By Alyson Klein | Ed Week
April 14, 2010
U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan today urged Congress to pass new aid to preserve education jobs. He testified before the Senate Appropriations subcommittee that deals with education spending on the same day the panel’s chairman introduced a bill that would provide $23 billion for that purpose.
The legislation offered by Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, would be modeled on the State Fiscal Stabilization Fund. That fund was included in the $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, the economic-stimulus measure approved by Congress last year. The money could be used for compensation and benefits to help districts hold on to existing employees and to hire new staff members to provide early-childhood, K-12, or postsecondary services. It could also be used for on-the-job training for “education-related careers.”
Continue reading
Sunday, April 18, 2010
Saturday, April 17, 2010
Harvard Offers New Doctorate for School Leaders Who Aim to Shake Up Status Quo
Looks like an interesting opportunity for leadership. I hope they build in a lot of sensitivity and understanding of diverse populations. -Angela
September 15, 2009
Harvard Offers New Doctorate for School Leaders Who Aim to Shake Up Status Quo
By Peter Schmidt
Harvard University today announced a new doctoral program in educational leadership that, in partnership with prominent organizations pushing for change in elementary and secondary schools, will seek to train people capable of bringing about major school reform.
Harvard's new Doctor of Education Leadership Program will be based at its Graduate School of Education and will involve faculty members of that school as well as Harvard's business school and John F. Kennedy School of Government. In their third and final year in the program, students will enter a yearlong residency with a partner organization such as Teach for America, the National Center on Education and the Economy, or one of the nation's largest urban school districts.
The program's mission will be to train top officials of school districts, government agencies, nonprofit groups, and private organizations who will be equipped to shake up the status quo in elementary and secondary education.
"Our goal is not to develop leaders for the system as it currently exists; rather, we aim to develop people who will lead system transformation," Kathleen McCartney, dean of the Graduate School of Education, said in written statement.
The Wallace Foundation has provided Harvard a $10-million grant for the program, enabling the university to operate it tuition-free and to offer its students a cost-of-living stipend. An initial cohort of 25 students is expected to enroll in the program in the fall of 2010.
September 15, 2009
Harvard Offers New Doctorate for School Leaders Who Aim to Shake Up Status Quo
By Peter Schmidt
Harvard University today announced a new doctoral program in educational leadership that, in partnership with prominent organizations pushing for change in elementary and secondary schools, will seek to train people capable of bringing about major school reform.
Harvard's new Doctor of Education Leadership Program will be based at its Graduate School of Education and will involve faculty members of that school as well as Harvard's business school and John F. Kennedy School of Government. In their third and final year in the program, students will enter a yearlong residency with a partner organization such as Teach for America, the National Center on Education and the Economy, or one of the nation's largest urban school districts.
The program's mission will be to train top officials of school districts, government agencies, nonprofit groups, and private organizations who will be equipped to shake up the status quo in elementary and secondary education.
"Our goal is not to develop leaders for the system as it currently exists; rather, we aim to develop people who will lead system transformation," Kathleen McCartney, dean of the Graduate School of Education, said in written statement.
The Wallace Foundation has provided Harvard a $10-million grant for the program, enabling the university to operate it tuition-free and to offer its students a cost-of-living stipend. An initial cohort of 25 students is expected to enroll in the program in the fall of 2010.
Tuesday, April 13, 2010
Nearly 21 Percent of Texas’s High School Students Attend the Nation's Lowest-Performing Schools
Nearly 21 Percent of Texas’s High School Students Attend the Nation's Lowest-Performing Schools
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
April 12, 2010
MEDIA CONTACT:
Jason Amos
(202) 828-0828
jamos@all4ed.org
ALLIANCE FOR EXCELLENT EDUCATION CALLS ON CONGRESS TO ADDRESS TEXAS’S LOWEST-PERFORMING HIGH SCHOOLS
Nearly 21 Percent of Texas’s High School Students Attend These Schools
Washington, DC – In advance of an April 13 Senate hearing on school turnaround, a new brief from the Alliance for Excellent Education released today calls on Congress to address the approximately two thousand high schools that account for nearly half of the nation’s dropouts. According to the brief, Prioritizing the Nation’s Lowest-Performing High Schools, these schools exist in every state and in 80 percent of congressional districts.
“When emergency medical personnel arrive at an accident scene, they immediately deliver treatment to the most severely injured, said Bob Wise, president of the Alliance for Excellent Education and former governor of West Virginia. “Similarly, the nation must focus its attention on the lowest-performing schools with the largest number of ‘victims’ in the national dropout crisis. The fact that these schools are so widespread and contribute so greatly to the national dropout crisis dictates making them an essential focus of any federal effort to improve the graduation rate.”
