Wednesday, January 16, 2008
An Open Letter to the Next President by James P. Comer
We all need to go back to James P. Comer's Yale Child Study research in New Haven, Connecticut. He provided extraordinary leadership with his School Development Program Model. I hope that the next President pays attention to Dr. Comer and other advocates like the the Forum for Education and Democracy who want to reform schools into caring, higher-order thinking spaces where children are engaged to learn according to world-class standards while becoming critically engaged citizens. -Angela
Massive Funding Cuts to ‘Reading First’ Generate Worries for Struggling Schools
Read comments by Dr. Stephen Krashen at the end. He provides data that provides an important corrective to the inadequate analysis on the Reading First Oregon data. Ed Week should hire him in order to improve their own coverage of these issues! -Angela
Massive Funding Cuts to ‘Reading First’ Generate Worries for Struggling Schools
By Kathleen Kennedy Manzo
The reading coaches, professional-development programs, and instructional materials that are the cornerstones of the Reading First program and are credited with improving instruction in struggling schools may be threatened by a deep cut included in the 2008 federal budget, officials and observers say.
The reduction of more than 60 percent—from nearly $1 billion each year since the program was rolled out in 2002 to $393 million for the fiscal year that began Oct. 1—will likely inhibit further improvements and test the sustainability of the changes Reading First has fostered over the past six years. The cut is part of an omnibus spending bill President Bush signed into law last month.
Read the rest here
Massive Funding Cuts to ‘Reading First’ Generate Worries for Struggling Schools
By Kathleen Kennedy Manzo
The reading coaches, professional-development programs, and instructional materials that are the cornerstones of the Reading First program and are credited with improving instruction in struggling schools may be threatened by a deep cut included in the 2008 federal budget, officials and observers say.
The reduction of more than 60 percent—from nearly $1 billion each year since the program was rolled out in 2002 to $393 million for the fiscal year that began Oct. 1—will likely inhibit further improvements and test the sustainability of the changes Reading First has fostered over the past six years. The cut is part of an omnibus spending bill President Bush signed into law last month.
Read the rest here
Monday, January 14, 2008
Parents, teachers outraged at proposed $5 billion cut
These parents and activists are righteously outraged. This is aweful and shameful. -Angela
Education: Parents, teachers outraged at proposed $5 billion cut
Nanette Asimovand Jill Tucker, Chronicle Staff Writers
Saturday, January 12, 2008
Parents, teachers and education advocates up and down California reacted with outrage Friday to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's proposal to cut nearly $5 billion from public schools over the next 18 months.
The news that millions of dollars could be cut from categories such as class-size reduction, textbooks, preschool programs, after-school tutoring and hot lunches led one father to ask why a state that ranks among the top 10 global economies educates its children in the manner of a Third World nation.
"By God, you're killing our children!" said Robert Studdiford, whose two sons attend Portola Junior High in El Cerrito. "With Arnold's cuts, we'll be at the bottom. We're educating our children like an underdeveloped nation."
Teachers, whose pay makes up the most expensive part of a school's budget, could receive layoff warnings for next year by this March.
"The governor's proposed budget is a giant step backward for our students," said David Sanchez, president of the California Teachers Association, which represents 340,000 public school employees.
Schwarzenegger wants to cut $400 million from this year's budget for schools and community colleges. Next fiscal year, which starts July 1, he would cut another $4.4 billion by suspending Proposition 98, the voter-approved measure that guarantees a minimum level of funding for schools and community colleges, and by slashing other school funding.
The result: The state would spend $8,458 per pupil next year, down from $8,558 this year.
Education advocates say the governor's budget represents the deepest cuts to schools ever proposed in the state.
In San Francisco, for example, school officials estimate that it could force them to cut spending by $30 million - 6 percent - from their $485 million budget.
Studdiford, who sits on the Citizens Budget Advisory Committee for the West Contra Costa Unified School District and heads a council of 33 PTAs in Contra Costa County, said many parents are frustrated at Schwarzenegger's refusal to raise taxes.
"If you gut funding for public education, then poor families have to go deeper into their pockets to get the basic necessities to educate their kids," Studdiford said. "This is, essentially, taxation of the poor."
The governor's proposal lays down the gauntlet for months of negotiations with state lawmakers on a final 2008-09 budget.
But one influential Democratic lawmaker, state Sen. Jack Scott of Los Angeles County, said he is unsure what alternatives exist.
"I don't have a magic rabbit to pull out of the hat right now," said Scott, who heads the Senate Education Committee. "This is disastrous."
The impact of the governor's budget on basic educational services would be even deeper than it appears because of a proposal to cut $358 million from special education programs for students with disabilities.
The federal government mandates special education services, so by law they can't be reduced. So districts would actually have to siphon the $358 million from their regular education budgets to meet the federal requirements, the governor's finance experts acknowledge.
"We can't reduce special education services even if the governor says we should," said Joe Frantz, an assistant superintendent in the Emery Unified School District in Emeryville, which is struggling to raise test scores after years of bankruptcy.
Emery has already transferred about $650,000 to pay for special education. Under the proposal, that would jump to $750,000, Frantz said.
It all confounds Isabel Samaras, whose son is a first-grader at Cornell Elementary in Albany.
"I think it's catastrophic," she said. "It's ridiculous. I don't understand why everyone doesn't just stand up on top of their cars and throw rocks. It doesn't make any kind of sense."
Online resources
California department of education
E-mail the writers at nasimov@sfchronicle.com and jtucker@sfchronicle.com.
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/01/12/MN7PUDRKN.DTL
This article appeared on page A - 8 of the San Francisco Chronicle
© 2008 Hearst Communications
Education: Parents, teachers outraged at proposed $5 billion cut
Nanette Asimovand Jill Tucker, Chronicle Staff Writers
Saturday, January 12, 2008
Parents, teachers and education advocates up and down California reacted with outrage Friday to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's proposal to cut nearly $5 billion from public schools over the next 18 months.
The news that millions of dollars could be cut from categories such as class-size reduction, textbooks, preschool programs, after-school tutoring and hot lunches led one father to ask why a state that ranks among the top 10 global economies educates its children in the manner of a Third World nation.
"By God, you're killing our children!" said Robert Studdiford, whose two sons attend Portola Junior High in El Cerrito. "With Arnold's cuts, we'll be at the bottom. We're educating our children like an underdeveloped nation."
Teachers, whose pay makes up the most expensive part of a school's budget, could receive layoff warnings for next year by this March.
"The governor's proposed budget is a giant step backward for our students," said David Sanchez, president of the California Teachers Association, which represents 340,000 public school employees.
Schwarzenegger wants to cut $400 million from this year's budget for schools and community colleges. Next fiscal year, which starts July 1, he would cut another $4.4 billion by suspending Proposition 98, the voter-approved measure that guarantees a minimum level of funding for schools and community colleges, and by slashing other school funding.
The result: The state would spend $8,458 per pupil next year, down from $8,558 this year.
Education advocates say the governor's budget represents the deepest cuts to schools ever proposed in the state.
In San Francisco, for example, school officials estimate that it could force them to cut spending by $30 million - 6 percent - from their $485 million budget.
Studdiford, who sits on the Citizens Budget Advisory Committee for the West Contra Costa Unified School District and heads a council of 33 PTAs in Contra Costa County, said many parents are frustrated at Schwarzenegger's refusal to raise taxes.
"If you gut funding for public education, then poor families have to go deeper into their pockets to get the basic necessities to educate their kids," Studdiford said. "This is, essentially, taxation of the poor."
The governor's proposal lays down the gauntlet for months of negotiations with state lawmakers on a final 2008-09 budget.
But one influential Democratic lawmaker, state Sen. Jack Scott of Los Angeles County, said he is unsure what alternatives exist.
"I don't have a magic rabbit to pull out of the hat right now," said Scott, who heads the Senate Education Committee. "This is disastrous."
The impact of the governor's budget on basic educational services would be even deeper than it appears because of a proposal to cut $358 million from special education programs for students with disabilities.
The federal government mandates special education services, so by law they can't be reduced. So districts would actually have to siphon the $358 million from their regular education budgets to meet the federal requirements, the governor's finance experts acknowledge.
"We can't reduce special education services even if the governor says we should," said Joe Frantz, an assistant superintendent in the Emery Unified School District in Emeryville, which is struggling to raise test scores after years of bankruptcy.
Emery has already transferred about $650,000 to pay for special education. Under the proposal, that would jump to $750,000, Frantz said.
It all confounds Isabel Samaras, whose son is a first-grader at Cornell Elementary in Albany.
"I think it's catastrophic," she said. "It's ridiculous. I don't understand why everyone doesn't just stand up on top of their cars and throw rocks. It doesn't make any kind of sense."
Online resources
California department of education
E-mail the writers at nasimov@sfchronicle.com and jtucker@sfchronicle.com.
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/01/12/MN7PUDRKN.DTL
This article appeared on page A - 8 of the San Francisco Chronicle
© 2008 Hearst Communications
Sunday, January 13, 2008
SPECIAL REPORT: Academic Freedom
SPECIAL REPORT: Academic Freedom
Academic freedom is under threat in many nations around the world. Yet, as the Canadian Association of University Teachers says, post-secondary educational institutions serve the common good of society by searching for and disseminating knowledge, truth and understanding – and by fostering independent thinking and expression among academic staff and students. “Robust democracies require no less. These ends cannot be achieved without academic freedom,” the union declares.
In this special series of reports, our correspondents discuss the situation in their countries.
US: Academics confront a political minefield
John K Wilson
American academics are under attack from a growing group of right-wing politicians and ideologues who accuse the nation's higher education system of being dominated by liberal professors and administrators. The political backlash has included efforts by state legislatures and Congress to control higher education and ban political discussions in the classroom and on campus, as well as restrictions on visas by the Bush administration against controversial professors.
Full report on the University World News site
Longer analysis by John K Wilson in the Features section.
Academic freedom is under threat in many nations around the world. Yet, as the Canadian Association of University Teachers says, post-secondary educational institutions serve the common good of society by searching for and disseminating knowledge, truth and understanding – and by fostering independent thinking and expression among academic staff and students. “Robust democracies require no less. These ends cannot be achieved without academic freedom,” the union declares.
In this special series of reports, our correspondents discuss the situation in their countries.
US: Academics confront a political minefield
John K Wilson
American academics are under attack from a growing group of right-wing politicians and ideologues who accuse the nation's higher education system of being dominated by liberal professors and administrators. The political backlash has included efforts by state legislatures and Congress to control higher education and ban political discussions in the classroom and on campus, as well as restrictions on visas by the Bush administration against controversial professors.
Full report on the University World News site
Longer analysis by John K Wilson in the Features section.
Saturday, January 12, 2008
Repress U
We don't frequently thing of our universities in this light but it's time to take notice and to consider the ramifications, especially their uses as a site for military recruitment. -Angela
Repress U
by MICHAEL GOULD-WARTOFSKY
[from the January 28, 2008 issue]
Free-speech zones. Taser guns. Hidden cameras. Data mining. A new security curriculum. Private security contractors. Welcome to the homeland security campus.
From Harvard to UCLA, the ivory tower is fast becoming the latest watchtower in Fortress America. The terror warriors, having turned their attention to "violent radicalization and homegrown terrorism prevention"--as it was recently dubbed in a House of Representatives bill of the same name--have set out to reconquer that traditional hotbed of radicalization, the university.
Building a homeland security campus and bringing the university to heel is a seven-step mission:
1. Target dissidents. As the warfare state has triggered dissent, the campus has attracted increasing scrutiny--with student protesters in the cross hairs. The government's number-one target? Peace and justice organizations.
From 2003 to 2007 an unknown number of them made it into the Pentagon's Threat and Local Observation Notice system (TALON), a secretive domestic spying program ostensibly designed to track direct "potential terrorist threats" to the Defense Department itself. In 2006 the ACLU uncovered, via Freedom of Information Act requests, at least 186 specific TALON reports on "anti-military protests" in the United States--some listed as "credible threats"--from student groups at the University of California, Santa Cruz; State University of New York, Albany; Georgia State University; and New Mexico State University, among other campuses.
At more than a dozen universities and colleges, police officers now double as full-time FBI agents, and according to the Campus Law Enforcement Journal, they serve on many of the nation's 100 Joint Terrorism Task Forces. These dual-purpose officer-agents have knocked on student activists' doors from North Carolina State to the University of Colorado and, in one case, interrogated an Iraqi-born professor at the University of Massachusetts about his antiwar views.
FBI agents, or their campus stand-ins, don't have to do all the work. Administrators often do it for them, setting up "free-speech zones," which actually constrain speech, and punishing those who step outside them. Protests were typically forced into "free-assembly areas" at the University of Central Florida and Clemson University, while students at Hampton and Pace universities faced expulsion for handing out antiwar fliers, aka "unauthorized materials."
2. Lock and load. Many campus police departments are morphing into heavily armed garrisons, equipped with a wide array of weaponry, from Taser stun guns and pepper guns to shotguns and semiautomatic rifles. Lock-and-load policies that began in the 1990s under the rubric of the "war on crime" only escalated with the President's "war on terror." Each school shooting--most recently the massacre at Virginia Tech--adds fuel to the armament flames.
Two-thirds of universities arm their police, according to the Justice Department. Many of the guns being purchased were previously in the province of military units and SWAT teams: for instance, AR-15 rifles (similar to M-16s) are in the arsenals of the University of Texas campus police. Last April City University of New York bought dozens of semiautomatic handguns. Some states, like Nevada, are even considering plans to allow university staff to pack heat in a "special reserve officer corps."
Most of the force used on campuses these days, though, comes in less lethal form, such as the rubber bullets and pepper pellets increasingly used to contain student demonstrations. Then there is the ubiquitous Taser, the electroshock weapon recently ruled a "form of torture" by the United Nations. A Taser was used by UCLA police in November 2006 to deliver shock after shock to an Iranian-American student for failing to produce his ID at the Powell Library. A University of Florida student was Tased last September after asking pointed questions of Senator John Kerry at a public forum, his plea "Don't Tase me, bro!" becoming the stuff of pop folklore.
3. Keep an eye (or hundreds of them) focused on campus. Surveillance has become a boom industry nationally--one that now reaches deep into the heart of campuses. In fact, universities have witnessed explosive growth since 2001 in the electronic surveillance of students, faculty and campus workers. On ever more campuses, closed-circuit security cameras can track people's every move, often from hidden or undisclosed locations, sometimes even into classrooms.
The International Association of Campus Law Enforcement Administrators reports that surveillance cameras have found their way onto at least half of all colleges, their numbers on any given campus doubling, tripling or, in a few cases, rising tenfold since September 11, 2001. Such cameras have proliferated by the hundreds on private campuses, in particular. The University of Pennsylvania, for instance, has more than 400 watching over it, while Harvard and Brown have about 200 each.
Often it can be tricky to find out where the cameras are and just what they're meant to be viewing. The University of Texas battled student journalists over disclosure and ultimately kept its cameras hidden. Sometimes, though, the cameras' purpose seems obvious. Take the case of Hussein Hussein, a professor in the department of animal biotechnology at the University of Nevada, Reno. In January 2005 the widely respected professor found a hidden camera redirected to monitor his office.
4. Mine student records. Student records have in recent years been opened up to all manner of data mining for purposes of investigation, recruitment or just all-purpose tracking. From 2001 to 2006, in an operation code-named Project Strike Back, the Education Department teamed up with the FBI to scour the records of the 14 million students who applied for federal financial aid each year. The objective? "To identify potential people of interest," explained an FBI spokesperson cryptically, especially those linked to "potential terrorist activity."
Strike Back was quietly discontinued in June 2006, days after students at Northwestern University blew its cover. But just one month later, the Education Department's Commission on the Future of Higher Education, in a much-criticized preliminary report, recommended the creation of a federal "unit records" database that would track the activities and studies of college students nationwide. The department's Institute of Education Sciences has developed a prototype for such a national database.
It's not a secret that the Pentagon, for its part, hopes to turn campuses into recruitment centers for its overstretched, overstressed forces. The Defense Department has built its own database for just this purpose. Known as Joint Advertising Market Research and Studies, this program tracks 30 million young people, ages 16 to 25. According to a Pentagon spokesperson, the department has partnered with private marketing and data-mining firms, which in turn sell the government reams of information on students and other potential recruits.
5. Track foreign-born students; keep the undocumented out. Under the auspices of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has been keeping close tabs on foreign students and their dependents through the Student and Exchange Visitor Information System (SEVIS). As of October 2007, ICE reported that it was actively following 713,000 internationals on campuses, while keeping more than 4.7 million names in the database.
The database aims to amass and record information on foreign students throughout their stay inside the United States. SEVIS requires thick files on the students from the sponsoring schools, constantly updated with all academic, biographical and employment records--all of which will be shared with other government agencies. If students fall out of "status" at school--or if the database thinks they have--the Compliance Enforcement Unit of ICE goes into action.
ICE, of course, has done its part to keep the homeland security campus purified of those not born in the homeland. The American Immigration Law Foundation estimates that only one in twenty undocumented immigrants who graduate high school goes on to enroll in a college--many don't go because they cannot afford the tuition but also because they have good reason to be afraid: ICE has deported a number of those who did make it to college, some before they could graduate.
6. Take over the curriculum, the classroom and the laboratory. Needless to say, not every student is considered a homeland security threat. Quite the opposite. Many students and faculty members are seen as potential assets. To exploit these assets, DHS has launched its own curriculum under its Office of University Programs (OUP), intended, it says, to "foster a homeland security culture within the academic community."
The record so far is impressive: DHS has doled out 439 federal fellowships and scholarships since 2003, providing full tuition to students who fit "within the homeland security research enterprise." Two hundred twenty-seven schools now offer degree or certificate programs in "homeland security," a curriculum that encompasses more than 1,800 courses. Along with OUP, some of the key players in creating the homeland security classroom are the US Northern Command and the Aerospace Defense Command, co-founders of the Homeland Security and Defense Education Consortium.
OUP has also partnered with researchers and laboratories to "align scientific results with homeland security priorities." In fiscal year 2008 alone, $4.9 billion in federal funding will go to homeland-security-related research. Grants correspond to sixteen research topics selected by DHS, based on presidential directives, legislation and a smattering of scientific advice.
But wait, there's more: DHS has founded and funded six of its very own "Centers of Excellence," research facilities that span dozens of universities from coast to coast. The latest is a Center of Excellence for the Study of Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism, the funding for which cleared the House in October. The center is mandated to assist a national commission in combating those "adopting or promoting an extremist belief system...to advance political, religious or social change."
