even by a modest amount in the next year or so," Spaniolo said. "We feel confident this will not slow us down."

With student debt becoming a growing concern, he said, "We want to make sure our students who are enrolled will stay enrolled, and those who might enroll will do so and continue on."

This could turn out to be just a temporary respite for students. Usually, the UT System sets tuition rates every other year, as they will do in early 2012. Along with its request to keep tuition steady next year, UT-Arlington will request the option to increase tuition up to the maximum allowed amount for 2013-2014 if that is deemed necessary.

ACLU Report Blasts Private Prisons

2011-11-07T00:50:00.001-06:00

Check out the full report: Banking on Bondage: Private Prisons and Mass Incarceration.

Here's the Executive Summary:

The imprisonment of human beings at record levels is both a moral failure and an economic one — especially at a time when more and more Americans are struggling to make ends meet and when state governments confront enormous fiscal crises. This report finds, however, that mass incarceration provides a gigantic windfall for one special interest group — the private prison industry — even as current incarceration levels harm the country as a whole. While the nation's unprecedented rate of imprisonment deprives individuals of freedom, wrests loved ones from their families, and drains the resources of governments, communities, and taxpayers, the private prison industry reaps lucrative rewards. As the public good suffers from mass incarceration, private prison companies obtain more and more government dollars, and private prison executives at the leading companies rake in enormous compensation packages, in some cases totaling millions of dollars.

The Spoils of Mass Incarceration
The United States imprisons more people — both per capita and in absolute terms — than any other nation in the world, including Russia, China, and Iran. Over the past four decades, imprisonment in the United States has increased explosively, spurred by criminal laws that impose steep sentences and curtail the opportunity to earn probation and parole. The current incarceration rate deprives record numbers of individuals of their liberty, disproportionately affects people of color, and has at best a minimal effect on public safety. Meanwhile, the crippling cost of imprisoning increasing numbers of Americans saddles government budgets with rising debt and exacerbates the current fiscal crises confronting states across the nation.

Leading private prison companies essentially admit that their business model depends on high rates of incarceration. For example, in a 2010 Annual Report filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), the largest private prison company, stated: "The demand for our facilities and services could be adversely affected by . . . leniency in conviction or parole standards and sentencing practices . . . ."

As incarceration rates skyrocket, the private prison industry expands at exponential rates, holding ever more people in its prisons and jails, and generating massive profits. Private prisons for adults were virtually non-existent until the early 1980s, but the number of prisoners in private prisons increased by approximately 1600% between 1990 and 2009. Today, for-profit companies are responsible for approximately 6% of state prisoners, 16% of federal prisoners, and, according to one report, nearly half of all immigrants detained by the federal government. In 2010, the two largest private prison companies alone received nearly $3 billion dollars in revenue, and their top executives, according to one source, each received annual compensation packages worth well over $3 million.

A Danger to State Finances
While supporters of privatization tout the idea that governments can save money through private facilities, the evidence for supposed cost savings is mixed at best. As state governments across the nation confront deep fiscal deficits, the assertion that private prisons demonstrably reduce the costs of incarceration can be dangerous and irresponsible. Such claims may lure states into building private prisons or privatizing existing ones rather than reducing incarceration rates and limiting corrections spending through serious criminal justice reform.

This year, advocates of for-profit prisons trotted out privatization schemes as a supposed answer to budgetary woes in numerous states:

Arizona has announced plans to award 5,000 additional prison beds to private contractors, despite a recent statement by the Arizona Auditor General that for-profit imprisonment in Arizona may cost more than incarceration in publicly-operated facilities. Arizona's Department of Corrections is the only large agency in that state not subject to a budget cut in fiscal year 2012 — in fact, the Department's budget increased by $10 million. According to a news report, private prison employees and corporate officers contributed money to Governor Jan Brewer's reelection campaign, and high ranking Brewer Administration officials previously worked as private prison lobbyists.
Florida has responded to exploding incarceration costs largely through increasing reliance on private prisons. Although the assertion that private prisons save taxpayer money is highly questionable, supporters of privatization, according to a recent news report, claim that privatization in Florida is necessary to rein in the prison system's budget, which stood at $2.3 billion in 2010. A recent editorial in the Orlando Sentinel expressed the view that privatization "has eclipsed and shelved potentially more fruitful, cost-effective changes. One of them is sentencing reform." On September 30, 2011, a Florida court enjoined the Department of Corrections from implementing the privatization of prisons in 18 counties, finding that the planned privatization failed to comply with procedures mandated by state law. The court stated, "[t]he decision to issue only one [request for proposal] and only one contract for all 29 prison facilities [subject to proposed privatization] was based on convenience and speed, … rather than on any demonstrated savings or benefit advantage."
Ohio recently announced that it will become, on December 31, 2011, the first state in the nation to sell a publicly operated prison, Lake Erie Correctional Facility, to a private company, CCA. Notably, the head of Ohio's corrections department had served as a managing director of CCA. The claim that prison privatization demonstrably reduces costs and trims government budgets may detract from the critical work of reducing the state's prison population.
Louisiana narrowly defeated a proposal, pushed by Governor Bobby Jindal in a desperate attempt to generate short-term revenue, to sell off three state prisons to private companies. The Louisiana House Appropriations Committee blocked the bill by a vote of 13-12, with legislators expressing deep concern about the wisdom of selling off the state's assets.
The federal government is in the midst of a private prison expansion spree, driven primarily by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), an agency that locks up roughly 400,000 immigrants each year and spends over $1.9 billion annually on custody operations. ICE now intends to create a new network of massive immigration detention centers, managed largely by private companies, in states including New Jersey, Texas, Florida, California and Illinois. According to a news report, in August 2011, ICE's plans to send 1,250 immigration detainees to Essex County, New Jersey threatened to unravel amid allegations that a private prison company seeking the contract, whose executives enjoyed close ties to Governor Chris Christie, received "special treatment" from the county. The fiscal crisis confronting the federal government, however, has done nothing to dampen Washington's spending binge on privatized immigration detention.