In the nation’s lowest-performing high schools, sometimes known as “dropout factories,” graduation rates routinely fall below 60 percent. Over half of these schools have student bodies larger than one thousand, but others are small- or medium-sized schools. And contrary to a common misconception, not all of the nation’s lowest-performing high schools are located in urban areas; half are located outside city limits in suburbs, small towns, and rural areas.
According to data from Johns Hopkins University and calculations by the Alliance, more than 175 of the nation’s lowest-performing high schools are located in Texas, representing approximately 14 percent of Texas’s high schools and educating about 21 percent of its high school students.
In an era of diminishing financial resources, it makes good economic sense to target the nation’s lowest-performing high schools and focus attention, commitment, and resources on improving them, the brief argues. Directing strategic efforts to turn around these schools could significantly reduce the nation’s dropout rate.
The Graduation Promise Act (GPA), currently pending before Congress, would authorize $2.5 billion in new funding to ensure that high schools with the greatest challenges receive the support they need to implement research-based interventions. Additionally, it would strengthen a state’s ability to identify and target the level of reform and resources necessary to improve and turn around the nation’s lowest-performing high schools, while ensuring transparency and accountability.
“As the Congress works to reauthorize the Elementary and Secondary Education Act this year, it should include the Graduation Promise Act, which would provide states and school districts with the resources to implement effective, research-based reforms tailored to the specific needs of the nation’s low-performing schools and the students who attend them,” Wise said.
The complete brief, which includes a table outlining the number of lowest-performing high schools and the percentages of students who attend them for each state, is available at http://www.all4ed.org/files/PrioritizingLowestPerformingSchools.pdf.
###
The Alliance for Excellent Education is a Washington, DC-based national policy and advocacy organization that works to improve national and federal policy so that all students can achieve at high academic levels and graduate from high school ready for success in college, work, and citizenship in the twenty-first century. For more information about the Alliance for Excellent Education, please visit http://www.all4ed.org
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
April 12, 2010
MEDIA CONTACT:
Jason Amos
(202) 828-0828
jamos@all4ed.org
ALLIANCE FOR EXCELLENT EDUCATION CALLS ON CONGRESS TO ADDRESS TEXAS’S LOWEST-PERFORMING HIGH SCHOOLS
Nearly 21 Percent of Texas’s High School Students Attend These Schools
Washington, DC – In advance of an April 13 Senate hearing on school turnaround, a new brief from the Alliance for Excellent Education released today calls on Congress to address the approximately two thousand high schools that account for nearly half of the nation’s dropouts. According to the brief, Prioritizing the Nation’s Lowest-Performing High Schools, these schools exist in every state and in 80 percent of congressional districts.
“When emergency medical personnel arrive at an accident scene, they immediately deliver treatment to the most severely injured, said Bob Wise, president of the Alliance for Excellent Education and former governor of West Virginia. “Similarly, the nation must focus its attention on the lowest-performing schools with the largest number of ‘victims’ in the national dropout crisis. The fact that these schools are so widespread and contribute so greatly to the national dropout crisis dictates making them an essential focus of any federal effort to improve the graduation rate.”
In the nation’s lowest-performing high schools, sometimes known as “dropout factories,” graduation rates routinely fall below 60 percent. Over half of these schools have student bodies larger than one thousand, but others are small- or medium-sized schools. And contrary to a common misconception, not all of the nation’s lowest-performing high schools are located in urban areas; half are located outside city limits in suburbs, small towns, and rural areas.
According to data from Johns Hopkins University and calculations by the Alliance, more than 175 of the nation’s lowest-performing high schools are located in Texas, representing approximately 14 percent of Texas’s high schools and educating about 21 percent of its high school students.
In an era of diminishing financial resources, it makes good economic sense to target the nation’s lowest-performing high schools and focus attention, commitment, and resources on improving them, the brief argues. Directing strategic efforts to turn around these schools could significantly reduce the nation’s dropout rate.
The Graduation Promise Act (GPA), currently pending before Congress, would authorize $2.5 billion in new funding to ensure that high schools with the greatest challenges receive the support they need to implement research-based interventions. Additionally, it would strengthen a state’s ability to identify and target the level of reform and resources necessary to improve and turn around the nation’s lowest-performing high schools, while ensuring transparency and accountability.
“As the Congress works to reauthorize the Elementary and Secondary Education Act this year, it should include the Graduation Promise Act, which would provide states and school districts with the resources to implement effective, research-based reforms tailored to the specific needs of the nation’s low-performing schools and the students who attend them,” Wise said.
The complete brief, which includes a table outlining the number of lowest-performing high schools and the percentages of students who attend them for each state, is available at http://www.all4ed.org/files/PrioritizingLowestPerformingSchools.pdf.