7. Privatize, privatize, privatize. Of course, homeland security is not just a department, nor is it simply a new network of surveillance and data mining--it's big business. (According to USA Today, global homeland-security-style spending had already reached $59 billion a year in 2006, a sixfold increase over 2000.) Not surprisingly, then, universities have in recent years established unprecedented private-sector partnerships with the corporations that have the most to gain from their research. DHS's on-campus National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terror (START), for instance, features Lockheed Martin on its advisory board. The Center for Food Protection and Defense relies on an industry working group that includes Wal-Mart and McDonald's offering "guidance and direction," according to its chair.
While vast sums of money are flowing in from corporate sponsors, huge payments are also flowing out to "strategic contracts" with private contractors, as universities permanently outsource security operations to big corporations like Securitas and AlliedBarton. Little of this money actually goes to those guarding the properties, who are often among the most underpaid workers in the universities. Instead, it fills the corporate coffers of those with little accountability for conditions on campus.
Meanwhile, some universities have developed intimate relationships with private-security outfits like the notorious Blackwater. Last May, for example, the University of Illinois and its police training institute cut a deal with the firm to share its facilities and training programs with Blackwater operatives. Local journalists later revealed that the director of the campus program at the time was on the Blackwater payroll. In the age of hired education, such collaboration is apparently par for the course.
Following these seven steps over the past six years, the homeland security state and its constituents have come a long way in their drive to remake the American campus in the image of a compound on lockdown. Somewhere inside the growing homeland security state that is our country, the next seven steps in the process are undoubtedly already being planned.
Still, the rise of Repress U is not inevitable. The new homeland security campus has proven itself unable to shut out public scrutiny or stamp out resistance to its latest Orwellian advances. Sometimes such opposition even yields a free-speech zone dismantled, or the Pentagon's TALON declawed, or a Project Strike Back struck down. A rising tide of student protest, led by groups like the new Students for a Democratic Society, has won free-speech victories and reined in repression from Pace and Hampton, where the university dropped its threat of expulsion, to UCLA, where Tasers will no longer be wielded against passive resisters.
Yet if the tightening grip of the homeland security complex isn't loosened, the latest towers of higher education will be built not of ivory but of Kevlar for the over-armored, over-armed campuses of America.
Repress U
by MICHAEL GOULD-WARTOFSKY
[from the January 28, 2008 issue]
Free-speech zones. Taser guns. Hidden cameras. Data mining. A new security curriculum. Private security contractors. Welcome to the homeland security campus.
From Harvard to UCLA, the ivory tower is fast becoming the latest watchtower in Fortress America. The terror warriors, having turned their attention to "violent radicalization and homegrown terrorism prevention"--as it was recently dubbed in a House of Representatives bill of the same name--have set out to reconquer that traditional hotbed of radicalization, the university.
Building a homeland security campus and bringing the university to heel is a seven-step mission:
1. Target dissidents. As the warfare state has triggered dissent, the campus has attracted increasing scrutiny--with student protesters in the cross hairs. The government's number-one target? Peace and justice organizations.
From 2003 to 2007 an unknown number of them made it into the Pentagon's Threat and Local Observation Notice system (TALON), a secretive domestic spying program ostensibly designed to track direct "potential terrorist threats" to the Defense Department itself. In 2006 the ACLU uncovered, via Freedom of Information Act requests, at least 186 specific TALON reports on "anti-military protests" in the United States--some listed as "credible threats"--from student groups at the University of California, Santa Cruz; State University of New York, Albany; Georgia State University; and New Mexico State University, among other campuses.
At more than a dozen universities and colleges, police officers now double as full-time FBI agents, and according to the Campus Law Enforcement Journal, they serve on many of the nation's 100 Joint Terrorism Task Forces. These dual-purpose officer-agents have knocked on student activists' doors from North Carolina State to the University of Colorado and, in one case, interrogated an Iraqi-born professor at the University of Massachusetts about his antiwar views.
FBI agents, or their campus stand-ins, don't have to do all the work. Administrators often do it for them, setting up "free-speech zones," which actually constrain speech, and punishing those who step outside them. Protests were typically forced into "free-assembly areas" at the University of Central Florida and Clemson University, while students at Hampton and Pace universities faced expulsion for handing out antiwar fliers, aka "unauthorized materials."
2. Lock and load. Many campus police departments are morphing into heavily armed garrisons, equipped with a wide array of weaponry, from Taser stun guns and pepper guns to shotguns and semiautomatic rifles. Lock-and-load policies that began in the 1990s under the rubric of the "war on crime" only escalated with the President's "war on terror." Each school shooting--most recently the massacre at Virginia Tech--adds fuel to the armament flames.
Two-thirds of universities arm their police, according to the Justice Department. Many of the guns being purchased were previously in the province of military units and SWAT teams: for instance, AR-15 rifles (similar to M-16s) are in the arsenals of the University of Texas campus police. Last April City University of New York bought dozens of semiautomatic handguns. Some states, like Nevada, are even considering plans to allow university staff to pack heat in a "special reserve officer corps."
Most of the force used on campuses these days, though, comes in less lethal form, such as the rubber bullets and pepper pellets increasingly used to contain student demonstrations. Then there is the ubiquitous Taser, the electroshock weapon recently ruled a "form of torture" by the United Nations. A Taser was used by UCLA police in November 2006 to deliver shock after shock to an Iranian-American student for failing to produce his ID at the Powell Library. A University of Florida student was Tased last September after asking pointed questions of Senator John Kerry at a public forum, his plea "Don't Tase me, bro!" becoming the stuff of pop folklore.
3. Keep an eye (or hundreds of them) focused on campus. Surveillance has become a boom industry nationally--one that now reaches deep into the heart of campuses. In fact, universities have witnessed explosive growth since 2001 in the electronic surveillance of students, faculty and campus workers. On ever more campuses, closed-circuit security cameras can track people's every move, often from hidden or undisclosed locations, sometimes even into classrooms.
The International Association of Campus Law Enforcement Administrators reports that surveillance cameras have found their way onto at least half of all colleges, their numbers on any given campus doubling, tripling or, in a few cases, rising tenfold since September 11, 2001. Such cameras have proliferated by the hundreds on private campuses, in particular. The University of Pennsylvania, for instance, has more than 400 watching over it, while Harvard and Brown have about 200 each.
Often it can be tricky to find out where the cameras are and just what they're meant to be viewing. The University of Texas battled student journalists over disclosure and ultimately kept its cameras hidden. Sometimes, though, the cameras' purpose seems obvious. Take the case of Hussein Hussein, a professor in the department of animal biotechnology at the University of Nevada, Reno. In January 2005 the widely respected professor found a hidden camera redirected to monitor his office.
4. Mine student records. Student records have in recent years been opened up to all manner of data mining for purposes of investigation, recruitment or just all-purpose tracking. From 2001 to 2006, in an operation code-named Project Strike Back, the Education Department teamed up with the FBI to scour the records of the 14 million students who applied for federal financial aid each year. The objective? "To identify potential people of interest," explained an FBI spokesperson cryptically, especially those linked to "potential terrorist activity."
Strike Back was quietly discontinued in June 2006, days after students at Northwestern University blew its cover. But just one month later, the Education Department's Commission on the Future of Higher Education, in a much-criticized preliminary report, recommended the creation of a federal "unit records" database that would track the activities and studies of college students nationwide. The department's Institute of Education Sciences has developed a prototype for such a national database.
It's not a secret that the Pentagon, for its part, hopes to turn campuses into recruitment centers for its overstretched, overstressed forces. The Defense Department has built its own database for just this purpose. Known as Joint Advertising Market Research and Studies, this program tracks 30 million young people, ages 16 to 25. According to a Pentagon spokesperson, the department has partnered with private marketing and data-mining firms, which in turn sell the government reams of information on students and other potential recruits.
5. Track foreign-born students; keep the undocumented out. Under the auspices of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has been keeping close tabs on foreign students and their dependents through the Student and Exchange Visitor Information System (SEVIS). As of October 2007, ICE reported that it was actively following 713,000 internationals on campuses, while keeping more than 4.7 million names in the database.
The database aims to amass and record information on foreign students throughout their stay inside the United States. SEVIS requires thick files on the students from the sponsoring schools, constantly updated with all academic, biographical and employment records--all of which will be shared with other government agencies. If students fall out of "status" at school--or if the database thinks they have--the Compliance Enforcement Unit of ICE goes into action.
ICE, of course, has done its part to keep the homeland security campus purified of those not born in the homeland. The American Immigration Law Foundation estimates that only one in twenty undocumented immigrants who graduate high school goes on to enroll in a college--many don't go because they cannot afford the tuition but also because they have good reason to be afraid: ICE has deported a number of those who did make it to college, some before they could graduate.
6. Take over the curriculum, the classroom and the laboratory. Needless to say, not every student is considered a homeland security threat. Quite the opposite. Many students and faculty members are seen as potential assets. To exploit these assets, DHS has launched its own curriculum under its Office of University Programs (OUP), intended, it says, to "foster a homeland security culture within the academic community."
The record so far is impressive: DHS has doled out 439 federal fellowships and scholarships since 2003, providing full tuition to students who fit "within the homeland security research enterprise." Two hundred twenty-seven schools now offer degree or certificate programs in "homeland security," a curriculum that encompasses more than 1,800 courses. Along with OUP, some of the key players in creating the homeland security classroom are the US Northern Command and the Aerospace Defense Command, co-founders of the Homeland Security and Defense Education Consortium.
OUP has also partnered with researchers and laboratories to "align scientific results with homeland security priorities." In fiscal year 2008 alone, $4.9 billion in federal funding will go to homeland-security-related research. Grants correspond to sixteen research topics selected by DHS, based on presidential directives, legislation and a smattering of scientific advice.
But wait, there's more: DHS has founded and funded six of its very own "Centers of Excellence," research facilities that span dozens of universities from coast to coast. The latest is a Center of Excellence for the Study of Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism, the funding for which cleared the House in October. The center is mandated to assist a national commission in combating those "adopting or promoting an extremist belief system...to advance political, religious or social change."
7. Privatize, privatize, privatize. Of course, homeland security is not just a department, nor is it simply a new network of surveillance and data mining--it's big business. (According to USA Today, global homeland-security-style spending had already reached $59 billion a year in 2006, a sixfold increase over 2000.) Not surprisingly, then, universities have in recent years established unprecedented private-sector partnerships with the corporations that have the most to gain from their research. DHS's on-campus National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terror (START), for instance, features Lockheed Martin on its advisory board. The Center for Food Protection and Defense relies on an industry working group that includes Wal-Mart and McDonald's offering "guidance and direction," according to its chair.
While vast sums of money are flowing in from corporate sponsors, huge payments are also flowing out to "strategic contracts" with private contractors, as universities permanently outsource security operations to big corporations like Securitas and AlliedBarton. Little of this money actually goes to those guarding the properties, who are often among the most underpaid workers in the universities. Instead, it fills the corporate coffers of those with little accountability for conditions on campus.
Meanwhile, some universities have developed intimate relationships with private-security outfits like the notorious Blackwater. Last May, for example, the University of Illinois and its police training institute cut a deal with the firm to share its facilities and training programs with Blackwater operatives. Local journalists later revealed that the director of the campus program at the time was on the Blackwater payroll. In the age of hired education, such collaboration is apparently par for the course.
Following these seven steps over the past six years, the homeland security state and its constituents have come a long way in their drive to remake the American campus in the image of a compound on lockdown. Somewhere inside the growing homeland security state that is our country, the next seven steps in the process are undoubtedly already being planned.
Still, the rise of Repress U is not inevitable. The new homeland security campus has proven itself unable to shut out public scrutiny or stamp out resistance to its latest Orwellian advances. Sometimes such opposition even yields a free-speech zone dismantled, or the Pentagon's TALON declawed, or a Project Strike Back struck down. A rising tide of student protest, led by groups like the new Students for a Democratic Society, has won free-speech victories and reined in repression from Pace and Hampton, where the university dropped its threat of expulsion, to UCLA, where Tasers will no longer be wielded against passive resisters.
Yet if the tightening grip of the homeland security complex isn't loosened, the latest towers of higher education will be built not of ivory but of Kevlar for the over-armored, over-armed campuses of America.
Friday, January 11, 2008
Diversity history noise
Interesting piece. What should be considered in Texas is the importance of Texas history and U.S.-Mexican history, generally, given its significant impact on the development of our state and nation and also considering the high numbers of Latinos that people our schools that teachers and all students should really have an informed perspective on. In my view, there should be no debate on this.
-Angela
Article published Jan 11, 2008
Diversity history noise
January 11, 2008
Robert Holland - In his Jan. 11, 1989 farewell address after eight years as President, Ronald Reagan warned that the teaching of U.S. history could be going into irreversible decline in the nation's elementary and secondary schools.
”If we forget what we did, we won't know who we are,” he said. “I am warning of an eradication of the American memory that could result, ultimately, in an erosion of the American spirit.”
The Great Communicator's words have a poignant ring now that we know the memory-robber called Alzheimer's was about to afflict him. But his words were prescient in anticipating the assault on study of U.S. history that grows ever more intense almost two decades later.
The multicultural doctrine promoted by academic elitists is a prime culprit.
In Texas, academics have prepared a set of college readiness standards for the high-school curriculum that emphasize “diverse human perspectives and experiences” while omitting pivotal events and heroic movers and shakers.
For instance, while ignoring the enormous sacrifices made by the Greatest Generation to defeat fascism in World War II, the standards ask students to explain the impact of that war on “the African-American and Mexican-American Civil Rights Movements.”
While the standards make no mention of Pearl Harbor or the Battle of Normandy, they invite students to second-guess President Truman's decision to drop the atomic bomb on Japan.
Instead of probing the intellectual roots of a Declaration of Independence that still motivates oppressed people around the world today, the proposed Texas standards imply that the American Revolution was nothing special.
Specifically, students are to “identify how revolutions such as the American, Cuban, French, Russian and Iranian Revolutions affected the functions and structure of government in those countries.”
The academics who drafted the standards up for adoption by the state's Higher Education Coordinating Board on Jan. 24 boasted that their approach was consistent with that of other states and national organizations. About that much they are right. Multiculturalism is weakening the study of U.S. history in many school systems.
Chicago is a case in point. There the public school system uses a voluminous curriculum guide for teaching history to its Latino students — Mexican history, that is, with U.S. history a mere footnote. The guide expresses hope that the instruction, pegged to state education goals, will “awaken in each child the joy and pride of the Mexican heritage.”
In tracing the Mexican independence movement, the guide praises Father Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla for ringing church bells as a call to the faithful to battle the Spaniards. So Chicago students learn of his exploits, but not of Paul Revere's Midnight Ride to warn American patriots of the British Army's advance on Lexington and Concord.
Later, Chicago students are taught in detail about Benito Juarez, a leader in developing the Constitution of 1857 limiting the power of the Mexican army. So they learn about him but not about James Madison, father of the U.S. Constitution. They also learn much about guerrilla fighters like Francisco “Pancho” Villa. But nothing about General George Washington.
The guide is full of time-consuming classroom activities to celebrate Mexican heritage and culture. Students can spend hours and even whole days making confetti eggs, pottery, blankets and goody bags for parties. Surely that time would be more productively spent teaching immigrant children to speak English, the primary language of their parents' adopted country.
Another exercise asks students to compare and contrast Independence Day celebrations in Mexico (Sept. 15) and the United States. As background, they are told of Father Hidalgo's bell ringing and address from the balcony of the palace in Mexico City. As for Independence Day in the U.S., the guide states that it is “celebrated on July 4 with elaborate fireworks displays throughout the country.” That's it — nothing about Thomas Jefferson's stirring evocation of mankind's “unalienable rights” in the Declaration of Independence.
The anniversary of Ronald Reagan's farewell provides an occasion to pause and to take his warning to heart. We need to insist that schools teach all children how America came to be, how it has striven to overcome its imperfections, and what it represents that is so special in the long history of the world.
Speculating about “diverse perspectives” ought to be secondary to teaching history — United States history.
Robert Holland is a policy analyst with the Lexington Institute in Arlington, Va.
-Angela
Article published Jan 11, 2008
Diversity history noise
January 11, 2008
Robert Holland - In his Jan. 11, 1989 farewell address after eight years as President, Ronald Reagan warned that the teaching of U.S. history could be going into irreversible decline in the nation's elementary and secondary schools.
”If we forget what we did, we won't know who we are,” he said. “I am warning of an eradication of the American memory that could result, ultimately, in an erosion of the American spirit.”
The Great Communicator's words have a poignant ring now that we know the memory-robber called Alzheimer's was about to afflict him. But his words were prescient in anticipating the assault on study of U.S. history that grows ever more intense almost two decades later.
The multicultural doctrine promoted by academic elitists is a prime culprit.
In Texas, academics have prepared a set of college readiness standards for the high-school curriculum that emphasize “diverse human perspectives and experiences” while omitting pivotal events and heroic movers and shakers.
For instance, while ignoring the enormous sacrifices made by the Greatest Generation to defeat fascism in World War II, the standards ask students to explain the impact of that war on “the African-American and Mexican-American Civil Rights Movements.”
While the standards make no mention of Pearl Harbor or the Battle of Normandy, they invite students to second-guess President Truman's decision to drop the atomic bomb on Japan.
Instead of probing the intellectual roots of a Declaration of Independence that still motivates oppressed people around the world today, the proposed Texas standards imply that the American Revolution was nothing special.
Specifically, students are to “identify how revolutions such as the American, Cuban, French, Russian and Iranian Revolutions affected the functions and structure of government in those countries.”
The academics who drafted the standards up for adoption by the state's Higher Education Coordinating Board on Jan. 24 boasted that their approach was consistent with that of other states and national organizations. About that much they are right. Multiculturalism is weakening the study of U.S. history in many school systems.
Chicago is a case in point. There the public school system uses a voluminous curriculum guide for teaching history to its Latino students — Mexican history, that is, with U.S. history a mere footnote. The guide expresses hope that the instruction, pegged to state education goals, will “awaken in each child the joy and pride of the Mexican heritage.”
In tracing the Mexican independence movement, the guide praises Father Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla for ringing church bells as a call to the faithful to battle the Spaniards. So Chicago students learn of his exploits, but not of Paul Revere's Midnight Ride to warn American patriots of the British Army's advance on Lexington and Concord.
Later, Chicago students are taught in detail about Benito Juarez, a leader in developing the Constitution of 1857 limiting the power of the Mexican army. So they learn about him but not about James Madison, father of the U.S. Constitution. They also learn much about guerrilla fighters like Francisco “Pancho” Villa. But nothing about General George Washington.
The guide is full of time-consuming classroom activities to celebrate Mexican heritage and culture. Students can spend hours and even whole days making confetti eggs, pottery, blankets and goody bags for parties. Surely that time would be more productively spent teaching immigrant children to speak English, the primary language of their parents' adopted country.