Atrocious Conditions
While evidence is mixed, certain empirical studies show a heightened level of violence against prisoners in private institutions. This may reflect in part the higher rate of staff turnover in private prisons, which can result in inexperienced guards walking the tiers. After an infamous escape from an Arizona private prison in 2010, for example, the Arizona Department of Corrections reported that at the prison, "[s]taff are fairly 'green' across all shifts," "are not proficient with weapons," and habitually ignore sounding alarms. Private facilities have also been linked to atrocious conditions. In a juvenile facility in Texas, for example, auditors reported, "[c]ells were filthy, smelled of feces and urine."

Just three weeks before the release of this report, prisoner fights in several locations throughout a private prison in Oklahoma left 46 prisoners injured and required 16 inmates to be sent to the hospital, some of them in critical condition. The risks to safety confronting inmates in private prisons are especially relevant at present, as the U.S. Supreme Court considers a case that could, depending on the outcome, prevent federal prisoners in private institutions from seeking compensation for constitutional violations — including deliberate indifference to prisoners' physical well being.

Shrewd Tactics
Certain private prison companies employ shrewd tactics to obtain more and more government contracts to incarcerate prisoners. In February 2011, for example, a jury convicted former Luzerene County, Pennsylvania Judge Mark Ciavarella of racketeering, racketeering conspiracy, and money laundering conspiracy in connection with payments received from a private prison developer. Tactics employed by some private prison companies, or individuals associated with the private prison industry, to gain influence or acquire more contracts or inmates include: use of questionable financial incentives; benefitting from the "revolving door" between public and private corrections; extensive lobbying; lavish campaign contributions; and efforts to control information.

* * * *

Part One of this Report traces the rise of the for-profit prison industry over the past 30 years, demonstrating that private prisons reaped lucrative spoils as incarceration rates reached historic levels. Part Two focuses on the supposed benefits associated with private prisons, showing that the view that private prison companies provide demonstrable economic benefits and humane facilities is debatable at best. Part Three discusses the tactics private prison companies have used to obtain control of more and more human beings and taxpayer dollars.

The time to halt the expansion of for-profit incarceration is now. The evidence that private prisons provide savings compared to publicly operated facilities is highly questionable, and certain studies point to worse conditions in for-profit facilities. The private prison industry helped to create the mass incarceration crisis and feeds off of this social ill. Private prisons cannot be part of the solution — economic or ethical — to the problem of mass incarceration.

-Patricia

by Haleigh Svoboda | Texas Tribune
11/3/2011

A report released Thursday by the American Civil Liberties Union criticizes the private prison industry for profiting at the expense of a growing prison population.

The report, titled “Banking on Bondage: Private Prisons and Mass Incarceration," accuses private prison companies of lobbying for laws that result in higher incarceration rates. Higher incarceration rates result in more government contracts, which, according to the report, are the primary source of funding for these companies.

“Mass incarceration needlessly wastes scarce tax dollars, contributes to torn communities, and disproportionally affects people of color; too many nonviolent offenders are behind bars, which contributes nothing to public safety,” Terri Burke, executive director of the ACLU of Texas, said in a press release.

Two leading industry companies, Corrections Corporation of America and the GEO Group, received a combined $3 billion in annual revenue in 2010. According to the report, the CCA acknowledged in records submitted to the Securities and Exchange Commission that current sentencing laws increase the company’s profits.

CCA officials could not be reached for comment. The GEO Group declined to comment.

In 2010, the U.S. prison population made up 25 percent of the world’s prisoners, according to the Congressional Research Service. The U.S. incarcerates roughly 2.3 million people, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics.

In a press release, the ACLU said that lobbying and campaign contributions are two tactics used by private prison companies to secure more government contracts. The release also said that both CCA and GEO donated to Gov. Rick Perry’s 2010 gubernatorial campaign. Government contracts at the local, state and federal levels make of part of these companies’ revenues.