###
The Alliance for Excellent Education is a Washington, DC-based national policy and advocacy organization that works to improve national and federal policy so that all students can achieve at high academic levels and graduate from high school ready for success in college, work, and citizenship in the twenty-first century. For more information about the Alliance for Excellent Education, please visit http://www.all4ed.org
Monday, April 12, 2010
A student's challenges parallel his school's With faculty in charge, Jefferson High is struggling to turn itself around academically. So is Jorge Garc
A student's challenges parallel his school's
With faculty in charge, Jefferson High is struggling to turn itself around academically. So is Jorge Garcia.
By Howard Blume
April 5, 2010
Jorge Garcia represents the past, the present and, potentially, the future of long-struggling Jefferson High School.
As a freshman in 2006 at the South Los Angeles school, he failed all his classes and was kicked out after starting two fights, one of them especially violent. Since then, he's survived five bullet wounds, dealt with his father's fatal illness and become a parent himself.
This year Jorge, 17, returned to Jefferson -- to set an example for his son.
Like the school itself, Jorge wants to turn things around. And like Jorge, Jefferson suddenly has a chance at redemption.
Last month, the Los Angeles Board of Education could have turned over the job of improving Jefferson to an outside operator. Instead, it chose a plan created by Jefferson's teachers.
With new authority, staffers at Jefferson have taken on the crucial test of whether they can fix one of the most historically troubled, low-achieving campuses in the Los Angeles Unified School District.
For decades, Jefferson, with its iconic 1930s Art Deco architecture, served a predominantly African American community and produced such figures as diplomat Ralph Bunche, dancer Alvin Ailey and football standout Woody Strode.
The school, like the area around it, has become a hub for working-class Latino immigrants.
Neighborhood tensions spilled onto the Jefferson campus in 2005, through racially tinged campuswide fights. That year, its test scores were second lowest among L.A. Unified's high schools. The dropout rate jumped to 58% in 2007, according to district records.
Juan Flecha was named principal after the unrest. He restored order, raised test scores somewhat and made key hires, including social studies teacher Nicolle Fefferman.
"Mr. Flecha was honest with me," Fefferman recalled. "He said: 'We have teachers who are afraid of students. We have a lot of work to do. I'm looking for soldiers.' "
Flecha divided Jefferson into small academies, each with a special focus. But they varied in quality and in the commitment of faculty and students.
This year, Flecha became a principals' supervisor and L.A. schools Supt. Ramon Cortines appointed Michael Taft to lead Jefferson, impressed by a program he had run on campus.
Taft and many teachers say they expect strong progress, even while they acknowledge that some staff members have been too comfortable with academic failure.
"There is a committed group of teachers at this school," Taft said. "I think we've created a real sense of urgency."
Jefferson has many bright, hard-working students. More than 200 of its 2,100 are in Advanced Placement classes; 98 are in trigonometry or calculus.
But few excel academically -- about four of every 100 who enter ninth grade go on to qualify as seniors for admission to the University of California or Cal State systems, the most recent state data show.
Hundreds of students aren't trying or aren't succeeding. More than half flunked at least one class during the first semester; more than one in four failed at least three.
On a recent day, 15 of 24 students were present in Rodney Weber's sophomore English class. They quietly, although unenthusiastically, completed a worksheet on a portion of Frank Bonham's "Durango Street," a street-gang redemption tale.
"You can't say, 'Read this book and tell me about it next week.' That would be suicide," Weber said. "They can usually hang in there for five to 10 pages at a time."
Weber, a 25-year veteran at Jefferson, is hopeful but a little jaded after a succession of reforms stretching across decades: "Things are changing," he said. "The question is: Is all change good change?"
The school's new plan includes opening all classes to parent observation and having teachers monitor their colleagues' performance.
Another strategy is to avoid traditional suspensions. Sending a student home for breaking a rule leads to lost educational time, the last thing the faculty wants to see.
A parent conference can replace a suspension or preclude worsening behavior, Taft said. So can requiring parents to attend classes with their child.
Faculty members are making unannounced home visits to students who flunk three or more classes.
On campus, the staff has started tracking down students who aren't in classrooms. Tutoring or other educational activities accompany disciplinary detentions.
During a recent detention period in the auditorium, counselors asked students to choose a college major or career and write two paragraphs.
Freshman Christian Hernandez mumbled that nothing interested him.
He was in detention for sleeping late.
"What's a vocational school?" counselor Laura Baca implored cheerfully.
Not one of the 30 or so answered.
One student finally said he wanted to be a skater, eliciting derisive chuckles.
"Let's not laugh," Baca said. "Those are things people want to pursue, but can he skate for the next 50 years? No, but he can study business and run a skating business or study graphic design."
Christian suddenly started to write about his interest in automotive technology and microcomputers.
Baca and attendance counselor Cesar Martinez talked up a free trip to San Diego State to inspire them. Days later, 44 low-achieving students boarded a 7:30 a.m. bus -- no small victory. But two were arrested during the lunch break on suspicion of shoplifting.