Another exercise asks students to compare and contrast Independence Day celebrations in Mexico (Sept. 15) and the United States. As background, they are told of Father Hidalgo's bell ringing and address from the balcony of the palace in Mexico City. As for Independence Day in the U.S., the guide states that it is “celebrated on July 4 with elaborate fireworks displays throughout the country.” That's it — nothing about Thomas Jefferson's stirring evocation of mankind's “unalienable rights” in the Declaration of Independence.
The anniversary of Ronald Reagan's farewell provides an occasion to pause and to take his warning to heart. We need to insist that schools teach all children how America came to be, how it has striven to overcome its imperfections, and what it represents that is so special in the long history of the world.
Speculating about “diverse perspectives” ought to be secondary to teaching history — United States history.
Robert Holland is a policy analyst with the Lexington Institute in Arlington, Va.
PSJA expands STC partnership
The conversation that's missing from this article is how the TAKS tests are barriers for students who are successfully completing their course requirements but do not obtain a diploma. What portion of students would need this service if the exit exam requirements didn't exist, similar to many other states? We should also be concerned about those students who are in situations similar to Ms. Ramos who don't return after failing to pass one or more of the exit exams. -Patricia
Ryan Holeywell | The Monitor
January 9, 2008
PHARR — Fay Beth Ramos nearly missed out on her high school diploma — until a new Pharr-San Juan-Alamo school district program gave her a second chance.
The 19-year-old was a senior at PSJA North High School last year when a low score on the science portion of her Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills kept her from graduating.
She had considered returning to high school but didn’t want to spend a semester taking classes when all she needed to graduate was a passing score on one exam.
Instead, she enrolled in a new program PSJA launched in the fall in conjunction with South Texas College that is designed for students who need only a few credits or a better TAKS score to graduate.
Ramos passed the test in October, graduated and is now studying to be a nurse at STC.
This week, PSJA began recruiting for next semester’s class of students for the College, Career & Technology Academy program. In the fall, 48 of the program’s 211 students graduated. The school’s principal, Leonore Tyler, said most of those who didn’t graduate are enrolled for the spring semester, which is set to start Jan. 16.
The program has now opened its doors to anyone under age 25 after previously focusing only on students who failed to graduate with the class of 2007.
“We’re very excited about working with that group as well, because … they have been out in that tough world for a few years,” said STC President Shirley Reed. “They know what it’s like not to have a diploma, not to be able to get a good job or a decent salary.”
Because students need a high school degree or equivalency to enroll in STC, the program helps students get a jump start on their studies by letting them take vocational and college preparatory classes while finishing up their high school work, Reed explained.
The district benefits by increasing its graduation rates and attendance, which plays a factor in determining how much funding it gets.
Tyler said 72 of the program’s students concurrently took STC classes with their high school studies at the academy. The majority of the graduates will take classes at STC or University of Texas-Pan American in the spring semester, she said.
“That’s one of our objectives for the school: to help students create some sort of … path, either to college or the career of their choice and to make sure they actually stick and stay there,” Tyler said.
Reed said she was moved when she attended the program’s graduation ceremony last month, since many of the students probably wouldn’t have earned their degrees without the help of the program.
Teaching the older students will be challenging, since many of them have children and jobs that would make attending school difficult, she said. Tyler said the school will work with students’ employers to tailor schedules, and Reed said STC is working with grassroots organizations to assist with childcare and transportation.
“I know they’ve all been tossed a lifesaver and a buoy,” Reed said.
Ryan Holeywell | The Monitor
January 9, 2008
PHARR — Fay Beth Ramos nearly missed out on her high school diploma — until a new Pharr-San Juan-Alamo school district program gave her a second chance.
The 19-year-old was a senior at PSJA North High School last year when a low score on the science portion of her Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills kept her from graduating.
She had considered returning to high school but didn’t want to spend a semester taking classes when all she needed to graduate was a passing score on one exam.
Instead, she enrolled in a new program PSJA launched in the fall in conjunction with South Texas College that is designed for students who need only a few credits or a better TAKS score to graduate.
Ramos passed the test in October, graduated and is now studying to be a nurse at STC.
This week, PSJA began recruiting for next semester’s class of students for the College, Career & Technology Academy program. In the fall, 48 of the program’s 211 students graduated. The school’s principal, Leonore Tyler, said most of those who didn’t graduate are enrolled for the spring semester, which is set to start Jan. 16.
The program has now opened its doors to anyone under age 25 after previously focusing only on students who failed to graduate with the class of 2007.
“We’re very excited about working with that group as well, because … they have been out in that tough world for a few years,” said STC President Shirley Reed. “They know what it’s like not to have a diploma, not to be able to get a good job or a decent salary.”
Because students need a high school degree or equivalency to enroll in STC, the program helps students get a jump start on their studies by letting them take vocational and college preparatory classes while finishing up their high school work, Reed explained.
The district benefits by increasing its graduation rates and attendance, which plays a factor in determining how much funding it gets.
Tyler said 72 of the program’s students concurrently took STC classes with their high school studies at the academy. The majority of the graduates will take classes at STC or University of Texas-Pan American in the spring semester, she said.
“That’s one of our objectives for the school: to help students create some sort of … path, either to college or the career of their choice and to make sure they actually stick and stay there,” Tyler said.
Reed said she was moved when she attended the program’s graduation ceremony last month, since many of the students probably wouldn’t have earned their degrees without the help of the program.
Teaching the older students will be challenging, since many of them have children and jobs that would make attending school difficult, she said. Tyler said the school will work with students’ employers to tailor schedules, and Reed said STC is working with grassroots organizations to assist with childcare and transportation.
“I know they’ve all been tossed a lifesaver and a buoy,” Reed said.
Wednesday, January 09, 2008
Year in Review by the Education and Labor Committee
COMMITTEE LOOKS FORWARD AFTER A YEAR OF LANDMARK EDUCATION & LABOR SUCCESSES
*************************************************************************** *
With new leadership in Congress, 2007 was a year of victories for America's families. The Education and Labor Committee worked to:
1. Make college more affordable and accessible, while protecting students and parents from unscrupulous lenders, including:
- Enacting the single largest increase in college aid since the GI bill, at no new cost to taxpayers.
- Encouraging colleges to rein in price increases and clean up corrupt practices in student loan programs.
2. Enhance early childhood education by improving the Head Start program:
- Helping more children arrive at school ready to succeed by improving teacher and classroom quality, expanding access to Head Start for more children, improving comprehensive services for children in Head Start and their families, and ensuring that taxpayer dollars only fund Head Start centers that are well-run and high-quality.
3. Protect workers by preserving workers wages, including:
- Enacting the Fair Minimum Wage Act of 2007, increasing the minimum wage for the lowest paid 13 million Americans.
- Passing legislation to overturn a Supreme Court ruling that made it harder for workers to pursue pay discrimination claims.
- Preserving prevailing wage requirements for federally-funded construction projects.
4. Protect workers by preserving rights, including:
- Passing the Employee Free Choice Act to enable workers to bargain for better wages, benefits, and working conditions by restoring their rights to form unions.
- Passing the Employment Non-Discrimination Act to prohibit employment discrimination,
preferential treatment, and retaliation on the basis of sexual orientation by employers with 15 or more employees.
- Voting to restore bargaining rights to skilled, professional and trades workers.
- Passing a bill to extend collective bargaining rights to public safety workers in all 50 states.
5. Protect workers by preserving workplace safety, including:
- Voting to make the workplace safer for miners.
- Passing a bill to protect food flavoring workers from severe lung disease ("popcorn lung").
6. Protect workers by preserving health coverage, including:
- Passing a bill to provide leave time to military families.
- Voting to give Americans better access to mental health treatment.
- Passing the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act to protect personal genetic information from discriminatory use by health insurers and employers.
7. Protect American workers in an international economy, including:
- Passing a bill to assist workers affected by international trade.
- Passing a bill to rein in unscrupulous foreign labor recruiters.
8. Strengthen the economy through innovation by:
- Enacting the 21st Century Competitiveness Act to make major investments in education and job training programs to help encourage America’s innovative spirit and strengthen the nation’s economic competitiveness.
- Enacting legislation to prepare workers for "green collar" jobs to fight global warming.
9. Revive and protect communities through education and service, including:
- Providing aid to Gulf Coast area schools devastated by Hurricane Katrina.
- Voting to renew and improve national community service and volunteer programs.
http://edlabor.house.gov/publications/keyE&Lvictories121807.pdf
http://edlabordemocrats.congressnewsletter.net/mail/util.cfm?gpiv=1999920871.5652.283&gen=1
*************************************************************************** *
With new leadership in Congress, 2007 was a year of victories for America's families. The Education and Labor Committee worked to:
1. Make college more affordable and accessible, while protecting students and parents from unscrupulous lenders, including:
- Enacting the single largest increase in college aid since the GI bill, at no new cost to taxpayers.
- Encouraging colleges to rein in price increases and clean up corrupt practices in student loan programs.
2. Enhance early childhood education by improving the Head Start program:
- Helping more children arrive at school ready to succeed by improving teacher and classroom quality, expanding access to Head Start for more children, improving comprehensive services for children in Head Start and their families, and ensuring that taxpayer dollars only fund Head Start centers that are well-run and high-quality.
3. Protect workers by preserving workers wages, including:
- Enacting the Fair Minimum Wage Act of 2007, increasing the minimum wage for the lowest paid 13 million Americans.
- Passing legislation to overturn a Supreme Court ruling that made it harder for workers to pursue pay discrimination claims.
- Preserving prevailing wage requirements for federally-funded construction projects.
4. Protect workers by preserving rights, including:
- Passing the Employee Free Choice Act to enable workers to bargain for better wages, benefits, and working conditions by restoring their rights to form unions.
- Passing the Employment Non-Discrimination Act to prohibit employment discrimination,
preferential treatment, and retaliation on the basis of sexual orientation by employers with 15 or more employees.
- Voting to restore bargaining rights to skilled, professional and trades workers.
- Passing a bill to extend collective bargaining rights to public safety workers in all 50 states.
5. Protect workers by preserving workplace safety, including:
- Voting to make the workplace safer for miners.
- Passing a bill to protect food flavoring workers from severe lung disease ("popcorn lung").
6. Protect workers by preserving health coverage, including:
- Passing a bill to provide leave time to military families.
- Voting to give Americans better access to mental health treatment.
- Passing the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act to protect personal genetic information from discriminatory use by health insurers and employers.
7. Protect American workers in an international economy, including:
- Passing a bill to assist workers affected by international trade.
- Passing a bill to rein in unscrupulous foreign labor recruiters.
8. Strengthen the economy through innovation by:
- Enacting the 21st Century Competitiveness Act to make major investments in education and job training programs to help encourage America’s innovative spirit and strengthen the nation’s economic competitiveness.
- Enacting legislation to prepare workers for "green collar" jobs to fight global warming.
9. Revive and protect communities through education and service, including:
- Providing aid to Gulf Coast area schools devastated by Hurricane Katrina.
- Voting to renew and improve national community service and volunteer programs.
http://edlabor.house.gov/publications/keyE&Lvictories121807.pdf
http://edlabordemocrats.congressnewsletter.net/mail/util.cfm?gpiv=1999920871.5652.283&gen=1
Gates Donates $30 Million to on Education Campaign (Update1)
Gates Donates $30 Million to on Education Campaign (Update1)
By Matthew Keenan and William McQuillen
Jan. 3 (Bloomberg) -- Bill Gates is spending $30 million on the U.S. presidential campaign for a cause, not a candidate. The world's richest man plans to make education the No. 1 domestic priority with voters.
The 52-year-old Microsoft Corp. chairman has poured $3.4 billion into school improvements and scholarships since 2000 through his Seattle-based Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, according to the foundation's records. Now the charity says it is providing half the money for Strong American Schools, a bipartisan group with a $60 million effort called ``Ed in '08.''
The Washington-based organization, led by former Democratic Governor Roy Romer of Colorado, wants the next president to rally support for learning standards, increased pay and training for teachers, and longer class days and school years. It says those ideas would improve access to high-quality education, boost economic vitality and reduce the number of U.S. high school dropouts from 1.2 million a year.
Ed in '08 has been ``a strong presence out there in the field in the key primary states, getting the grassroots going, getting online going, getting volunteers going,'' said Jonathan Prince, deputy campaign manager for Democrat John Edwards, whose policy aides have conferred with Strong American Schools officials. ``They've taken a very smart approach.''
Nonpartisan Effort
The Gates-backed effort is nonpartisan by design, said Marc Lampkin, 43, the executive director of Strong American Schools and a deputy campaign director for Bush in 2000. Gates and Romer weren't available for comment. Lampkin said the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation in Los Angeles, a frequent Gates partner on education projects, is providing the other $30 million for the Strong American Schools' effort.
``The Gates name, the Gates brand, his commitment to philanthropy opens up lots of doors and avenues, and it really does, based on their enormous amount of effort they put into improving schools,'' Lampkin said in an interview today with Bloomberg radio.
Ed in '08 officials say they face an uphill fight in a year in which the war in Iraq, the economy and health care are issues with voters. A Dec. 11 ABC News/Washington Post poll showed only 1 percent of voters identified education as their overriding concern in the presidential campaign.
``It is very difficult for any special issue to break through, given how cluttered the terrain is,'' said Democratic consultant Chris Lehane, who worked for Al Gore's 2000 presidential bid and now supports Democratic Senator Hillary Clinton of New York.
Four-State Push
Strong American Schools has 125 staffers and consultants working in four early-voting states, according to organizers. They've attended more than 675 forums, posted an 87-page so- called toolkit for reform on the Internet and met with advisers for the major candidates.
Among New Hampshire residents planning to vote in the Democratic primary on Jan. 8, education tied with the economy for second among domestic issues, according to the ABC News/Washington Post poll. It was identified by 8 percent of respondents, compared with health care at 23 percent. In Iowa, which holds its caucuses today, 6 percent of Democrats made education their top concern, up from 3 percent in November.
The poll numbers rose as two Democratic candidates, Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois and Clinton, began airing television ads on education in those states.
Advertising Planned
Ed in '08 plans a multimillion-dollar ad campaign, likely to begin in March, that will focus on contested states led by Ohio and Florida and target voting blocs including married women and Hispanics, said communications director Chad Kolton.
Twelve of 15 major candidates support at least part of its platform. The group doesn't identify the candidates because charitable organizations are prohibited by law from publicly supporting or opposing candidates for office.
Ed in 08's leaders say education has become a highly partisan issue in the wake of the No Child Left Behind law, a priority for then-candidate George W. Bush when he first ran for president in 2000.
The law, enacted in 2002, requires about 50 million public school students to be tested in reading and math and raises standards for new teachers. All of the major Democratic candidates have been critical of the program, and efforts in Congress to change it stalled last fall.
No Position on Law
While aspects of Strong American School's program resemble No Child Left Behind, the group doesn't take a stand on the law or any other federal legislation. It also isn't pushing for more federal spending on schools or for a government-mandated national curriculum.
Lampkin said Republicans like him and Democrats, including Romer, who served as Los Angeles school superintendent from 2001-2006, agree that schools are in such an imperiled state that it's necessary to ``actually work on an issue that transcends party politics.''
The goal is to prod the next president into rallying support from governors, mayors and local school superintendents, ``using the bully pulpit to drive American consciousness around this issue,'' Lampkin said. With ``the next president, we have an opportunity to begin that process.''
Strong American Schools has set up field offices in Iowa and New Hampshire as well as Nevada and South Carolina. The group enlisted rapper Kanye West to record a public-service announcement and this month rolled out another, featuring young people reciting statistics about failing schools.
The Gates foundation, formed in 2000, is the world's biggest charitable fund, with assets valued at $37.6 billion. The figure includes $3.4 billion contributed by Warren Buffett, chairman of Berkshire Hathaway Inc.
Gates has ``a credibility that gives you the voice to actually challenge the politicians, to challenge the status quo,'' Lampkin said.
To contact the reporter on this story: Matthew Keenan in Boston at mkeenan6@bloomberg.net ; William McQuillen in Washington at bmcquillen@bloomberg.net
Last Updated: January 3, 2008 14:20 EST
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601103&sid=axlS9ALgtlUg&refer=us#
By Matthew Keenan and William McQuillen
Jan. 3 (Bloomberg) -- Bill Gates is spending $30 million on the U.S. presidential campaign for a cause, not a candidate. The world's richest man plans to make education the No. 1 domestic priority with voters.
The 52-year-old Microsoft Corp. chairman has poured $3.4 billion into school improvements and scholarships since 2000 through his Seattle-based Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, according to the foundation's records. Now the charity says it is providing half the money for Strong American Schools, a bipartisan group with a $60 million effort called ``Ed in '08.''
The Washington-based organization, led by former Democratic Governor Roy Romer of Colorado, wants the next president to rally support for learning standards, increased pay and training for teachers, and longer class days and school years. It says those ideas would improve access to high-quality education, boost economic vitality and reduce the number of U.S. high school dropouts from 1.2 million a year.
Ed in '08 has been ``a strong presence out there in the field in the key primary states, getting the grassroots going, getting online going, getting volunteers going,'' said Jonathan Prince, deputy campaign manager for Democrat John Edwards, whose policy aides have conferred with Strong American Schools officials. ``They've taken a very smart approach.''
Nonpartisan Effort
The Gates-backed effort is nonpartisan by design, said Marc Lampkin, 43, the executive director of Strong American Schools and a deputy campaign director for Bush in 2000. Gates and Romer weren't available for comment. Lampkin said the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation in Los Angeles, a frequent Gates partner on education projects, is providing the other $30 million for the Strong American Schools' effort.
``The Gates name, the Gates brand, his commitment to philanthropy opens up lots of doors and avenues, and it really does, based on their enormous amount of effort they put into improving schools,'' Lampkin said in an interview today with Bloomberg radio.
Ed in '08 officials say they face an uphill fight in a year in which the war in Iraq, the economy and health care are issues with voters. A Dec. 11 ABC News/Washington Post poll showed only 1 percent of voters identified education as their overriding concern in the presidential campaign.
``It is very difficult for any special issue to break through, given how cluttered the terrain is,'' said Democratic consultant Chris Lehane, who worked for Al Gore's 2000 presidential bid and now supports Democratic Senator Hillary Clinton of New York.
Four-State Push
Strong American Schools has 125 staffers and consultants working in four early-voting states, according to organizers. They've attended more than 675 forums, posted an 87-page so- called toolkit for reform on the Internet and met with advisers for the major candidates.
Among New Hampshire residents planning to vote in the Democratic primary on Jan. 8, education tied with the economy for second among domestic issues, according to the ABC News/Washington Post poll. It was identified by 8 percent of respondents, compared with health care at 23 percent. In Iowa, which holds its caucuses today, 6 percent of Democrats made education their top concern, up from 3 percent in November.
The poll numbers rose as two Democratic candidates, Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois and Clinton, began airing television ads on education in those states.