This two-steps-forward, one-step-back progress also marks Jorge's journey toward graduation.
It took a couple of rough years before he decided that tagging is "pointless" and school isn't.
His problems at Jefferson began just weeks after his arrival. He started a fight with a rival tagger.
Then, before first semester ended, he and two friends jumped a student in the science building, sending him to the hospital. They believed he belonged to a gang that had killed a friend. Jorge escaped jail after an older boy took the rap.
Jorge later spent a few days in custody for tagging.
As for school, "it's stressing and it's hard," he said. "You want to pay attention and you want to do good. But when you're actually in school, you just don't feel like doing it."
On Halloween in 2008, long after Jefferson booted Jorge, the streets nearly claimed him. He'd been walking with his mother when he decided to hang out close to their apartment.
Gang members approached where he was standing -- an area near a gang gathering spot -- and one started shooting. Among the five wounded, Jorge got the worst of it: Two bullets went through his chest, one of which punctured a lung; one went through each upper arm, and one shattered his left forearm.
During his recovery, he had to care for his diabetic father, administering insulin. His father had become blind and was dying.
After his death, Jorge's mother suffered a mild stroke. He accompanies her to doctor appointments on the bus.
Caring for his parents made Jorge want to become a nurse, although for now he's earning some money at a car repair shop.
His motivation comes partly from his girlfriend, whom he describes proudly as a straight-A student. And also from their son, who is nearly 2.
"I really want to graduate because nobody from my family has graduated," said Jorge, 17. "Now that I have a kid, I'm trying to be somebody in life, to be a good example to my kid and also to give myself a good life."
He just earned a B in history through a Jefferson credit-recovery program at Los Angeles Trade-Technical College.
But old habits are hard to break. He's been in and out of school.
"You're so close," Baca told him during a recent visit to his home. "I know you're going to make it."
"These students do have dreams," Baca said later. "That's what we have to tap into."
howard.blume@ latimes.com
Copyright © 2010, The Los Angeles Times
With faculty in charge, Jefferson High is struggling to turn itself around academically. So is Jorge Garcia.
By Howard Blume
April 5, 2010
Jorge Garcia represents the past, the present and, potentially, the future of long-struggling Jefferson High School.
As a freshman in 2006 at the South Los Angeles school, he failed all his classes and was kicked out after starting two fights, one of them especially violent. Since then, he's survived five bullet wounds, dealt with his father's fatal illness and become a parent himself.
This year Jorge, 17, returned to Jefferson -- to set an example for his son.
Like the school itself, Jorge wants to turn things around. And like Jorge, Jefferson suddenly has a chance at redemption.
Last month, the Los Angeles Board of Education could have turned over the job of improving Jefferson to an outside operator. Instead, it chose a plan created by Jefferson's teachers.
With new authority, staffers at Jefferson have taken on the crucial test of whether they can fix one of the most historically troubled, low-achieving campuses in the Los Angeles Unified School District.
For decades, Jefferson, with its iconic 1930s Art Deco architecture, served a predominantly African American community and produced such figures as diplomat Ralph Bunche, dancer Alvin Ailey and football standout Woody Strode.
The school, like the area around it, has become a hub for working-class Latino immigrants.
Neighborhood tensions spilled onto the Jefferson campus in 2005, through racially tinged campuswide fights. That year, its test scores were second lowest among L.A. Unified's high schools. The dropout rate jumped to 58% in 2007, according to district records.
Juan Flecha was named principal after the unrest. He restored order, raised test scores somewhat and made key hires, including social studies teacher Nicolle Fefferman.
"Mr. Flecha was honest with me," Fefferman recalled. "He said: 'We have teachers who are afraid of students. We have a lot of work to do. I'm looking for soldiers.' "
Flecha divided Jefferson into small academies, each with a special focus. But they varied in quality and in the commitment of faculty and students.
This year, Flecha became a principals' supervisor and L.A. schools Supt. Ramon Cortines appointed Michael Taft to lead Jefferson, impressed by a program he had run on campus.
Taft and many teachers say they expect strong progress, even while they acknowledge that some staff members have been too comfortable with academic failure.
"There is a committed group of teachers at this school," Taft said. "I think we've created a real sense of urgency."
Jefferson has many bright, hard-working students. More than 200 of its 2,100 are in Advanced Placement classes; 98 are in trigonometry or calculus.
But few excel academically -- about four of every 100 who enter ninth grade go on to qualify as seniors for admission to the University of California or Cal State systems, the most recent state data show.
Hundreds of students aren't trying or aren't succeeding. More than half flunked at least one class during the first semester; more than one in four failed at least three.