Advertising Planned
Ed in '08 plans a multimillion-dollar ad campaign, likely to begin in March, that will focus on contested states led by Ohio and Florida and target voting blocs including married women and Hispanics, said communications director Chad Kolton.
Twelve of 15 major candidates support at least part of its platform. The group doesn't identify the candidates because charitable organizations are prohibited by law from publicly supporting or opposing candidates for office.
Ed in 08's leaders say education has become a highly partisan issue in the wake of the No Child Left Behind law, a priority for then-candidate George W. Bush when he first ran for president in 2000.
The law, enacted in 2002, requires about 50 million public school students to be tested in reading and math and raises standards for new teachers. All of the major Democratic candidates have been critical of the program, and efforts in Congress to change it stalled last fall.
No Position on Law
While aspects of Strong American School's program resemble No Child Left Behind, the group doesn't take a stand on the law or any other federal legislation. It also isn't pushing for more federal spending on schools or for a government-mandated national curriculum.
Lampkin said Republicans like him and Democrats, including Romer, who served as Los Angeles school superintendent from 2001-2006, agree that schools are in such an imperiled state that it's necessary to ``actually work on an issue that transcends party politics.''
The goal is to prod the next president into rallying support from governors, mayors and local school superintendents, ``using the bully pulpit to drive American consciousness around this issue,'' Lampkin said. With ``the next president, we have an opportunity to begin that process.''
Strong American Schools has set up field offices in Iowa and New Hampshire as well as Nevada and South Carolina. The group enlisted rapper Kanye West to record a public-service announcement and this month rolled out another, featuring young people reciting statistics about failing schools.
The Gates foundation, formed in 2000, is the world's biggest charitable fund, with assets valued at $37.6 billion. The figure includes $3.4 billion contributed by Warren Buffett, chairman of Berkshire Hathaway Inc.
Gates has ``a credibility that gives you the voice to actually challenge the politicians, to challenge the status quo,'' Lampkin said.
To contact the reporter on this story: Matthew Keenan in Boston at mkeenan6@bloomberg.net ; William McQuillen in Washington at bmcquillen@bloomberg.net
Last Updated: January 3, 2008 14:20 EST
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601103&sid=axlS9ALgtlUg&refer=us#
How To Fix 'No Child'
How To Fix 'No Child'
By Edward M. Kennedy
Monday, January 7, 2008; Page A17
With renewal of the No Child Left Behind Act high on the agenda for the new session of Congress, it's no surprise that the 2002 law -- the Bush administration's signature domestic initiative -- has become a political football in this intense campaign season. The administration continues to speak glowingly of the law while Democratic candidates blast it. But simplistic campaign rhetoric hardly reflects what's actually happening on school reform.
Tomorrow is the sixth anniversary of the law's enactment. It's a good time to take realistic stock of things. Obviously, the results are mixed. Many elements of the reforms have produced encouraging progress for young children in public schools across the nation, and they deserve to be supported. Other aspects of the law have not been satisfactory, and some have been failures. These must be changed.
The stakes are high. At issue is a goal that Democrats have long embraced as a fundamental principle of our party -- opportunity for all Americans. Strengthening the nation's schools is essential for preparing our citizens to compete and win in the global economy. We in Congress have an obligation to parents, to teachers and, most of all, to schoolchildren across America to draw the right lessons from these past six years with the No Child Left Behind Act and put school reform on a stronger path for the future.
On the plus side, the law demands that all children must benefit -- black or white, immigrant or native-born, rich or poor, disabled or not. Before its enactment, only a handful of states monitored the achievement of every group of students in their schools. Today, all 50 states must do that. Across the country, schools are poring over student data to identify weaknesses in instruction and to improve teaching and learning. All schools now measure performance based not on the achievement of their average and above-average students but on their progress in helping below-average students reach high standards as well.
The positive changes are evident in the National Assessment of Educational Progress, better known as "The Nation's Report Card." The improvements are still modest, but they're noticeable, particularly among students who formerly were low achievers. We're beginning to see a narrowing of the achievement gap between white students and other students.
All of this is good news. But the law still needs major changes to bring out the best in all children. The process for rating troubled schools fails to reward incremental progress made by schools struggling to catch up. Its one-size-fits-all approach encourages "teaching to the test" and discourages innovation in the classroom. We need to encourage local decision makers to use a broader array of information, beyond test scores, to determine which schools need small adjustments and which need extensive reforms.
The act doesn't do enough to support teachers as the professionals they are by training and mentoring them and by placing good teachers in the schools that need them most. It fails to deal with the dropout crisis, which puts large numbers of young students beyond the reach of the American dream. It doesn't involve parents enough in helping their children succeed. It falls short in achieving smaller classes so that teachers can give children the one-on-one attention they need.
Most of all, the law fails to supply the essential resources that schools desperately need to improve their performance. We can't achieve progress for all students on the cheap. No child should have to attend crumbling schools or learn from an outdated textbook, regardless of where he or she lives. It's disgraceful that President Bush has failed to include adequate funding for school reform in his education budgets. Struggling schools can do only so much on a tin-cup budget.
Four decades ago, my brother Robert Kennedy asked at a Senate hearing on education: "What happened to the children?" That question is as appropriate today as it was in 1966. We're still not doing enough for the nation's schools and children.
As Democrats and Republicans choose their nominees in our democratic process, and as President Bush prepares to deliver his last State of the Union address, let us all remember that we owe it to our children and our children's children to put progress ahead of politics and support what is working in school reform, and to work together to fix what is not.
The writer, a Democratic senator from Massachusetts, was a lead author of the No Child Left Behind Act.
By Edward M. Kennedy
Monday, January 7, 2008; Page A17
With renewal of the No Child Left Behind Act high on the agenda for the new session of Congress, it's no surprise that the 2002 law -- the Bush administration's signature domestic initiative -- has become a political football in this intense campaign season. The administration continues to speak glowingly of the law while Democratic candidates blast it. But simplistic campaign rhetoric hardly reflects what's actually happening on school reform.
Tomorrow is the sixth anniversary of the law's enactment. It's a good time to take realistic stock of things. Obviously, the results are mixed. Many elements of the reforms have produced encouraging progress for young children in public schools across the nation, and they deserve to be supported. Other aspects of the law have not been satisfactory, and some have been failures. These must be changed.
The stakes are high. At issue is a goal that Democrats have long embraced as a fundamental principle of our party -- opportunity for all Americans. Strengthening the nation's schools is essential for preparing our citizens to compete and win in the global economy. We in Congress have an obligation to parents, to teachers and, most of all, to schoolchildren across America to draw the right lessons from these past six years with the No Child Left Behind Act and put school reform on a stronger path for the future.
On the plus side, the law demands that all children must benefit -- black or white, immigrant or native-born, rich or poor, disabled or not. Before its enactment, only a handful of states monitored the achievement of every group of students in their schools. Today, all 50 states must do that. Across the country, schools are poring over student data to identify weaknesses in instruction and to improve teaching and learning. All schools now measure performance based not on the achievement of their average and above-average students but on their progress in helping below-average students reach high standards as well.
The positive changes are evident in the National Assessment of Educational Progress, better known as "The Nation's Report Card." The improvements are still modest, but they're noticeable, particularly among students who formerly were low achievers. We're beginning to see a narrowing of the achievement gap between white students and other students.
All of this is good news. But the law still needs major changes to bring out the best in all children. The process for rating troubled schools fails to reward incremental progress made by schools struggling to catch up. Its one-size-fits-all approach encourages "teaching to the test" and discourages innovation in the classroom. We need to encourage local decision makers to use a broader array of information, beyond test scores, to determine which schools need small adjustments and which need extensive reforms.
The act doesn't do enough to support teachers as the professionals they are by training and mentoring them and by placing good teachers in the schools that need them most. It fails to deal with the dropout crisis, which puts large numbers of young students beyond the reach of the American dream. It doesn't involve parents enough in helping their children succeed. It falls short in achieving smaller classes so that teachers can give children the one-on-one attention they need.
Most of all, the law fails to supply the essential resources that schools desperately need to improve their performance. We can't achieve progress for all students on the cheap. No child should have to attend crumbling schools or learn from an outdated textbook, regardless of where he or she lives. It's disgraceful that President Bush has failed to include adequate funding for school reform in his education budgets. Struggling schools can do only so much on a tin-cup budget.
Four decades ago, my brother Robert Kennedy asked at a Senate hearing on education: "What happened to the children?" That question is as appropriate today as it was in 1966. We're still not doing enough for the nation's schools and children.
As Democrats and Republicans choose their nominees in our democratic process, and as President Bush prepares to deliver his last State of the Union address, let us all remember that we owe it to our children and our children's children to put progress ahead of politics and support what is working in school reform, and to work together to fix what is not.
The writer, a Democratic senator from Massachusetts, was a lead author of the No Child Left Behind Act.
Texas Virtual Academy lets kids attend public school online
Texas Virtual Academy lets kids attend public school online
06:11 AM CST on Monday, January 7, 2008
By KAREN AYRES SMITH / The Dallas Morning News
kayres@dallasnews.com
Going to school now means going online for Victoria McClure-Esqueda.
JIM MAHONEY/DMN
Victoria McClure-Esqueda, 8, squeezes her eyes shut to envision the correct answer to a math problem at home in Irving with her mother, Jenifer McClure. Victoria attends school online, but workbooks are still in the equation.
The Irving 8-year-old is one of hundreds of students across North Texas who have enrolled at the Texas Virtual Academy at Southwest, an online public school that opened to area students for the first time in 2007.
The students work at home and study a curriculum created by a contracted company, but they can earn the same credits as students who attend any other public school in the state.
For Victoria, online learning means studying some advanced fourth-grade courses and, perhaps more important, not slacking off.
Also Online
Link: Southwest Schools
Link: K12
Link: TEA electronic course pilot description
"She kind of just decided to zone out at school," said Jenifer McClure, Victoria's mother. "If she's at home, we know she won't be zoning out because she doesn't have that option."
The growing program puts Texas in the middle of a booming national experiment with online education.
Companies across the country have signed lucrative deals with state and local education agencies to offer curriculum and technology services in exchange for part of the money that typically goes to local school districts.
Advocates and scholars of online education say the technology lets students work at their own speeds, but monitoring student attendance and performance can be challenging when students don't see their teachers every day.
The Texas Education Agency has long allowed school districts to offer some online courses, but this program marks a major shift because the state is now paying a public charter school to educate students who never attend the school building.
The program looks a lot like home-schooling, but it carries far more requirements: Professional teachers monitor students' attendance and academic progress every day. The students must also pass the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills tests.
Kate Loughrey, TEA's distance-learning director, said TEA is closely monitoring the school's test scores and other factors to see what works. The results could shape virtual education across the state for years to come.
"We knew as a state that [online learning] is something that can offer terrific opportunities to kids in different situations," Ms. Loughrey said. "We're conducting the program so we can learn what we need to learn as a state in order to support and enable quality online learning."
Computer provided
Victoria starts her day around 8 a.m.
A precocious middle child, she plops in front of a computer squeezed next to a television in her family's Irving apartment. The school sent the computer and boxes of supplies at no cost when she enrolled last month.
First up is answering her teacher's question of the day – today, it's in history – designed to prepare her for the upcoming state TAKS tests that all virtual students must take.
Victoria pinpoints the location of the original 13 colonies. By sending her answer, she confirms to her virtual teacher that she is present for the day.
Her dad and at-home teacher, Joe Esqueda, lets her pick her next subject. The school lays out her schedule for the day, but she gets to choose the order.
Her pick, as usual, is math.
She has already studied the introduction to dividing large numbers online, so she moves over to one of several workbooks scattered across a coffee table. Much of her time is spent offline, reading books or doing experiments, for example.
Victoria was a third-grader at Gilbert Elementary, but her placement test for virtual school showed she was ready for fourth grade in some subjects, including math.
Her dad helps with a tough question.
When they both need help, they e-mail her virtual teacher. Or Ms. McClure fills in when she gets home from work.
"If she is stuck on it, we can go over it 300 times," Ms. McClure says.
Victoria must earn at least an 80 percent on this lesson's assessment to move to the next one. She asks her mom for help, but her parents won't assist when it comes to grades.
"It's a test; I can't touch it," Ms. McClure tells her daughter.
Victoria will soon get a break for lunch. By the end of the day, she'll have spent about six hours working on her lessons, even literature, which she could do without.
Most days, she'll also have run around a track for exercise and attended Girl Scout meetings or outings with other virtual school students to hang out with kids.
"It's fun," Victoria says of virtual school.
That's a big step for a girl who was so bored at school a few months ago that she didn't turn in completed assignments. Her dad found them under the couch.
Still, her parents aren't sure whether it would work for their other two children – Megan, 6, and Alex, 11 – who both do well at Gilbert Elementary.
Victoria "wants to be the center of attention at all times," Mr. Esqueda says with a laugh as he turns to his daughter. "Now finish your assessment, baby girl. Now."
One size 'doesn't fit all'
Victoria is one of about 550 students who have enrolled in the virtual academy as part of the state's electronic course program.
Many students want the chance to work at an advanced or slower pace. Some are home-schooled. Others suffer from medical problems that make school attendance difficult.
"I've been in the public school classroom to know that one size really doesn't fit all," said Feyi Obamehinti, Victoria's teacher who has taught in Irving and Dallas. "Students here are looked at individually, not across a grade level."
The state granted Southwest Schools, a Houston-based charter school, permission to launch the virtual school a few years ago for students in the Houston area. It received approval to expand in the Dallas and Fort Worth regions in September. It's capped statewide at 750 students.
The school signed an agreement with K12, a Virginia-based company that provides content for 39,500 students in 17 state-run virtual schools and other programs across the country.
The deal calls for K12 to provide computers, curriculum and support in exchange for a portion of the state funding. The final cost will depend on how many students enroll. K12's revenues have soared from work in other states. The company went public Dec. 13.
Mary Gifford, a K12 vice president who covers the Texas region, said K12 adjusted its curriculum to match the requirements in Texas. For example, the company created a Texas history course for seventh-graders.
"This has been a gigantic investment on K12's part into the state of Texas," Ms. Gifford said.
Reviewing TAKS data
The state leaves it up to Southwest to run the program.
"Just like with bricks-and-mortar schools, we presume that teachers are doing their jobs and teaching what needs to be taught," Ms. Loughrey said. "We don't send people in the classroom to observe them."
Leaders of K12 and Southwest say they rely on parents, technology and their staff of teachers to monitor attendance and progress. A student who wants to sit on the couch all day will not last, they say.
"It's not the classroom for all students; it's the classroom for some students," said Janelle James, chief academic and operating officer for Southwest Schools. "The student who might not benefit from this program is someone who needs that interaction on an everyday basis."
Virtual academy officials say results from 2007 show that average TAKS scores for students in the Houston program exceeded state requirements, but Ms. Loughrey said the agency is still reviewing the data.
"We're taking it one year at a time," she said. "They don't have unlimited approval."
Nationally, online education for kids in elementary through high school has grown by about 30 percent a year since 1997 to 92,000 full-time students and thousands of part-time students taking roughly 1 million courses, according to the North American Council for Online Learning.
"We haven't even scratched the surface of offering online courses that students and parents want to see," said Susan Patrick, the group's president.
Still, John Hoyle, a professor of educational administration at Texas A&M University, said there is no research to show learning with technology is any better than learning in a traditional classroom.
"We have no solid evidence," he said. "We haven't come up with sophisticated enough techniques to see if technology really improves learning over a traditional classroom."
Dr. Hoyle said online programs can be hard to hold accountable, but they can be a good option for some students not served well by a traditional school.
K12's success will depend on reaching parents of those students. The company has held several information sessions in the Dallas-Fort Worth area since fall. More are scheduled this month.
After a recent session in Fort Worth, Tanya Kirkland, a home-schooling mom, said she decided to enroll her daughter, a sixth-grader.
"My concern is meeting my individual child's needs," said Ms. Kirkland of Waxahachie. "I don't want to see her stifled."
HOW DOES ONLINE SCHOOL WORK?
How does the Texas Virtual Academy at Southwest work?
Who is eligible?
Students in grades three to eight who live in three of the Texas Education Agency's geographic regions: Region IV (Houston/Galveston), Region X (Dallas) or Region XI (Fort Worth). The program is limited to a total of 750 students.
How much does it cost families?
Nothing. Students work at home on computers. The school does not charge tuition, lends a computer to students and provides all instructional materials. Families can be reimbursed for their Internet connections.
Who runs the school?
Southwest Schools, a Houston-based charter school, partnered with a company called K12 to provide curriculum and management services. K12 is a national for-profit company that runs virtual schools across the country.
Who created the curriculum?
K12 uses teachers and other experts to create the online curriculum. It was adapted to meet requirements in Texas.
What courses are offered?
Language arts, math, science, history, music and art are the core courses. There will also be other courses in the appropriate grade levels, such as physical education.
Does the school have teachers?
Yes. Teachers monitor students' academic progress and attendance. They conduct virtual lessons and answer questions from students and parents. Each teacher works with roughly 50 students.
How does the school monitor attendance?
Students must respond to daily questions issued by their virtual teachers. Teachers also monitor students' progress on completing required lessons. Students who don't meet attendance rules can be held responsible under truancy laws.
How does the state measure accountability?
All students must take the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills.
How is the program funded?
The state pays Southwest Schools roughly the same per-pupil funds other public schools receive. Southwest pays the teachers, receives a 2 percent oversight fee, and receives some additional fees for academy-related expenses. K12 retains the remaining funds. Total funds for this year will depend on final enrollment.
06:11 AM CST on Monday, January 7, 2008
By KAREN AYRES SMITH / The Dallas Morning News
kayres@dallasnews.com
Going to school now means going online for Victoria McClure-Esqueda.
JIM MAHONEY/DMN
Victoria McClure-Esqueda, 8, squeezes her eyes shut to envision the correct answer to a math problem at home in Irving with her mother, Jenifer McClure. Victoria attends school online, but workbooks are still in the equation.
The Irving 8-year-old is one of hundreds of students across North Texas who have enrolled at the Texas Virtual Academy at Southwest, an online public school that opened to area students for the first time in 2007.
The students work at home and study a curriculum created by a contracted company, but they can earn the same credits as students who attend any other public school in the state.
For Victoria, online learning means studying some advanced fourth-grade courses and, perhaps more important, not slacking off.
Also Online
Link: Southwest Schools
Link: K12
Link: TEA electronic course pilot description
"She kind of just decided to zone out at school," said Jenifer McClure, Victoria's mother. "If she's at home, we know she won't be zoning out because she doesn't have that option."
The growing program puts Texas in the middle of a booming national experiment with online education.
Companies across the country have signed lucrative deals with state and local education agencies to offer curriculum and technology services in exchange for part of the money that typically goes to local school districts.