On a recent day, 15 of 24 students were present in Rodney Weber's sophomore English class. They quietly, although unenthusiastically, completed a worksheet on a portion of Frank Bonham's "Durango Street," a street-gang redemption tale.
"You can't say, 'Read this book and tell me about it next week.' That would be suicide," Weber said. "They can usually hang in there for five to 10 pages at a time."
Weber, a 25-year veteran at Jefferson, is hopeful but a little jaded after a succession of reforms stretching across decades: "Things are changing," he said. "The question is: Is all change good change?"
The school's new plan includes opening all classes to parent observation and having teachers monitor their colleagues' performance.
Another strategy is to avoid traditional suspensions. Sending a student home for breaking a rule leads to lost educational time, the last thing the faculty wants to see.
A parent conference can replace a suspension or preclude worsening behavior, Taft said. So can requiring parents to attend classes with their child.
Faculty members are making unannounced home visits to students who flunk three or more classes.
On campus, the staff has started tracking down students who aren't in classrooms. Tutoring or other educational activities accompany disciplinary detentions.
During a recent detention period in the auditorium, counselors asked students to choose a college major or career and write two paragraphs.
Freshman Christian Hernandez mumbled that nothing interested him.
He was in detention for sleeping late.
"What's a vocational school?" counselor Laura Baca implored cheerfully.
Not one of the 30 or so answered.
One student finally said he wanted to be a skater, eliciting derisive chuckles.
"Let's not laugh," Baca said. "Those are things people want to pursue, but can he skate for the next 50 years? No, but he can study business and run a skating business or study graphic design."
Christian suddenly started to write about his interest in automotive technology and microcomputers.
Baca and attendance counselor Cesar Martinez talked up a free trip to San Diego State to inspire them. Days later, 44 low-achieving students boarded a 7:30 a.m. bus -- no small victory. But two were arrested during the lunch break on suspicion of shoplifting.
This two-steps-forward, one-step-back progress also marks Jorge's journey toward graduation.
It took a couple of rough years before he decided that tagging is "pointless" and school isn't.
His problems at Jefferson began just weeks after his arrival. He started a fight with a rival tagger.
Then, before first semester ended, he and two friends jumped a student in the science building, sending him to the hospital. They believed he belonged to a gang that had killed a friend. Jorge escaped jail after an older boy took the rap.
Jorge later spent a few days in custody for tagging.
As for school, "it's stressing and it's hard," he said. "You want to pay attention and you want to do good. But when you're actually in school, you just don't feel like doing it."
On Halloween in 2008, long after Jefferson booted Jorge, the streets nearly claimed him. He'd been walking with his mother when he decided to hang out close to their apartment.
Gang members approached where he was standing -- an area near a gang gathering spot -- and one started shooting. Among the five wounded, Jorge got the worst of it: Two bullets went through his chest, one of which punctured a lung; one went through each upper arm, and one shattered his left forearm.
During his recovery, he had to care for his diabetic father, administering insulin. His father had become blind and was dying.
After his death, Jorge's mother suffered a mild stroke. He accompanies her to doctor appointments on the bus.
Caring for his parents made Jorge want to become a nurse, although for now he's earning some money at a car repair shop.
His motivation comes partly from his girlfriend, whom he describes proudly as a straight-A student. And also from their son, who is nearly 2.
"I really want to graduate because nobody from my family has graduated," said Jorge, 17. "Now that I have a kid, I'm trying to be somebody in life, to be a good example to my kid and also to give myself a good life."
He just earned a B in history through a Jefferson credit-recovery program at Los Angeles Trade-Technical College.
But old habits are hard to break. He's been in and out of school.
"You're so close," Baca told him during a recent visit to his home. "I know you're going to make it."
"These students do have dreams," Baca said later. "That's what we have to tap into."
howard.blume@ latimes.com
Copyright © 2010, The Los Angeles Times
Tying Teacher Evaluation to Student Achievement
April 7, 2010
Tying Teacher Evaluation to Student Achievement
Caution, Yellow Light Ahead
By Susan H. Fuhrman
The Obama administration, through its Race to the Top initiative, is encouraging states to develop approaches for evaluating teachers that incorporate student-achievement results. This aspect of the program has been controversial, prompting some teachers’ unions to refuse to endorse state applications for competitive federal grants. However, a number of efforts to develop such indices of teacher effectiveness are under way, and the American Federation of Teachers’ president, Randi Weingarten, has publicly endorsed including student-achievement results along with other measures to evaluate teacher success.
Read on here.
Tying Teacher Evaluation to Student Achievement
Caution, Yellow Light Ahead
By Susan H. Fuhrman
The Obama administration, through its Race to the Top initiative, is encouraging states to develop approaches for evaluating teachers that incorporate student-achievement results. This aspect of the program has been controversial, prompting some teachers’ unions to refuse to endorse state applications for competitive federal grants. However, a number of efforts to develop such indices of teacher effectiveness are under way, and the American Federation of Teachers’ president, Randi Weingarten, has publicly endorsed including student-achievement results along with other measures to evaluate teacher success.