Advocates and scholars of online education say the technology lets students work at their own speeds, but monitoring student attendance and performance can be challenging when students don't see their teachers every day.
The Texas Education Agency has long allowed school districts to offer some online courses, but this program marks a major shift because the state is now paying a public charter school to educate students who never attend the school building.
The program looks a lot like home-schooling, but it carries far more requirements: Professional teachers monitor students' attendance and academic progress every day. The students must also pass the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills tests.
Kate Loughrey, TEA's distance-learning director, said TEA is closely monitoring the school's test scores and other factors to see what works. The results could shape virtual education across the state for years to come.
"We knew as a state that [online learning] is something that can offer terrific opportunities to kids in different situations," Ms. Loughrey said. "We're conducting the program so we can learn what we need to learn as a state in order to support and enable quality online learning."
Computer provided
Victoria starts her day around 8 a.m.
A precocious middle child, she plops in front of a computer squeezed next to a television in her family's Irving apartment. The school sent the computer and boxes of supplies at no cost when she enrolled last month.
First up is answering her teacher's question of the day – today, it's in history – designed to prepare her for the upcoming state TAKS tests that all virtual students must take.
Victoria pinpoints the location of the original 13 colonies. By sending her answer, she confirms to her virtual teacher that she is present for the day.
Her dad and at-home teacher, Joe Esqueda, lets her pick her next subject. The school lays out her schedule for the day, but she gets to choose the order.
Her pick, as usual, is math.
She has already studied the introduction to dividing large numbers online, so she moves over to one of several workbooks scattered across a coffee table. Much of her time is spent offline, reading books or doing experiments, for example.
Victoria was a third-grader at Gilbert Elementary, but her placement test for virtual school showed she was ready for fourth grade in some subjects, including math.
Her dad helps with a tough question.
When they both need help, they e-mail her virtual teacher. Or Ms. McClure fills in when she gets home from work.
"If she is stuck on it, we can go over it 300 times," Ms. McClure says.
Victoria must earn at least an 80 percent on this lesson's assessment to move to the next one. She asks her mom for help, but her parents won't assist when it comes to grades.
"It's a test; I can't touch it," Ms. McClure tells her daughter.
Victoria will soon get a break for lunch. By the end of the day, she'll have spent about six hours working on her lessons, even literature, which she could do without.
Most days, she'll also have run around a track for exercise and attended Girl Scout meetings or outings with other virtual school students to hang out with kids.
"It's fun," Victoria says of virtual school.
That's a big step for a girl who was so bored at school a few months ago that she didn't turn in completed assignments. Her dad found them under the couch.
Still, her parents aren't sure whether it would work for their other two children – Megan, 6, and Alex, 11 – who both do well at Gilbert Elementary.
Victoria "wants to be the center of attention at all times," Mr. Esqueda says with a laugh as he turns to his daughter. "Now finish your assessment, baby girl. Now."
One size 'doesn't fit all'
Victoria is one of about 550 students who have enrolled in the virtual academy as part of the state's electronic course program.
Many students want the chance to work at an advanced or slower pace. Some are home-schooled. Others suffer from medical problems that make school attendance difficult.
"I've been in the public school classroom to know that one size really doesn't fit all," said Feyi Obamehinti, Victoria's teacher who has taught in Irving and Dallas. "Students here are looked at individually, not across a grade level."
The state granted Southwest Schools, a Houston-based charter school, permission to launch the virtual school a few years ago for students in the Houston area. It received approval to expand in the Dallas and Fort Worth regions in September. It's capped statewide at 750 students.
The school signed an agreement with K12, a Virginia-based company that provides content for 39,500 students in 17 state-run virtual schools and other programs across the country.
The deal calls for K12 to provide computers, curriculum and support in exchange for a portion of the state funding. The final cost will depend on how many students enroll. K12's revenues have soared from work in other states. The company went public Dec. 13.
Mary Gifford, a K12 vice president who covers the Texas region, said K12 adjusted its curriculum to match the requirements in Texas. For example, the company created a Texas history course for seventh-graders.
"This has been a gigantic investment on K12's part into the state of Texas," Ms. Gifford said.
Reviewing TAKS data
The state leaves it up to Southwest to run the program.
"Just like with bricks-and-mortar schools, we presume that teachers are doing their jobs and teaching what needs to be taught," Ms. Loughrey said. "We don't send people in the classroom to observe them."
Leaders of K12 and Southwest say they rely on parents, technology and their staff of teachers to monitor attendance and progress. A student who wants to sit on the couch all day will not last, they say.
"It's not the classroom for all students; it's the classroom for some students," said Janelle James, chief academic and operating officer for Southwest Schools. "The student who might not benefit from this program is someone who needs that interaction on an everyday basis."
Virtual academy officials say results from 2007 show that average TAKS scores for students in the Houston program exceeded state requirements, but Ms. Loughrey said the agency is still reviewing the data.
"We're taking it one year at a time," she said. "They don't have unlimited approval."
Nationally, online education for kids in elementary through high school has grown by about 30 percent a year since 1997 to 92,000 full-time students and thousands of part-time students taking roughly 1 million courses, according to the North American Council for Online Learning.
"We haven't even scratched the surface of offering online courses that students and parents want to see," said Susan Patrick, the group's president.
Still, John Hoyle, a professor of educational administration at Texas A&M University, said there is no research to show learning with technology is any better than learning in a traditional classroom.
"We have no solid evidence," he said. "We haven't come up with sophisticated enough techniques to see if technology really improves learning over a traditional classroom."
Dr. Hoyle said online programs can be hard to hold accountable, but they can be a good option for some students not served well by a traditional school.
K12's success will depend on reaching parents of those students. The company has held several information sessions in the Dallas-Fort Worth area since fall. More are scheduled this month.
After a recent session in Fort Worth, Tanya Kirkland, a home-schooling mom, said she decided to enroll her daughter, a sixth-grader.
"My concern is meeting my individual child's needs," said Ms. Kirkland of Waxahachie. "I don't want to see her stifled."
HOW DOES ONLINE SCHOOL WORK?
How does the Texas Virtual Academy at Southwest work?
Who is eligible?
Students in grades three to eight who live in three of the Texas Education Agency's geographic regions: Region IV (Houston/Galveston), Region X (Dallas) or Region XI (Fort Worth). The program is limited to a total of 750 students.
How much does it cost families?
Nothing. Students work at home on computers. The school does not charge tuition, lends a computer to students and provides all instructional materials. Families can be reimbursed for their Internet connections.
Who runs the school?
Southwest Schools, a Houston-based charter school, partnered with a company called K12 to provide curriculum and management services. K12 is a national for-profit company that runs virtual schools across the country.
Who created the curriculum?
K12 uses teachers and other experts to create the online curriculum. It was adapted to meet requirements in Texas.
What courses are offered?
Language arts, math, science, history, music and art are the core courses. There will also be other courses in the appropriate grade levels, such as physical education.
Does the school have teachers?
Yes. Teachers monitor students' academic progress and attendance. They conduct virtual lessons and answer questions from students and parents. Each teacher works with roughly 50 students.
How does the school monitor attendance?
Students must respond to daily questions issued by their virtual teachers. Teachers also monitor students' progress on completing required lessons. Students who don't meet attendance rules can be held responsible under truancy laws.
How does the state measure accountability?
All students must take the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills.
How is the program funded?
The state pays Southwest Schools roughly the same per-pupil funds other public schools receive. Southwest pays the teachers, receives a 2 percent oversight fee, and receives some additional fees for academy-related expenses. K12 retains the remaining funds. Total funds for this year will depend on final enrollment.
REPORTS TOUTING VOUCHERS TO REDUCE DROPOUT RATES FOUND TO BE OF POOR QUALITY
Education Policy Research Unit (EPRU) at ASU
Education and the Public Interest Center (EPIC) at CU-Boulder
****NEWS RELEASE--FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE****
REPORTS TOUTING VOUCHERS TO REDUCE DROPOUT RATES FOUND TO BE OF POOR QUALITY
Review concludes that the conclusions reached by Friedman Foundation series on
voucher program benefits "are not trustworthy."
Contact: Sherman Dorn, (813) 205-6143; (email) [sherman.dorn@gmail.com]
Kevin Welner, (303) 492-8370; (email) [kevin.welner@gmail.com]
TEMPE, Ariz and BOULDER, Colo. (Jan. 9, 2008) -- A series of five reports
released from early 2006 through late 2007 asserts that dropout rates could be
reduced with the implementation of private-school voucher programs. A new review
of those reports, however, finds that they "cherry-pick" research authority and
ignore an abundance of relevant research on high school graduation.
The five reports, each specific to a given state -- Missouri, Indiana, Texas,
South Carolina, and North Carolina -- are written in a parallel structure, with
only "the details of the arguments chang[ing] in a formulaic manner for each
state in question," according to Professor Sherman Dorn of the University of
South Florida, who reviewed the reports for the Think Tank Review Project. All
these reports were written by researcher Brian Gottlob and published by the
Milton and Rose D. Friedman Foundation.
Among their more serious flaws, Dorn finds that all five reports:
* inadequately use existing research on dropping out and school competition;
* present a superficial calculation of the costs of dropping out;
* improperly rely on a single, imperfect 1998 article as the entire basis
for their calculations on the purported impact of voucher programs on improving
graduation rates; and
* ignore possible alternative approaches for raising graduation rates,
instead focusing exclusively on private school voucher programs. Dorn writes:
"Without a comparative analysis of alternative proposals to increase high school
graduation, the reports are of little practical use to policymakers who have no
means by which to gauge the value of vouchers versus other alternatives."
On their argument for vouchers as a remedy to reduce dropout rates, Dorn found
that the reports "cherry-pick" a 1998 article to support the association while
ignoring other, contradictory research. Moreover, these reports lack appropriate
transparency in their calculations that apply that earlier article's formula to
each state's dropout data. Absent the necessary statistical details, "the
reports' conclusions about the benefits of school voucher programs are not
trustworthy," Dorn says.
At the same time, he adds, "the reports make no mention of the extensive
literature exploring graduation, dropping out, and the factors that shape
educational attainment." As a result, "each report obscures other program
options that policy-makers could consider." These other options include
preschool programs and intervention in elementary and high school grades.
In addition, the reports offer only an oversimplified analysis of the costs of
dropping out, both to individuals and to society. In doing so, Dorn explains,
they ignore the "extensive, published debate among economists" who have found
that understanding the impact of dropping out is much more complex. Dropping out
is a real problem, he notes, and it deserves serious rather than superficial
analysis.
Finally, Dorn finds carelessness ranging from misleading graphs to misspelling
the author of the 1998 article relied on for calculating the alleged benefits of
vouchers in reducing dropout rates.
Dorn notes that the way the reports present data has the effect of exaggerating
the dropout problems in each state. In one egregious instance, the report on
South Carolina uses a misleading bar graph where the lengths of the bars do not
correspond to the numbers reported. This report wrongly implies that there are
more dropouts in the state than college graduates. The reports' sloppy
presentation does nothing to advance public understanding of dropping out.
Dorn also notes that the dropout rates should be cause for concern using any
reasonable approach for the calculations, but the Friedman Foundation reports
are not credible.
Dorn concludes by advising state policy makers who are interested in increasing
graduation to bypass these reports and instead seek out "the available,
well-researched scholarship on the topic," much of which he identifies in the
review.
Find Sherman Dorn's review on the web at:
[http://epsl.asu.edu/epru/ttreviews/EPSL-0801-248-EPRU.pdf]
About the Think Tank Review Project
The Think Tank Review Project ([http://thinktankreview.org]), a collaborative
project of the ASU Education Policy Research Unit (EPRU) and CU-Boulder's
Education and the Public Interest Center (EPIC), provides the public, policy
makers, and the press with timely, academically sound reviews of selected think
tank publications. The project is made possible by funding from the Great Lakes
Center for Education Research and Practice.
Kevin Welner, the project co-director, explains that the project is needed
because, "despite their garnering of media attention and their influence with
many policy makers, reports released by private think tanks vary tremendously in
their quality. Many think tank reports are little more than ideological
argumentation dressed up as research. Many others include flaws that would
likely have been identified and addressed through the peer review process. We
believe that the media, policy makers, and the public will greatly benefit from
having qualified social scientists provide reviews of these documents in a
timely fashion." He adds, "we don't consider our reviews to be the final word,
nor is our goal to stop think tanks' contributions to a public dialogue. That
dialogue is, in fact, what we value the most. The best ideas come about through
rigorous critique and debate."
CONTACT:
Sherman Dorn, Associate Professor of Education
University of South Florida
(813) 205-6143
[sherman.dorn@gmail.com]
Kevin Welner, Professor and Director
Education and the Public Interest Center
University of Colorado at Boulder
(303) 492-8370
[kevin.welner@gmail.com]
Education and the Public Interest Center (EPIC) at CU-Boulder
****NEWS RELEASE--FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE****
REPORTS TOUTING VOUCHERS TO REDUCE DROPOUT RATES FOUND TO BE OF POOR QUALITY
Review concludes that the conclusions reached by Friedman Foundation series on
voucher program benefits "are not trustworthy."
Contact: Sherman Dorn, (813) 205-6143; (email) [sherman.dorn@gmail.com]
Kevin Welner, (303) 492-8370; (email) [kevin.welner@gmail.com]
TEMPE, Ariz and BOULDER, Colo. (Jan. 9, 2008) -- A series of five reports
released from early 2006 through late 2007 asserts that dropout rates could be
reduced with the implementation of private-school voucher programs. A new review
of those reports, however, finds that they "cherry-pick" research authority and
ignore an abundance of relevant research on high school graduation.
The five reports, each specific to a given state -- Missouri, Indiana, Texas,
South Carolina, and North Carolina -- are written in a parallel structure, with
only "the details of the arguments chang[ing] in a formulaic manner for each
state in question," according to Professor Sherman Dorn of the University of
South Florida, who reviewed the reports for the Think Tank Review Project. All
these reports were written by researcher Brian Gottlob and published by the
Milton and Rose D. Friedman Foundation.
Among their more serious flaws, Dorn finds that all five reports:
* inadequately use existing research on dropping out and school competition;
* present a superficial calculation of the costs of dropping out;
* improperly rely on a single, imperfect 1998 article as the entire basis
for their calculations on the purported impact of voucher programs on improving
graduation rates; and
* ignore possible alternative approaches for raising graduation rates,
instead focusing exclusively on private school voucher programs. Dorn writes:
"Without a comparative analysis of alternative proposals to increase high school
graduation, the reports are of little practical use to policymakers who have no
means by which to gauge the value of vouchers versus other alternatives."
On their argument for vouchers as a remedy to reduce dropout rates, Dorn found
that the reports "cherry-pick" a 1998 article to support the association while
ignoring other, contradictory research. Moreover, these reports lack appropriate
transparency in their calculations that apply that earlier article's formula to
each state's dropout data. Absent the necessary statistical details, "the
reports' conclusions about the benefits of school voucher programs are not
trustworthy," Dorn says.
At the same time, he adds, "the reports make no mention of the extensive
literature exploring graduation, dropping out, and the factors that shape
educational attainment." As a result, "each report obscures other program
options that policy-makers could consider." These other options include
preschool programs and intervention in elementary and high school grades.
In addition, the reports offer only an oversimplified analysis of the costs of
dropping out, both to individuals and to society. In doing so, Dorn explains,
they ignore the "extensive, published debate among economists" who have found
that understanding the impact of dropping out is much more complex. Dropping out
is a real problem, he notes, and it deserves serious rather than superficial
analysis.
Finally, Dorn finds carelessness ranging from misleading graphs to misspelling
the author of the 1998 article relied on for calculating the alleged benefits of
vouchers in reducing dropout rates.
Dorn notes that the way the reports present data has the effect of exaggerating
the dropout problems in each state. In one egregious instance, the report on
South Carolina uses a misleading bar graph where the lengths of the bars do not
correspond to the numbers reported. This report wrongly implies that there are
more dropouts in the state than college graduates. The reports' sloppy
presentation does nothing to advance public understanding of dropping out.
Dorn also notes that the dropout rates should be cause for concern using any
reasonable approach for the calculations, but the Friedman Foundation reports
are not credible.
Dorn concludes by advising state policy makers who are interested in increasing
graduation to bypass these reports and instead seek out "the available,
well-researched scholarship on the topic," much of which he identifies in the
review.
Find Sherman Dorn's review on the web at:
[http://epsl.asu.edu/epru/ttreviews/EPSL-0801-248-EPRU.pdf]
About the Think Tank Review Project
The Think Tank Review Project ([http://thinktankreview.org]), a collaborative
project of the ASU Education Policy Research Unit (EPRU) and CU-Boulder's
Education and the Public Interest Center (EPIC), provides the public, policy
makers, and the press with timely, academically sound reviews of selected think
tank publications. The project is made possible by funding from the Great Lakes
Center for Education Research and Practice.
Kevin Welner, the project co-director, explains that the project is needed
because, "despite their garnering of media attention and their influence with
many policy makers, reports released by private think tanks vary tremendously in
their quality. Many think tank reports are little more than ideological
argumentation dressed up as research. Many others include flaws that would
likely have been identified and addressed through the peer review process. We
believe that the media, policy makers, and the public will greatly benefit from
having qualified social scientists provide reviews of these documents in a
timely fashion." He adds, "we don't consider our reviews to be the final word,
nor is our goal to stop think tanks' contributions to a public dialogue. That
dialogue is, in fact, what we value the most. The best ideas come about through
rigorous critique and debate."
CONTACT:
Sherman Dorn, Associate Professor of Education
University of South Florida
(813) 205-6143
[sherman.dorn@gmail.com]
Kevin Welner, Professor and Director
Education and the Public Interest Center
University of Colorado at Boulder
(303) 492-8370
[kevin.welner@gmail.com]
NEW BOOK PROVIDES EXAMINATION AND EVALUTION OF NCLB
Press Release
Contact: Gail Sunderman
glsunderman@yahoo.com, 410-435-1207
NEW BOOK PROVIDES EXAMINATION AND EVALUTION OF THE NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND ACT
Los Angeles-January 9, 2008-A new book from The Civil Rights
Project/Proyecto Derechos Civiles (CRP/PDC) at UCLA's Graduate School
of Education and Information Studies evaluates and accesses the
efficacy of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) test-based
accountability in today's schools. The book, Holding NCLB
Accountable: Achieving Accountability, Equity, and School Reform
(Corwin Press, 2008), is edited by CRP/PDC senior researcher Gail L.
Sunderman.