Read on here.
Barbara Cargill Is Whitewashing History
Barbara Cargill Is Whitewashing History
By Dan
Let’s revisit the success of Texas State Board of Education member Barbara Cargill, R-The Woodlands, in requiring social studies students to analyze Confederate President Jefferson Davis’s inaugural address. The Texas Education Agency has posted the revised American history curriculum standards (as of the January changes) here. The relevant standard for eighth-grade American history reads:
“(A)nalyze the ideas contained in Jefferson Davis’s inaugural address and Abraham Lincoln’s ideas about liberty, equality, union, and government as contained in his first and second inaugural addresses and the Gettysburg Address.”
The implication here is that Davis and Lincoln had competing ideas about “liberty, equality, union, and government.” Such competing ideas should be obvious: Davis was defending the Confederacy’s right to secede so that it could maintain the evil institution of slavery. Lincoln, who opposed slavery, was trying to maintain the Union. But that’s not what Cargill and other far-right board members really have in mind.
Writing for the New York Times this weekend, Newsweek editor Jon Meacham looks at how many people in the South continue to view the Civil War as a noble cause in which the controversy over slavery supposedly was a sideshow. He recounts, for example, Virginia Gov. Robert McDonnell’s recent proclamation recognizing April as Confederate History Month in his state — a proclamation that originally didn’t even mention slavery. It calls for Virginians to honor people “who fought for their homes and communities and Commonwealth” and “the sacrifices of the Confederate leaders, soldiers and citizens during the period of the Civil War.”
Meacham:
“Advertently or not, Mr. McDonnell is working in a long and dispiriting tradition. Efforts to rehabilitate the Southern rebellion frequently come at moments of racial and social stress, and it is revealing that Virginia’s neo-Confederates are refighting the Civil War in 2010. Whitewashing the war is one way for the right — alienated, anxious and angry about the president, health care reform and all manner of threats, mostly imaginary — to express its unease with the Age of Obama, disguising hate as heritage.”
People like McDonnell and his supporters, Meacham writes, “would like what Lincoln called our ‘fiery trial’ to be seen in a political, not a moral, light”:
“If the slaves are erased from the picture, then what took place between Sumter and Appomattox is not about the fate of human chattel, or a battle between good and evil. It is, instead, more of an ancestral skirmish in the Reagan revolution, a contest between big and small government.”
Cargill and her partners on the Texas State Board of Education are engaged in the same whitewashing of history and for the same reasons. One of the common themes of their hundreds of changes in vandalizing the social studies curriculum standards in January and March was the concept of ” big government” as a threat to liberty. Davis’s inaugural address fits that theme quite well.
Davis didn’t refer to slavery even once in his address. Instead, he praised the “courage and patriotism” of Confederates, the “rights of person and property” and the rights of “sovereign states” against “wanton aggression” and a federal government that, he argued, had “perverted” the Constitution.
Such language is hardly foreign in today’s far-right screeds against the federal government. Cargill, intentionally or not, has latched on to the wagon of what Meacham and others call the “Lost Cause” — the concept of a noble and freedom-loving Confederacy, destroyed by aggression against its people’s way of life.
But the “Lost Cause” is a lie. Jefferson Davis and the Confederacy were defending the “right” of southern states to continue the race-based enslavement of a large portion of their population. Davis said nothing about that in the address Cargill wants students to analyze alongside President Lincoln’s speeches. She and other far-right board members are simply whitewashing that evil history in our children’s classrooms, all in the service of the radical anti-government nonsense that passes for political discourse in America today. They should be ashamed of themselves — if they were really capable of it.
This entry was posted on April 11, 2010 at 1:27 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
By Dan
Let’s revisit the success of Texas State Board of Education member Barbara Cargill, R-The Woodlands, in requiring social studies students to analyze Confederate President Jefferson Davis’s inaugural address. The Texas Education Agency has posted the revised American history curriculum standards (as of the January changes) here. The relevant standard for eighth-grade American history reads:
“(A)nalyze the ideas contained in Jefferson Davis’s inaugural address and Abraham Lincoln’s ideas about liberty, equality, union, and government as contained in his first and second inaugural addresses and the Gettysburg Address.”
The implication here is that Davis and Lincoln had competing ideas about “liberty, equality, union, and government.” Such competing ideas should be obvious: Davis was defending the Confederacy’s right to secede so that it could maintain the evil institution of slavery. Lincoln, who opposed slavery, was trying to maintain the Union. But that’s not what Cargill and other far-right board members really have in mind.
Writing for the New York Times this weekend, Newsweek editor Jon Meacham looks at how many people in the South continue to view the Civil War as a noble cause in which the controversy over slavery supposedly was a sideshow. He recounts, for example, Virginia Gov. Robert McDonnell’s recent proclamation recognizing April as Confederate History Month in his state — a proclamation that originally didn’t even mention slavery. It calls for Virginians to honor people “who fought for their homes and communities and Commonwealth” and “the sacrifices of the Confederate leaders, soldiers and citizens during the period of the Civil War.”
Meacham:
“Advertently or not, Mr. McDonnell is working in a long and dispiriting tradition. Efforts to rehabilitate the Southern rebellion frequently come at moments of racial and social stress, and it is revealing that Virginia’s neo-Confederates are refighting the Civil War in 2010. Whitewashing the war is one way for the right — alienated, anxious and angry about the president, health care reform and all manner of threats, mostly imaginary — to express its unease with the Age of Obama, disguising hate as heritage.”
People like McDonnell and his supporters, Meacham writes, “would like what Lincoln called our ‘fiery trial’ to be seen in a political, not a moral, light”:
“If the slaves are erased from the picture, then what took place between Sumter and Appomattox is not about the fate of human chattel, or a battle between good and evil. It is, instead, more of an ancestral skirmish in the Reagan revolution, a contest between big and small government.”
Cargill and her partners on the Texas State Board of Education are engaged in the same whitewashing of history and for the same reasons. One of the common themes of their hundreds of changes in vandalizing the social studies curriculum standards in January and March was the concept of ” big government” as a threat to liberty. Davis’s inaugural address fits that theme quite well.
Davis didn’t refer to slavery even once in his address. Instead, he praised the “courage and patriotism” of Confederates, the “rights of person and property” and the rights of “sovereign states” against “wanton aggression” and a federal government that, he argued, had “perverted” the Constitution.
Such language is hardly foreign in today’s far-right screeds against the federal government. Cargill, intentionally or not, has latched on to the wagon of what Meacham and others call the “Lost Cause” — the concept of a noble and freedom-loving Confederacy, destroyed by aggression against its people’s way of life.
But the “Lost Cause” is a lie. Jefferson Davis and the Confederacy were defending the “right” of southern states to continue the race-based enslavement of a large portion of their population. Davis said nothing about that in the address Cargill wants students to analyze alongside President Lincoln’s speeches. She and other far-right board members are simply whitewashing that evil history in our children’s classrooms, all in the service of the radical anti-government nonsense that passes for political discourse in America today. They should be ashamed of themselves — if they were really capable of it.
This entry was posted on April 11, 2010 at 1:27 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Sunday, April 11, 2010
The Essence of “S-ness”
The Essence of “S-ness”
Anthropolitical linguist Ana Celia Zentella is a strong proponent of language diversity and respect for language rights.
By Carol Brévart-Demm
“Linguistic details are of great importance in determining class and regional background,” says Eugene M. Lang Visiting Professor for Issues of Social Change Ana Celia Zentella.
Who of us would ever have imagined that the letter s could be of any significance in issues of social status? For Ana Celia Zentella, the Eugene M. Lang Visiting Professor for Issues of Social Change, phenomena like the “s-ness” in pronunciation of Spanish language varieties offer important linguistic pointers on how speakers of those languages perceive themselves and others whose pronunciation differs from their own.
Zentella cites the example of Dominicans—especially among the working class—who, because they drop the final syllable s from their speech, suffer criticism from those who espouse more conservative pronunciation.
“There are linguistic details that are of great importance in determining class and regional background,” she says. For example, las costas (the coast) in prestigious Castilian Spanish, becomes la cota in Dominican Spanish, and because many Dominicans are poor and dark, this becomes a stigmatizing feature. (listen: Zentella’s faculty lecture)
“S-ness, in and of itself, has no status; it’s endowed with status because of attitudes about the class and racial background of speakers,” says Zentella, adding that the reason for Dominicans dropping the final syllable s can be traced back to Spanish spoken by the southern Spaniards who colonized the Caribbean. Yet linguistic features such as s-ness, Zentella says, are related to ideologies of power and who has a right to be recognized and respected.
A professor emerita in the Department of Ethnic Studies at the University of California at San Diego, Zentella identifies herself as an anthropolitical linguist.
“I thought that by calling my field anthropolitical linguistics, the word ‘political’ would bring to the forefront the importance of social structures and political ideologies,” she says. “And it’s not just an interesting theoretical construct. I see the terrible fallout in schools and communities, in the increase in violence against Latinos in the last few years—a 40 percent increase since 2003.”
Many of these attacks involve people either mimicking Spanish or yelling something insulting about the Spanish language without regard for or understanding of the particular Hispanic ethnicity they’re attacking, she says, citing the November 2008 stabbing of Ecuadorean Marcelo Lucero, 37, in Long Island, N.Y., by seven teenagers because “he looked Mexican.”