The pending reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind Act has
generated a spirited debate among educators. In this book, a team of
noted education scholars assess NCLB's performance-based system and
discuss options for improving the law. With contributions from Gary
Orfield, Linda Darling Hammond, Catherine Snow, Robert Linn, and
Daniel Koretz, among others, Holding NCLB Accountable examines themes
of capacity, accountablity, school reform, and the law's impact on
educating all students, especially those from low-income and diverse
backgrounds. It responds to critical questions such as the following:
. How do we develop assessments and accountabilty systems that assist
rather than interfere with educational progress?
. How do we press for change without being counterproductive?
. How do we create a viable educational agenda that is mindful of
state and local capacity?
Harvard testing expert Daniel Koretz argues that the entire NCLB
accountabiltiy system is not based on hard evidence. Koretz says, "We
know far too little about how to hold schools accountable for
improving student performance."
Jaekyung Lee, associate professor of education at the State
University of New York in Buffalo, compares the findings from the
National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) to state assessment
results and shows that the federal accountability hasn't improved
reading and mathematical achievement or reduced achievement gaps.
"Based on the NAEP, there are no systemic indications of improving the
average achievement and narrowing the gap after NCLB," says Lee.
Other contributors suggest that the nation has not focused on the
kinds of serious long-term reforms that can actually produce gains and
narrow the huge gaps in opportunity and achievement for minority
students.
Throughout the book, contributors provide information on what we
know and don't know about educational accountability and what types of
accountalbity systems will most improve opportunties for
low-performing students while minimizing the negative effects. They
provide the groundwork for developing a system of multiple measures,
for obtaining evidence on whether NCLB is achieving its aim to
increase student achievement and close the racial achievement gap, and
tackling the very important issue of whether states have the financial
and administrative capacity to meet the law's requirements and turn
around low-performing schools. Finally, contributors examine whether
NCLB maximizes its potential for fostering reform in low-performing
schools. Taken together, these discussions raise important questions
about the law's effects and offer strong recommendations for designing
workable accountablity systems that will lead to coherent efforts to
improve schools.
Among the authors' findings are the following:
. We know too little about what types of accountability systems will
most improve opportunities for low-performing students.
. The current NCLB accountability system does not provide the
information we need to know how students are performing or what to do
to advance students' learning and improve instruction.
. Evidence that NCLB is working to improve student achievement and
close achievement gaps is not promising.
. State education agencies' capacity to meet the law's requirements
and intervene in low-performing schools on the scale demanded by NCLB
is limited.
. Many of the NCLB provisions, including the definition of highly
qualified teachers, the design of the testing and accountability
regulations, and the reliance on mandates impede school reform and
make it more difficult for high schools serving low-income students to
do their work.
. Only about 40% of the nation's high schools that have high dropout
rates are identified as needing improvement by NCLB's core
accountability measure (AYP).
The editor and authors of Holding NCLB Accountable recommend:
. More needs to be done to develop an accountability system that is
fair, yields information that informs and advances student learning
goals, and contributes to improving instruction. This includes, but
is not limited to, adopting performance goals that are ambitious but
realistic and obtainable, multiple indicators of performance, and
realistic timetables for school improvement.
. The high expectations of NCLB must be paired with adequate support
and greater investment in capacity building in low-performing schools
and districts.
. To offset the disadvantages faced by historically lower performing
groups of students, in-school programs and reforms need to be
complemented with out-of-school interventions and programs that
address nonschool conditions such as housing, poverty, health care,
and safety.
. An independent, federally funded analysis of what it takes in
administrative and financial resources for states to have a reasonable
chance of turning around low-performing schools needs to be conducted.
Published by Corwin Press, Holding NCLB Accountable is funded in
part by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Charles Stewart
Mott Foundation. Interested readers can order the book through Corwin
Press at: www.corwinpress.com/.webloc
Contributors to Holding NCLB Accountable include: Robert
Balfanz, Linda Darling-Hammond, Walter M. Haney, Willis D. Hawley,
Michael Kieffer, Daniel Koretz, Mindy L. Kornhaber, Jaekyung Lee,
Nettie Legters, Nonie K. Lesaux, Robert L. Linn, Goodwin Liu, Heinrich
Mintrop, Gary Orfield, Russell W. Rumberger Catherine Snow, and Gail
L. Sunderman
The Civil Rights Project/Proyecto Derechos Civiles at UCLA's
Graduate School of Education and Information Studies is a leading,
national organization devoted to research and policy analysis about
critical civil rights issues facing the nation. Its mission is to
bridge the worlds of ideas and action by becoming a preeminent source
of intellectual capital and a forum for building consensus within the
civil rights movement.
About the Editor:
Gail Sunderman is a Senior Research Associate in K-12 Education for
the Civil Rights Project/Proyecto Derechos Civiles. She received her
doctorate in Political Science from the University of Chicago. Her
research focuses on educational policy and politics, urban school
reform, and the impact of policy on the educational opportunities for
at-risk students. At CRP/PDC, she is project director on a five-year
study examining the implementation of the No Child Left Behind Act of
2001 and is co-author of the book NCLB Meets School Realities: Lessons
from the Field (Corwin Press, 2005).
Contact: Gail Sunderman
glsunderman@yahoo.com, 410-435-1207
NEW BOOK PROVIDES EXAMINATION AND EVALUTION OF THE NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND ACT
Los Angeles-January 9, 2008-A new book from The Civil Rights
Project/Proyecto Derechos Civiles (CRP/PDC) at UCLA's Graduate School
of Education and Information Studies evaluates and accesses the
efficacy of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) test-based
accountability in today's schools. The book, Holding NCLB
Accountable: Achieving Accountability, Equity, and School Reform
(Corwin Press, 2008), is edited by CRP/PDC senior researcher Gail L.
Sunderman.
The pending reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind Act has
generated a spirited debate among educators. In this book, a team of
noted education scholars assess NCLB's performance-based system and
discuss options for improving the law. With contributions from Gary
Orfield, Linda Darling Hammond, Catherine Snow, Robert Linn, and
Daniel Koretz, among others, Holding NCLB Accountable examines themes
of capacity, accountablity, school reform, and the law's impact on
educating all students, especially those from low-income and diverse
backgrounds. It responds to critical questions such as the following:
. How do we develop assessments and accountabilty systems that assist
rather than interfere with educational progress?
. How do we press for change without being counterproductive?
. How do we create a viable educational agenda that is mindful of
state and local capacity?
Harvard testing expert Daniel Koretz argues that the entire NCLB
accountabiltiy system is not based on hard evidence. Koretz says, "We
know far too little about how to hold schools accountable for
improving student performance."
Jaekyung Lee, associate professor of education at the State
University of New York in Buffalo, compares the findings from the
National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) to state assessment
results and shows that the federal accountability hasn't improved
reading and mathematical achievement or reduced achievement gaps.
"Based on the NAEP, there are no systemic indications of improving the
average achievement and narrowing the gap after NCLB," says Lee.
Other contributors suggest that the nation has not focused on the
kinds of serious long-term reforms that can actually produce gains and
narrow the huge gaps in opportunity and achievement for minority
students.
Throughout the book, contributors provide information on what we
know and don't know about educational accountability and what types of
accountalbity systems will most improve opportunties for
low-performing students while minimizing the negative effects. They
provide the groundwork for developing a system of multiple measures,
for obtaining evidence on whether NCLB is achieving its aim to
increase student achievement and close the racial achievement gap, and
tackling the very important issue of whether states have the financial
and administrative capacity to meet the law's requirements and turn
around low-performing schools. Finally, contributors examine whether
NCLB maximizes its potential for fostering reform in low-performing
schools. Taken together, these discussions raise important questions
about the law's effects and offer strong recommendations for designing
workable accountablity systems that will lead to coherent efforts to
improve schools.
Among the authors' findings are the following:
. We know too little about what types of accountability systems will
most improve opportunities for low-performing students.
. The current NCLB accountability system does not provide the
information we need to know how students are performing or what to do
to advance students' learning and improve instruction.
. Evidence that NCLB is working to improve student achievement and
close achievement gaps is not promising.
. State education agencies' capacity to meet the law's requirements
and intervene in low-performing schools on the scale demanded by NCLB
is limited.
. Many of the NCLB provisions, including the definition of highly
qualified teachers, the design of the testing and accountability
regulations, and the reliance on mandates impede school reform and
make it more difficult for high schools serving low-income students to
do their work.
. Only about 40% of the nation's high schools that have high dropout
rates are identified as needing improvement by NCLB's core
accountability measure (AYP).
The editor and authors of Holding NCLB Accountable recommend:
. More needs to be done to develop an accountability system that is
fair, yields information that informs and advances student learning
goals, and contributes to improving instruction. This includes, but
is not limited to, adopting performance goals that are ambitious but
realistic and obtainable, multiple indicators of performance, and
realistic timetables for school improvement.
. The high expectations of NCLB must be paired with adequate support
and greater investment in capacity building in low-performing schools
and districts.
. To offset the disadvantages faced by historically lower performing
groups of students, in-school programs and reforms need to be
complemented with out-of-school interventions and programs that
address nonschool conditions such as housing, poverty, health care,
and safety.
. An independent, federally funded analysis of what it takes in
administrative and financial resources for states to have a reasonable
chance of turning around low-performing schools needs to be conducted.
Published by Corwin Press, Holding NCLB Accountable is funded in
part by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Charles Stewart
Mott Foundation. Interested readers can order the book through Corwin
Press at: www.corwinpress.com/.webloc
Contributors to Holding NCLB Accountable include: Robert
Balfanz, Linda Darling-Hammond, Walter M. Haney, Willis D. Hawley,
Michael Kieffer, Daniel Koretz, Mindy L. Kornhaber, Jaekyung Lee,
Nettie Legters, Nonie K. Lesaux, Robert L. Linn, Goodwin Liu, Heinrich
Mintrop, Gary Orfield, Russell W. Rumberger Catherine Snow, and Gail
L. Sunderman
The Civil Rights Project/Proyecto Derechos Civiles at UCLA's
Graduate School of Education and Information Studies is a leading,
national organization devoted to research and policy analysis about
critical civil rights issues facing the nation. Its mission is to
bridge the worlds of ideas and action by becoming a preeminent source
of intellectual capital and a forum for building consensus within the
civil rights movement.
About the Editor:
Gail Sunderman is a Senior Research Associate in K-12 Education for
the Civil Rights Project/Proyecto Derechos Civiles. She received her
doctorate in Political Science from the University of Chicago. Her
research focuses on educational policy and politics, urban school
reform, and the impact of policy on the educational opportunities for
at-risk students. At CRP/PDC, she is project director on a five-year
study examining the implementation of the No Child Left Behind Act of
2001 and is co-author of the book NCLB Meets School Realities: Lessons
from the Field (Corwin Press, 2005).
Friday, January 04, 2008
AISD looks to restart 'dual-language' program
Thursday, January 3, 2008
AISD looks to restart 'dual-language' program
This looks like a hopeful development given what the research says about dual language education and its benefits, including strong positive test score correlations. -Angela
AISD looks to restart 'dual-language' program
District dropped program, which involves alternating instruction in English and a second language, in 2003 after disappointing results
By Laura Heinauer
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Wednesday, January 02, 2008
The Austin school district, one of the largest school districts in the state without a program in which English and non-English speakers both learn two languages, is considering giving the dual-language approach a second try.
Across the country, such programs, which proponents say promote bilingualism, are gaining in popularity, with about 330 nationwide in 2007, according to the Center for Applied Linguistics, a language research and education group based in Washington.
But in the Austin school district, such a program hasn't been tried since a Spanish dual-language program at Harris Elementary School was shut in 2003.
Unlike one-way bilingual and English-as-a-second-language programs, which are aimed primarily at teaching English to non-native speakers and are found at many area public schools, dual-language programs serve English and non-English speakers by alternating the language used during the school day. The goal is have students become fluent in both.
"It creates an atmosphere where everyone is learning a language," said Martha Garcia, the district's executive director of bilingual education. "It becomes a situation where, if I'm a Spanish speaker, I can help my English speaking classmates as much as they can help me. There's more of an equality, and kids feel more empowered."
The district has formed a committee to look at what it would take to begin such a program in Austin, Garcia said. The challenges include finding the funding, gathering community support and recruiting the special staff members needed for such a program.
The program at Harris Elementary was shut down after three years when grant funding ran out and administrators said they were seeing only varying degrees of effectiveness in academic performance.
In an letter to the editor in the American-Statesman, district administrators said a "significant number of students at the time were performing below grade level in their native language because they weren't given the opportunity to have a good, solid basis for literacy before going to a second language. They, therefore, weren't developing their literacy in either language."
They added that success requires every child to have both a command of his or her home language and to be on grade level in literacy skills in the native language if he or she is to fully benefit from the second language.
Today, many experts say that students in such programs, if they are done properly, often out-perform students in monolingual settings.
Julie Sugarman, a research associate with the Center for Applied Linguistics, said the key to success in such programs is an early and strong focus on literacy for all speakers of the non-English language. Administrators, she added, need to be patient and not judge language skills too harshly until fifth grade.
"We know for the non-English speaker, it helps them learn English ... and for the English speaker, it's what's needed for them to do grade-level work by the third or fourth grade," Sugarman said.
In Austin, Garcia said, studies show that former English-language learners, or students who successfully complete the program, pass the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills at higher rates than all other students.
Marcelo Tafoya of the League of United Latin American Citizens said that those figures are not surprising.
"If you know the culture, you will understand why, when they get into something like this, they will really do better," he said. "You want a better job, learn two languages. Being that we're the largest of the minorities right now, we should take advantage of it."
Others question the need for dual-language programs in public schools, saying that such programs are expensive and that students in them run the risk of being functionally illiterate in both.
Currently, the demand for dual-language programs in Austin is being met by private schools such as Petite Ecole Internationale, a French immersion Montessori school, or organizations that offer instruction for young learners.
Justin Scott hopes to open a dual-language charter school in Austin where students would be taught about 90 percent of the time in Spanish starting in kindergarten, adding more English each year until instruction becomes 50 percent in Spanish and 50 percent in English by fourth grade. Scott said he's had the most interest from English-speaking parents.
"We're seeing a big demand because there's nothing like it in Austin," he said. "A lot of the parents we've had lived abroad. ... That intercultural awareness is paramount for a lot of these parents."
Austin officials have said they look at dual-language programs as a way to tailor services to best meet the needs of particular students, similar to building a middle school for girls and providing theme-based education for high school students.
The specifics of what Austin's dual-language program might look like have yet to be decided.
Garcia said that it probably would start in just one school but that it hasn't been decided whether enrollment would be open to the entire city.
A program for Spanish speakers makes sense, she said, because you need a significant number of students and teachers who speak a language other than English, but that is still to be determined.
The district has schools with bilingual programs for Korean and Vietnamese speakers. Though some have said under-enrolled Becker Elementary School in South Austin would be a good option for a dual language program, Garcia said, that's not a sure thing either.
lheinauer@statesman.com; 445-3694
More on statesman.com
http://www.statesman.com/news/content/news/stories/local/01/02/0102duallanguage.html
AISD looks to restart 'dual-language' program
This looks like a hopeful development given what the research says about dual language education and its benefits, including strong positive test score correlations. -Angela
AISD looks to restart 'dual-language' program
District dropped program, which involves alternating instruction in English and a second language, in 2003 after disappointing results
By Laura Heinauer
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Wednesday, January 02, 2008
The Austin school district, one of the largest school districts in the state without a program in which English and non-English speakers both learn two languages, is considering giving the dual-language approach a second try.
Across the country, such programs, which proponents say promote bilingualism, are gaining in popularity, with about 330 nationwide in 2007, according to the Center for Applied Linguistics, a language research and education group based in Washington.
But in the Austin school district, such a program hasn't been tried since a Spanish dual-language program at Harris Elementary School was shut in 2003.
Unlike one-way bilingual and English-as-a-second-language programs, which are aimed primarily at teaching English to non-native speakers and are found at many area public schools, dual-language programs serve English and non-English speakers by alternating the language used during the school day. The goal is have students become fluent in both.
"It creates an atmosphere where everyone is learning a language," said Martha Garcia, the district's executive director of bilingual education. "It becomes a situation where, if I'm a Spanish speaker, I can help my English speaking classmates as much as they can help me. There's more of an equality, and kids feel more empowered."
The district has formed a committee to look at what it would take to begin such a program in Austin, Garcia said. The challenges include finding the funding, gathering community support and recruiting the special staff members needed for such a program.
The program at Harris Elementary was shut down after three years when grant funding ran out and administrators said they were seeing only varying degrees of effectiveness in academic performance.
In an letter to the editor in the American-Statesman, district administrators said a "significant number of students at the time were performing below grade level in their native language because they weren't given the opportunity to have a good, solid basis for literacy before going to a second language. They, therefore, weren't developing their literacy in either language."
They added that success requires every child to have both a command of his or her home language and to be on grade level in literacy skills in the native language if he or she is to fully benefit from the second language.
Today, many experts say that students in such programs, if they are done properly, often out-perform students in monolingual settings.
Julie Sugarman, a research associate with the Center for Applied Linguistics, said the key to success in such programs is an early and strong focus on literacy for all speakers of the non-English language. Administrators, she added, need to be patient and not judge language skills too harshly until fifth grade.
"We know for the non-English speaker, it helps them learn English ... and for the English speaker, it's what's needed for them to do grade-level work by the third or fourth grade," Sugarman said.
In Austin, Garcia said, studies show that former English-language learners, or students who successfully complete the program, pass the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills at higher rates than all other students.
Marcelo Tafoya of the League of United Latin American Citizens said that those figures are not surprising.
"If you know the culture, you will understand why, when they get into something like this, they will really do better," he said. "You want a better job, learn two languages. Being that we're the largest of the minorities right now, we should take advantage of it."
Others question the need for dual-language programs in public schools, saying that such programs are expensive and that students in them run the risk of being functionally illiterate in both.
Currently, the demand for dual-language programs in Austin is being met by private schools such as Petite Ecole Internationale, a French immersion Montessori school, or organizations that offer instruction for young learners.
Justin Scott hopes to open a dual-language charter school in Austin where students would be taught about 90 percent of the time in Spanish starting in kindergarten, adding more English each year until instruction becomes 50 percent in Spanish and 50 percent in English by fourth grade. Scott said he's had the most interest from English-speaking parents.
"We're seeing a big demand because there's nothing like it in Austin," he said. "A lot of the parents we've had lived abroad. ... That intercultural awareness is paramount for a lot of these parents."
Austin officials have said they look at dual-language programs as a way to tailor services to best meet the needs of particular students, similar to building a middle school for girls and providing theme-based education for high school students.
The specifics of what Austin's dual-language program might look like have yet to be decided.
Garcia said that it probably would start in just one school but that it hasn't been decided whether enrollment would be open to the entire city.
A program for Spanish speakers makes sense, she said, because you need a significant number of students and teachers who speak a language other than English, but that is still to be determined.
The district has schools with bilingual programs for Korean and Vietnamese speakers. Though some have said under-enrolled Becker Elementary School in South Austin would be a good option for a dual language program, Garcia said, that's not a sure thing either.
lheinauer@statesman.com; 445-3694
More on statesman.com
http://www.statesman.com/news/content/news/stories/local/01/02/0102duallanguage.html
Left out, students want a voice in reform
Teachers and parents were asked to vote on Villaraigosa's plan, but those attending affected schools were not.
By Duke Helfand and Howard Blume, LA Times
January 2, 2008
Even as Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa promises to enlist teachers and parents in his reform plan for Los Angeles schools, he has largely overlooked another group with a stake in his new enterprise: students.
Villaraigosa might want to listen to 16-year-old Yamileth Capetillo, who goes to class on an empty stomach many days because her crowded high school, the Santee Education Complex near downtown, runs out of hot food for the second lunch shift.
The mayor might also consider seventh-grader Michael Santizo, who fears that his education at Gompers Middle School in Watts has suffered because of long-term substitute teachers in math and science.
And then there is Roosevelt High School senior Cristhian Barrera, who must take Advanced Placement calculus during his vacation because the class isn't available on his track at the year-round school of 5,000 students in Boyle Heights.
Students at those three schools and four others were not given an opportunity to vote in elections last month in which teachers and parents decided whether the campuses would join Villaraigosa's Partnership for Los Angeles Schools.
That, the students believe, was a mistake.
"We're the ones whose education is at risk," said Cristhian, a member of Roosevelt's Student Council. "Why not let the students be heard?"
Deputy Mayor Ramon C. Cortines, who will lead the partnership's new board of directors, agreed with the students.
He said he thinks it was wrong not to give them at least an advisory voice in the recent elections. And he insists now that they will be included in planning sessions that begin this month for the five schools that chose to join the mayor's partnership, including Roosevelt and Gompers, as well as Markham, Stevenson and Hollenbeck middle schools. Santee is awaiting a final vote of its teachers this month.
"Young people need to be provided the opportunity to become contributing citizens," Cortines said. "They have a lot to say."
Cortines said he believes the new partnership can address some of the problems raised by students, including the lack of lunch food at Santee.
But details have yet to emerge.
And late last month, it became clear that students weren't the only ones who felt left out. Michael O'Sullivan, president of Associated Administrators of Los Angeles, the administrators union, said he considered the elections invalid because there was no inclusion, as promised, of school administrators, about 35 to 40 people at the seven balloting schools.
"No attention was paid to the non-teaching staff or administrators," he said.
So far, Villaraigosa has not identified exactly how he intends to improve achievement at schools that team with him, saying teachers, parents and administrators will play a direct role in decisions about budgeting and curriculum. The specifics will be worked out in the coming months as leaders at the schools hammer out plans to operate under the partnership's auspices, starting in July.
One school courted by Villaraigosa -- Jordan High in Watts -- fell short of the required majority support from members of the teachers union when votes were cast last month. Instead, Jordan and more than two dozen other Los Angeles schools will fall under a separate reform plan put forward by Schools Supt. David L. Brewer.
Students at Jordan and other schools ticked off an array of problems they say hinder their education.
Yamileth from the Santee Education Complex, for example, cited scheduling snafus at her campus that gave her three English classes at the beginning of the fall term. The junior class president spent two weeks pestering counselors to correct her schedule. By then, however, the math analysis class she wanted was full, leaving her no option but to take it during the second half of the year.
Like Yamileth, Jordan High junior Ana Exiga complained about a lack of counselors and college advisors. Ana also said she'd like to see fewer military recruiters on campus and more history classes about African Americans and Latinos.
"We want to see more kids going to college," said Ana, 16, the recording secretary for Jordan's Student Council.
Ana belongs to a small but determined band of student activists, known as Jordan Youth Empowered Thru Action. Some of them turned up at an evening meeting Villaraigosa held last month for parents and community members.
Senior Xochil Frausto told the mayor that students need to be part of his reforms.
"Yes, you should have a voice," Villaraigosa responded. "But with that voice comes responsibility."
At such events, Villaraigosa typically fussed over students, pulling them from the crowd and putting his arm around them. Time and again, he praised them as examples to be emulated. Some appreciated the compliments and spotlight, but others found him patronizing and unresponsive.
Xochil left dissatisfied.
"I thought his answer wasn't very good, because it didn't directly answer my question," she said. "He avoided my question."
Student activists at Roosevelt High had a similar experience when the mayor visited.
For several years, students there have taken part in an organizing drive spearheaded by local groups, including InnerCity Struggle, which is closely allied with Villaraigosa. The students have participated in demonstrations calling for smaller schools and greater access to college prep classes.
Senior Vicky Gonzalez addressed Villaraigosa at a recent evening meeting, held almost entirely in Spanish and intended to explain his reform plan to parents and other community members.
Vicky was direct: "How will you make a difference with dropouts?" she asked the mayor in Spanish.
"I wasn't a very good example," Villaraigosa responded, also in Spanish, referring to his own experience as a dropout. He said there would be a better use of data to track students and more counselors. Parents would get phone calls if their children were not in school.
Another Roosevelt senior wanted to know if his diploma would have value.
Villaraigosa seized the opportunity to move the conversation in a different direction.
"Look at this young man," he said to the audience of 750. "He's in a suit. He's ready. He's intelligent. This is what we want in our school. . . . A diploma should signify that you're prepared."
By Duke Helfand and Howard Blume, LA Times
January 2, 2008
Even as Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa promises to enlist teachers and parents in his reform plan for Los Angeles schools, he has largely overlooked another group with a stake in his new enterprise: students.
Villaraigosa might want to listen to 16-year-old Yamileth Capetillo, who goes to class on an empty stomach many days because her crowded high school, the Santee Education Complex near downtown, runs out of hot food for the second lunch shift.
The mayor might also consider seventh-grader Michael Santizo, who fears that his education at Gompers Middle School in Watts has suffered because of long-term substitute teachers in math and science.
And then there is Roosevelt High School senior Cristhian Barrera, who must take Advanced Placement calculus during his vacation because the class isn't available on his track at the year-round school of 5,000 students in Boyle Heights.
Students at those three schools and four others were not given an opportunity to vote in elections last month in which teachers and parents decided whether the campuses would join Villaraigosa's Partnership for Los Angeles Schools.
That, the students believe, was a mistake.
"We're the ones whose education is at risk," said Cristhian, a member of Roosevelt's Student Council. "Why not let the students be heard?"
Deputy Mayor Ramon C. Cortines, who will lead the partnership's new board of directors, agreed with the students.
He said he thinks it was wrong not to give them at least an advisory voice in the recent elections. And he insists now that they will be included in planning sessions that begin this month for the five schools that chose to join the mayor's partnership, including Roosevelt and Gompers, as well as Markham, Stevenson and Hollenbeck middle schools. Santee is awaiting a final vote of its teachers this month.
"Young people need to be provided the opportunity to become contributing citizens," Cortines said. "They have a lot to say."
Cortines said he believes the new partnership can address some of the problems raised by students, including the lack of lunch food at Santee.
But details have yet to emerge.
And late last month, it became clear that students weren't the only ones who felt left out. Michael O'Sullivan, president of Associated Administrators of Los Angeles, the administrators union, said he considered the elections invalid because there was no inclusion, as promised, of school administrators, about 35 to 40 people at the seven balloting schools.
"No attention was paid to the non-teaching staff or administrators," he said.
So far, Villaraigosa has not identified exactly how he intends to improve achievement at schools that team with him, saying teachers, parents and administrators will play a direct role in decisions about budgeting and curriculum. The specifics will be worked out in the coming months as leaders at the schools hammer out plans to operate under the partnership's auspices, starting in July.
One school courted by Villaraigosa -- Jordan High in Watts -- fell short of the required majority support from members of the teachers union when votes were cast last month. Instead, Jordan and more than two dozen other Los Angeles schools will fall under a separate reform plan put forward by Schools Supt. David L. Brewer.
Students at Jordan and other schools ticked off an array of problems they say hinder their education.
Yamileth from the Santee Education Complex, for example, cited scheduling snafus at her campus that gave her three English classes at the beginning of the fall term. The junior class president spent two weeks pestering counselors to correct her schedule. By then, however, the math analysis class she wanted was full, leaving her no option but to take it during the second half of the year.
Like Yamileth, Jordan High junior Ana Exiga complained about a lack of counselors and college advisors. Ana also said she'd like to see fewer military recruiters on campus and more history classes about African Americans and Latinos.
"We want to see more kids going to college," said Ana, 16, the recording secretary for Jordan's Student Council.
Ana belongs to a small but determined band of student activists, known as Jordan Youth Empowered Thru Action. Some of them turned up at an evening meeting Villaraigosa held last month for parents and community members.
Senior Xochil Frausto told the mayor that students need to be part of his reforms.
"Yes, you should have a voice," Villaraigosa responded. "But with that voice comes responsibility."
At such events, Villaraigosa typically fussed over students, pulling them from the crowd and putting his arm around them. Time and again, he praised them as examples to be emulated. Some appreciated the compliments and spotlight, but others found him patronizing and unresponsive.
Xochil left dissatisfied.
"I thought his answer wasn't very good, because it didn't directly answer my question," she said. "He avoided my question."
Student activists at Roosevelt High had a similar experience when the mayor visited.
For several years, students there have taken part in an organizing drive spearheaded by local groups, including InnerCity Struggle, which is closely allied with Villaraigosa. The students have participated in demonstrations calling for smaller schools and greater access to college prep classes.
Senior Vicky Gonzalez addressed Villaraigosa at a recent evening meeting, held almost entirely in Spanish and intended to explain his reform plan to parents and other community members.
Vicky was direct: "How will you make a difference with dropouts?" she asked the mayor in Spanish.
"I wasn't a very good example," Villaraigosa responded, also in Spanish, referring to his own experience as a dropout. He said there would be a better use of data to track students and more counselors. Parents would get phone calls if their children were not in school.
Another Roosevelt senior wanted to know if his diploma would have value.
Villaraigosa seized the opportunity to move the conversation in a different direction.
"Look at this young man," he said to the audience of 750. "He's in a suit. He's ready. He's intelligent. This is what we want in our school. . . . A diploma should signify that you're prepared."
Mexican Farm Activists End Anti-NAFTA Border Blockade
December 3, 2008
From Democracy Now:
In Mexico, farm activists have ended a thirty-six hour blockade of the U.S.-Mexico border to protest the lifting of the last of its protective tariffs on northern goods. A Mexican tax on basic crops including corn, beans and sugar from Canada and the U.S. ended January 1st under the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA. Critics say NAFTA has devastated Mexican farmers by forcing them to compete with government-subsidized American and Canadian goods.
To read more (in Spanish) check out the article entitled "Campesinos alzan la voz en México" in La Opinión -Patricia
From Democracy Now:
In Mexico, farm activists have ended a thirty-six hour blockade of the U.S.-Mexico border to protest the lifting of the last of its protective tariffs on northern goods. A Mexican tax on basic crops including corn, beans and sugar from Canada and the U.S. ended January 1st under the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA. Critics say NAFTA has devastated Mexican farmers by forcing them to compete with government-subsidized American and Canadian goods.
To read more (in Spanish) check out the article entitled "Campesinos alzan la voz en México" in La Opinión -Patricia
AISD looks to restart 'dual-language' program
Exciting news for students and the Austin community. -Patricia
District dropped program, which involves alternating instruction in English and a second language, in 2003 after disappointing results
By Laura Heinauer
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Wednesday, January 02, 2008
The Austin school district, one of the largest school districts in the state without a program in which English and non-English speakers both learn two languages, is considering giving the dual-language approach a second try.
Across the country, such programs, which proponents say promote bilingualism, are gaining in popularity, with about 330 nationwide in 2007, according to the Center for Applied Linguistics, a language research and education group based in Washington.
But in the Austin school district, such a program hasn't been tried since a Spanish dual-language program at Harris Elementary School was shut in 2003.
Unlike one-way bilingual and English-as-a-second-language programs, which are aimed primarily at teaching English to non-native speakers and are found at many area public schools, dual-language programs serve English and non-English speakers by alternating the language used during the school day. The goal is have students become fluent in both.
"It creates an atmosphere where everyone is learning a language," said Martha Garcia, the district's executive director of bilingual education. "It becomes a situation where, if I'm a Spanish speaker, I can help my English speaking classmates as much as they can help me. There's more of an equality, and kids feel more empowered."
The district has formed a committee to look at what it would take to begin such a program in Austin, Garcia said. The challenges include finding the funding, gathering community support and recruiting the special staff members needed for such a program.
The program at Harris Elementary was shut down after three years when grant funding ran out and administrators said they were seeing only varying degrees of effectiveness in academic performance.
In an letter to the editor in the American-Statesman, district administrators said a "significant number of students at the time were performing below grade level in their native language because they weren't given the opportunity to have a good, solid basis for literacy before going to a second language. They, therefore, weren't developing their literacy in either language."
They added that success requires every child to have both a command of his or her home language and to be on grade level in literacy skills in the native language if he or she is to fully benefit from the second language.
Today, many experts say that students in such programs, if they are done properly, often out-perform students in monolingual settings.
Julie Sugarman, a research associate with the Center for Applied Linguistics, said the key to success in such programs is an early and strong focus on literacy for all speakers of the non-English language. Administrators, she added, need to be patient and not judge language skills too harshly until fifth grade.
"We know for the non-English speaker, it helps them learn English ... and for the English speaker, it's what's needed for them to do grade-level work by the third or fourth grade," Sugarman said.
In Austin, Garcia said, studies show that former English-language learners, or students who successfully complete the program, pass the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills at higher rates than all other students.
Marcelo Tafoya of the League of United Latin American Citizens said that those figures are not surprising.
"If you know the culture, you will understand why, when they get into something like this, they will really do better," he said. "You want a better job, learn two languages. Being that we're the largest of the minorities right now, we should take advantage of it."
Others question the need for dual-language programs in public schools, saying that such programs are expensive and that students in them run the risk of being functionally illiterate in both.
Currently, the demand for dual-language programs in Austin is being met by private schools such as Petite Ecole Internationale, a French immersion Montessori school, or organizations that offer instruction for young learners.
Justin Scott hopes to open a dual-language charter school in Austin where students would be taught about 90 percent of the time in Spanish starting in kindergarten, adding more English each year until instruction becomes 50 percent in Spanish and 50 percent in English by fourth grade. Scott said he's had the most interest from English-speaking parents.
"We're seeing a big demand because there's nothing like it in Austin," he said. "A lot of the parents we've had lived abroad. ... That intercultural awareness is paramount for a lot of these parents."
Austin officials have said they look at dual-language programs as a way to tailor services to best meet the needs of particular students, similar to building a middle school for girls and providing theme-based education for high school students.
The specifics of what Austin's dual-language program might look like have yet to be decided.
Garcia said that it probably would start in just one school but that it hasn't been decided whether enrollment would be open to the entire city.
A program for Spanish speakers makes sense, she said, because you need a significant number of students and teachers who speak a language other than English, but that is still to be determined.
The district has schools with bilingual programs for Korean and Vietnamese speakers. Though some have said under-enrolled Becker Elementary School in South Austin would be a good option for a dual language program, Garcia said, that's not a sure thing either.
District dropped program, which involves alternating instruction in English and a second language, in 2003 after disappointing results
By Laura Heinauer
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Wednesday, January 02, 2008
The Austin school district, one of the largest school districts in the state without a program in which English and non-English speakers both learn two languages, is considering giving the dual-language approach a second try.
Across the country, such programs, which proponents say promote bilingualism, are gaining in popularity, with about 330 nationwide in 2007, according to the Center for Applied Linguistics, a language research and education group based in Washington.
But in the Austin school district, such a program hasn't been tried since a Spanish dual-language program at Harris Elementary School was shut in 2003.
Unlike one-way bilingual and English-as-a-second-language programs, which are aimed primarily at teaching English to non-native speakers and are found at many area public schools, dual-language programs serve English and non-English speakers by alternating the language used during the school day. The goal is have students become fluent in both.
"It creates an atmosphere where everyone is learning a language," said Martha Garcia, the district's executive director of bilingual education. "It becomes a situation where, if I'm a Spanish speaker, I can help my English speaking classmates as much as they can help me. There's more of an equality, and kids feel more empowered."
The district has formed a committee to look at what it would take to begin such a program in Austin, Garcia said. The challenges include finding the funding, gathering community support and recruiting the special staff members needed for such a program.
The program at Harris Elementary was shut down after three years when grant funding ran out and administrators said they were seeing only varying degrees of effectiveness in academic performance.
In an letter to the editor in the American-Statesman, district administrators said a "significant number of students at the time were performing below grade level in their native language because they weren't given the opportunity to have a good, solid basis for literacy before going to a second language. They, therefore, weren't developing their literacy in either language."
They added that success requires every child to have both a command of his or her home language and to be on grade level in literacy skills in the native language if he or she is to fully benefit from the second language.
Today, many experts say that students in such programs, if they are done properly, often out-perform students in monolingual settings.
Julie Sugarman, a research associate with the Center for Applied Linguistics, said the key to success in such programs is an early and strong focus on literacy for all speakers of the non-English language. Administrators, she added, need to be patient and not judge language skills too harshly until fifth grade.
"We know for the non-English speaker, it helps them learn English ... and for the English speaker, it's what's needed for them to do grade-level work by the third or fourth grade," Sugarman said.
In Austin, Garcia said, studies show that former English-language learners, or students who successfully complete the program, pass the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills at higher rates than all other students.
Marcelo Tafoya of the League of United Latin American Citizens said that those figures are not surprising.
"If you know the culture, you will understand why, when they get into something like this, they will really do better," he said. "You want a better job, learn two languages. Being that we're the largest of the minorities right now, we should take advantage of it."
Others question the need for dual-language programs in public schools, saying that such programs are expensive and that students in them run the risk of being functionally illiterate in both.
Currently, the demand for dual-language programs in Austin is being met by private schools such as Petite Ecole Internationale, a French immersion Montessori school, or organizations that offer instruction for young learners.
Justin Scott hopes to open a dual-language charter school in Austin where students would be taught about 90 percent of the time in Spanish starting in kindergarten, adding more English each year until instruction becomes 50 percent in Spanish and 50 percent in English by fourth grade. Scott said he's had the most interest from English-speaking parents.
"We're seeing a big demand because there's nothing like it in Austin," he said. "A lot of the parents we've had lived abroad. ... That intercultural awareness is paramount for a lot of these parents."
Austin officials have said they look at dual-language programs as a way to tailor services to best meet the needs of particular students, similar to building a middle school for girls and providing theme-based education for high school students.
The specifics of what Austin's dual-language program might look like have yet to be decided.
Garcia said that it probably would start in just one school but that it hasn't been decided whether enrollment would be open to the entire city.
A program for Spanish speakers makes sense, she said, because you need a significant number of students and teachers who speak a language other than English, but that is still to be determined.
The district has schools with bilingual programs for Korean and Vietnamese speakers. Though some have said under-enrolled Becker Elementary School in South Austin would be a good option for a dual language program, Garcia said, that's not a sure thing either.
It's Time for a Progressive Vision of Education!
A few good points made here, especially in terms of how some schools create divisions among students through competition. I personally believe that it's through sharing of knowledge that people and communities become stronger. -Patricia
By Svi Shapiro | Tikkun Magazine
Janurary - February 2008 Issue
The primary debates are an exceptional vehicle to make, as the educational philosopher Maxine Greene put it, “the familiar strange and the strange familiar.” They are, in other words, an opportunity to pose serious questions about the conventional wisdom that guides our public policies and practices, as well as a time to suggest radically different visions for how we might do things in our society and in our world. At least as far as education goes, the candidates have failed miserably in both regards. They have neglected to ask the deep questions about what is really happening in our schools. Nor have they even begun to offer imaginative possibilities for what education might be about in these early but difficult years of the 21st century. This is both sad and troubling, not merely because of the limitations of what these individuals have had to say about this one sector of our culture, but, more importantly, because education in many ways instantiates the root metaphors that guide and structure how we think about the purposes of human life and social relationships. What we have to say about education is intimately bound up with what we say to the young about the meaning of our lives, the aspirations we value for them, and how they should understand their relationships and responsibilities towards other human beings. In this sense education is always about the qualities we favor in human beings as reasoning, moral, and spiritual beings, and about our capacity to teach these to young people. Sadly, the candidates ’ shallow banalities and overwhelmingly predictable discourse about schools has done little to point the public in new and more meaningful directions in thinking about what it means to educate the young in these turbulent times.
The No Child Left Behind Debacle
Picking up on the increasing sense of frustration among parents and teachers with No Child Left Behind, candidates are now comfortable with deriding or even dismissing this legislation. Yet their reasons are left vague or unclear. Perhaps it is time spell out what it is that makes this law such a ghastly mistake. They might, for example, make clear how it has resulted in making schools little more than testing mills. They might point out that it has led to an extraordinary distortion and disfiguring of the classroom experience for children in the way that learning has been reduced to its most shallow and reductionist form—rote memorization and canned answers devoid of creative or critical input. Far from learning that enhances curiosity, imaginative exploration, and joyful wonder, the classroom has become an increasingly anxiety-fraught experience where everything takes a backseat to preparation for the next test. Teachers as well as students burn-out in these test-factories with their daily grind of deadening, yet stress-filled, demands. No test-prep rallies or post-test ‘victory’ assemblies can overcome the increasing boredom and alienation that No Child Left Behind has produced among young people. Nor does it allay the desire among so many new teachers to leave the profession as quickly as they can. We are aware, for example, of how much our current schooling has reduced or even eliminated those non-tested areas of the curriculum: the arts, social studies, foreign language instruction, P.E., even recess. We are aware, too, of the increasing propensity to cheat among students, as well as among teachers and administrators, as the pressure to produce the right scores mounts. In this brave new world of education, (to paraphrase Albert Einstein) nothing that cannot be counted counts. Unless it can be measured on a test and plotted on a bell curve it has no merit. Only things that enable us to create those league tables of success and failure have worth. In this perverse version of democratic accountability, public education has become little more than public evaluation.
Most cruelly, it really does nothing to ensure that many children are not left behind. The gap between the achievements of children of poverty and affluence has been little affected by the law. The evidence on this is now quite clear. The recent report of the National Assessment of Educational Progress showed minimal progress on narrowing the gap between the achievement of white and minority students between 2003 and 2007. Despite their democratic promise of a common education for all, schools are sorting machines whose primary mission is to construct hierarchies of worth and opportunity. They are our way to give some legitimacy to those glaring inequalities of race and social class that scar our society and contradict our cherished ideas about being a land of opportunity. To believe that no child can be left behind in a society in which so many adults and parents are left behind, is to believe that what happens in schools is not somehow related to the blighted neighborhoods, poor health, inferior nutrition, low incomes, and lack of economic security that surround the lives of kids in what Jonathan Kozol has referred to as our apartheid system of public education. We might be cajoled by Republicans into absenting ‘class warfare’ from our political discourse, but we know that school success has everything to do with kids ’ social and economic circumstances, and the expectations that are consequent upon them.
We delude ourselves into thinking that educational change will cure the ills of our deeply and increasingly inequitable society. Indeed public schools with their so very different facilities and resources, levels of safety, curricular offerings, and extent of teacher turnover are the very embodiment of our nation ’s social and racial injustice. Democrats cannot run away from this critical reality of American life. We must stop offering school reform as if it is a primary lever for moving towards a more socially just society. This is quite simply the ideology of mass distraction. An honest discussion of current educational policies —their harm to kids and their diversion from our real societal challenges—would be a valuable contribution by Democratic candidates to the larger public discourse on growing inequality in America.
Democracy and Education
While the damage and obfuscations of current educational policies must be made clear, candidates still have to do more than critique. They must offer a language of possibility too. In this sense, education ’s vision must speak to the wider concerns of our nation and our world. I will suggest here three such concerns and how they might help shape a revitalized purpose and meaning for the education of our children. First, I suggest that the candidates remind Americans that we once talked about the connection between public education and our vision of a democratic society. Whatever the hypocrisies of such talk (going all the way back to Jefferson ’s assertion that a democracy required an educated citizenry while he simultaneously affirmed slavery and deep class privilege) we nonetheless possess an enduring legacy that argues that citizenship in a democracy demands citizens who are trained in the knowledge and skills of democratic life and culture. While our country is prepared to go to war for somebody else ’s democracy, even the rhetoric of democratic purpose seems to have disappeared from the mission statements of schools and school systems. Yet can we really be in doubt as to the crucial importance today of our educational institutions seeing the preparation of democratic citizens as their core responsibility? With our nation and our planet facing such extraordinary challenges can there be much doubt about how important it is to cultivate among young people the capacity for critical, creative, and courageous thinking, and the interest and commitment to engage in public life?
Sadly, we are told that there is a deep sense of political impotence and a profound cynicism among young people about the possibility of significant social agency. Of course, they are not alone in this sense. Political power is now so far removed from average people ’s lives that meaning can only be found in our private worlds (perhaps this explains the special attraction of the cell phone and the chat room in the lives of young people). The public world seems to offer little sense of purpose or connection, or the possibility to influence or shape it. Schools themselves typically provide little real opportunity for the practice of democratic governance. They are increasingly authoritarian spaces, often prison –like, obsessed with monitoring and regulating the lives of young people. The spaces they offer for meaningful deliberation and decision-making about what goes on in their institution are meager at best.
Within the classroom we continue to teach in ways that overwhelmingly squelch the life –blood out of democratic life. There is little encouragement of genuine dialogue or the sharing of ideas and opinions. With the exception of those students in the top academic tiers of high school, there is little chance to approach texts and knowledge as propositions to be challenged and interrogated rather than passively accepted and memorized. Little time, if any, is used to teach the characteristics of civil discourse; respect for the views of another, and empathy for the experiences and perspectives of those who lives may be different to ours. For few students is the classroom a place where one ’s voice and the capacity to articulate ideas or argue one’s beliefs is nurtured and strengthened. Our culture also reinforces the assumption that democracy is not about expression but about the capacity to consume. Choosing what to buy next, not the ability to think and question, define for the young the meaning of freedom and autonomy. It is an astounding fact that for all the well-documented influence of the media and popular culture, very little time is spent in school equipping young people with the capacity to critically interrogate our culture of advertising and persuasion. Notwithstanding the way that young people are the subject of powerful influences that encourage them to shape their aspirations around the acquisition of material objects, and their identities around the desire for glamour, fame, and celebrity, we offer little to the young that might empower them to challenge and resist these extraordinary influences in their lives.
Believing in democracy means believing in the right of young people to be offered more in their education than memorization, ‘well-behaved’ passivity, and subject matter that speaks little to the real problems and issues that confront us today. It means, for example, creating the space where students may ask why we so often turn to war or violence as the way to resolve our differences; or why such huge disparities exist in the lives and well-being of people both in this country and around the world; or what it mean for our political system when so much influence is exercised by corporate interests. Democracy can mean nothing if it is not the vehicle through which we think and question self and social values in the context of our national and global priorities. It will require courage to remind our fellow citizens that the struggle for our democracy starts not in Iraq but in the institutions of our own country. Our concern for a vibrant and meaningful democracy surely requires a younger generation educated in the skills, knowledge and dispositions that ensure democratic ideas are much more than the abstract words on the pages of a civics text book. They will need to infuse the classrooms, hallways, and assemblies of our schools.
The Priority of Community
While democracy is about the advance of individuals, it is not about individual advantage. It is about the quality and well-being of our shared community. It is a sad consequence of our educational priorities that our classrooms are places that are so shaped by the emphasis on competition and individualism. It has been well-described by many observers and researchers just how much of the real curriculum of schooling is concerned with learning about the process of ‘getting ahead’ of one’s peers. From their first day in school, students learn that human worth is linked to success or achievement, and that the latter is designed to be a limited resource. One of the most profound lessons of the classroom is that we are engaged in a constant contest for affirmation, not just of our intelligence and ability, but, more importantly, of our worth and value as human beings. Schooling is a constant reinforcement of these competitive relations between individuals. We learn from our earliest time in the classroom that this is a culture of ‘separated desks’ in which knowledge is the prized possession that divides winners from losers.
This is a world that values self-sufficiency and autonomy over interdependence and connection. For the young the rewards are teacher ’s praise and admission into more valued ability groups. For older students it is a passport into higher classes or tracks, which promise admission to the more prestigious colleges or universities. Sharing what we know violates the rules, which are always connected to distinguishing those who are successful from those that are not. The emphasis on competition has long been a central value of education, but it has become more pronounced in this era of intensified testing. Increasingly, schooling is about the process in which young people learn to see their peers as rivals and contestants in the game of invidious comparisons. We have already noted its effects in the increased amounts of anxiety and stress among young people. Its effects are also morally corrosive. We know that students view cheating as an increasingly acceptable risk in the high stakes game of schooling. From the social standpoint we are reminded again and again of the damaging consequences of institutions that encourage the growth of divisive distinctions among young people. We have seen its results in the unleashed rage of individuals who find themselves designated as losers in the competitive hothouse of school cliques and rivalries.
It is important to remind ourselves that education is not an end in itself. Education embodies our aspirations for what kind of world we wish to see and what kind of human behavior we hope for. It is the site in which these aspirations are nurtured and shaped. As inheritors of the progressive political tradition, we have always believed in the possibility of a world in which solidarity and mutual care are cherished values. However, in this era of market triumphalism fewer voices seem ready to articulate such values. Yet can we be in any doubt today of the importance of our vision of a world that values community and caring above competition and rivalry? Our nation and our world cries out for human connections that are more compassionate and socially responsible. Whether we look at the lack of health insurance for so many, the numbers of our fellow citizens deprived of adequate nutrition or housing, or the proportion of children growing up in impoverished circumstances, we are confronted with the shocking reality of the dysfunctional character of our own national community. The market society has unleashed a social order that is extraordinarily predatory and selfish. Our society has become one in which the bonds of connection between human beings have become increasingly instrumental and exploitative. Greater numbers of individuals experience themselves as used and manipulated, whether in the world of work, in relationship with colleagues, even in relations with intimate partners. We are urged to relate to others in ways that emphasize appearance and the capacity to impress rather than through relations of authentic concern and connection.
Education alone cannot transform our increasingly atomistic and divisive society into a caring and compassionate community. But we certainly might ask that it educate our young to the importance and possibility of human relationships where care, compassion, and cooperation matter more than the culture of winning and losing. There is good reason to believe that, at least with younger children, this is precisely what already matters to teachers and educators. We can imagine schools where the competitive emphasis of grading and the attention to differential rewards and status among students gives way to a quite different moral climate —one where young people are encouraged to share and assist others in the development of their talents and understanding, to see one another not as rivals for achievement but as collaborators in learning. We have plenty of examples of how peer learning and cooperative relations can be nurtured in the classroom. Our vision becomes the quality of the school community as a whole. Our concern is the full inclusion of everyone regardless of difference in abilities, skills, or interests. Above all else, it is our responsibility to convey to our young people the unconditional worth of all human beings.
We need progressive voices that will promote education’s connection, not to competition and individualism, but to the value of community as critical to our nation ’s social, moral, and spiritual well-being. It is human generosity, connection, and care towards others that provides the deepest sense of fulfillment in our lives, and provides the most enduring sense of meaning. Education needs to explicitly combat the ways human beings are divided and excluded from one another, whether through racism, religious intolerance, sexism, ethnocentrism, or homophobia. Education is a powerful vehicle for helping young people to recognize themselves as part of a single family in which no one deserves to be demonized, treated without dignity, or deprived of human rights. While we should educate to see ourselves as part of a single human family, this in no way detracts from the importance of recognizing and celebrating those mediating human communities of nation, ethnicity, religion, language, etc., that have been, and continue to be, the locus of much of our sense of meaning and identity in the world. It is within these communities that much of who we are and what we cherish finds expression and realization. More than providing the rich expressiveness, beauty, and diversity of wisdom found within the human experience, these mediating communities also often carry the valiant as well as painful memory of their struggles for justice and human dignity.
We must attend, as never before, to the universal dimension of what it means to be human. We must bring our students to recognize the terrible inequities in our world —the poverty, suffering, and indignities that scar the lives of so many—and also the multiple human efforts to bring hope and redress to this situation and the ways they may contribute to this work. Like never before, humanity is threatened by the destruction and abuse of our environment. The present crisis demands from us a radical realization of the interconnected nature of life on earth. To an unprecedented degree we are witnesses to the danger of acting as if our actions and behavior do not have drastic consequences on the lives of others. We exist as part of an interconnected web, which demands from us an unprecedented sense of concern and responsibility for all life on our fragile planet. Education has a key role in helping us to see beyond our divisions and separations to what connects and unites us. Candidates for office have a special responsibility to try to ensure that a new generation is educated to understand themselves as responsible and concerned members of the human community.
Educating the Whole Person
Finally, education ought to be one of the primary ways through which we can realize the fullness of human existence. It is a sad fact that so much of what we now regard as the importance of education has to do only with its instrumental purposes. The mission of education is increasingly defined in terms of ensuring that students will become part of a globally competitive work force. Now, of course, the capacity to be economically secure is an important dimension of the education we offer our children. But when this dwarfs all other concerns, our educational vision suffers. Our vision of human life has become one-sided, distorted, and constricted. Where is the concern for our children ’s emotional life, intellectual curiosity, creativity, ethical awareness, and spiritual development? Young people experience schooling as primarily something of extrinsic value. Education ’s reward is in the grade awarded for a course, the end of term test score, the certificate or diploma received at the end of a program of study. Little is derived through the intrinsic nature of the pedagogic experience. Students rarely expect to be moved, inspired, or intellectually roused by their classroom experience. The classroom becomes, above all else, a place where we learn the meaning of alienation. We are trained in the arts of daydreaming and clock –watching, mentally and emotionally estranged from our own activities. Above all, schooling teaches us what it means to not be present to our own lives, how to survive the exhaustion of experiences that leave us mentally passive and emotionally dead. Years in this environment rob many students of the capacity for passionate engagement with their world and the aliveness of awakened curiosity.
It is a sad fact of our public discourse that the word joy is rarely used in the same breath as education. From our first days in school, children are taught that what they are engaged in is ‘work,’ not ‘play.’ They are told that education is a serious and difficult business to be contrasted with what is pleasurable and inherently satisfying. The usefulness of what one learns is to be found mainly in the way it equips one for the next stage of schooling. Education is to be regarded principally as an instrumental process that takes one somewhere else, not because learning itself is its own reward in joy, stimulation, and illumination. It is easy to see how this process contributes to the emotional dis-ease of later years, when so many adults find it impossible to experience themselves fully in the here and now. No wonder that our bookstores are filled with volumes that promise to help us calm our minds so that we can be alive and present to what is already here rather than what might come next. We are a nation in a state of permanent distraction from where we presently are, always on route to somewhere else. Our view of the joy of play is still schizophrenic; it is at once immensely desirable but still caught up in the Zeitgeist of guilt, in which it is the sweet dessert that follows the onerous obligations of work and production. We are, if we need to be reminded of it, a workaholic culture. The notion that school should be centered on the pleasure of learning, rather than preparation for a work-centered life is, for some in our culture, a disturbing or even disruptive concept.
Yet there continue to be voices that warn us against this shrunken view of human life and purpose in which people appear to have no other existence than as future employees in our corporate-driven economy. It is worth reminding ourselves that the rational-analytic abilities that are so much the focus of academic learning represent only a fragment of human capabilities. Such an emphasis ignores our intuitive and emotional wisdom that is indispensable to understanding human relationships. It minimizes the kinesthetic understanding of the world that comes through our embodied nature and that provides a very different vehicle for self –awareness and knowing. It ignores the aesthetic dimensions of learning with its attention to imagination, creativity, and form. And it ignores our spiritual capacity that can enable us to have such a profound recognition of the ineffable beauty and mystery of the universe. Against the two-dimensional view of human life that constitutes today ’s dominant vision of education we need voices that remind us of the richness and complexity of human life. We are holistic beings who seek meaning, struggle with ethical dilemmas, relate to others with empathy and compassion, are enlivened by our sensual impulses and our capacity for love, have deep commitments to social and political change, and are moved by spiritual and religious awareness that enables us to experience our world with awe and wonder. Tragically, we forget this when we reduce our education to the prosaic and pragmatic purposes that now seem to constitute schooling ’s mission.
The call to re-envision education is not about one more reform to improve achievement, make us more globally competitive, or even to close the gap between the advantaged and disadvantaged in our society. Nor is it about blaming or retraining teachers, or making principals and other educational leaders more efficient or effective managers. The task for those who would offer a new progressive direction for our country is to articulate a different vision about the very purpose and goals of education. But to talk about the purpose of education is also to talk about our purpose as a society. It means to ask what kind of a world we envisage for our children and what kind of lives we wish for them. Our talk about the meaning of education must also be about what it is to live in ways that are worthwhile and meaningful. Such talk requires going beyond the boiler plate language of political debate. It will require what the philosopher Cornel West refers to as parrhesia, the capacity for bold and courageous speech that challenges deeply held assumptions and offers us radically different ways to understand what is both possible and needed at this time in our nation ’s history.
Svi Shapiro teaches in the Education and Cultural Studies program at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. His most recent book is Losing Heart: The Moral and Spiritual Miseducation of America’s Children (Lawrence Erlbaum).
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