Zentella is the daughter of a Mexican father and Puerto Rican mother who grew up in the South Bronx, N.Y. She decries the process of homogenization that has taken place in the United States with respect to what is generally referred to as “the Hispanic community”—more than 45 million people with roots in more than a dozen different countries, all with their own cultures, political systems, and varieties of Spanish. The repercussions of this homogenization include threats to the survival of the various groups’ distinctive linguistic traits and have created a sense of insecurity, especially among young people.
“This issue can divide families, with some members believing in the importance of holding on to their community’s way of speaking, while others believe they should learn and speak only the standard varieties of whichever language is their heritage. Still others believe we should forget altogether about those inherited languages and just adopt English,” Zentella says. “I see the repercussions in terms of increased linguistic intolerance and academic failure of students who are told they have to forget their home languages and focus on English only.”
Zentella believes that espousing “English-only” laws and anti-bilingual education ostensibly for the benefit of immigrant groups is misguided and counterproductive if the goal is to encourage fluency in English while contributing to the cohesion of immigrant families and to linguistic diversity and tolerance in the United States.
In fall 2009, Zentella taught the course Language, Race, and Ethnic Identities, during which she asked the large turnout of 39 students to write term papers on topics of their choice about the languages spoken in Philadelphia. She’ll seek funding to edit the students’ papers and publish them as a book titled Multilingual Philadelphia: Portraits of Language and Social Change. The publication will resemble one produced while teaching at San Diego, called Multilingual San Diego: Portraits of Language Loss and Revitalization.
In her spring semester course, Latino Languages and Dialects in Contact in Families, Schools, and Communities, Zentella’s students are investigating, among other things, the phenomenon of Spanglish—the alternation of Spanish and English, which includes the adoption of some English words that are usually either shorter than the Spanish expression or reflective of a different cultural reality. Her own position is that Spanglish deserves respect as a systematic way of speaking bilingually.
Referring to different points of view among linguists, she explains: “We’re agreed about the vitality of this way of speaking and its linguistic correctness, the rule-governed nature of it, its social importance, and its communicative strength. And we know that in all these different groups of young bilinguals, where there is close and intense contact between groups, they will begin to alternate languages. They do it because they have to alternate between their parents on the one hand and their younger brothers and sisters on the other. So it actually begins at home, and extends to other members of the larger community,” Zentella says. She explains that the alternation becomes a hallmark of bilingualism that indicates belonging in and sharing two worlds, between which and within which those who share this talent can move and communicate with ease.
She further points out that Latinos did not invent the practice of alternating between languages. She cites the existence of Greenglish (Greek/English), Konglish (Korean/English), and Japlish (Japanese/English).
The debate about Spanglish, Zentella continues, is not about the language’s structure or strength but rather about whether as a label it is damaging to its speakers. Zentella’s opponents consider the use of the term Spanglish derogatory, indicative of a mish-mash, sending the message that its speakers are illiterate, alingual, or semilingual, lacking fluency in either language.
Having grown up speaking Spanglish herself, Zentella acknowledges these assertions but approves of the label because it is undergoing a process of what she calls a “semantic inversion, like what black people in the United States did with the label ‘black’ or what homosexuals did with the word ‘queer.’” Many are investing Spanglish with a pride and a strength that recognizes its origins in ways that the suggested alternative terms such as U.S. Spanish or Spanish of the United States do not, she says.
Although the label “U.S. Spanish” might acknowledge the language from a linguistic point of view as being on an equal footing with the other forms of Spanish such as Mexican or Argentinian Spanish, it fails to highlight the fact as the label “Spanglish” does from the standpoint of anthropolitical linguistics that this language was created within two communities that have been in close (yet by no means equal) contact with each other.
“The children who are trying to identify with both groups by creating this wonderful mesh of two languages are doing things that are not happening in Mexico or in Argentina,” Zentella says.
In her advocacy for equality of language, Zentella has been engaged for the past five years in discussions with the U.S. Census Bureau about its discriminatory method of classifying the language abilities of immigrants. Questions on the census form inquiring about languages other than English spoken in homes categorize English proficiency levels spoken by non-native English speakers by offering four options—“not at all,” “not well,” “well,” or “very well”—on the form.
In evaluating the responses, Zentella says, the Census Bureau groups all responses other than “very well” into one class called “linguistically isolated”—a categorization she abhors and is striving hard to have changed. She says that even children who speak only English at home, if living with nobody over the age of 14 who speaks “very well,” are classified as “linguistically isolated.
“This distorts the real picture. Many people say they speak only ‘well’ because they believe that ‘very well’ is how they speak their native language. They don’t put English on the same level as that,” Zentella says.
With the backing of five national organizations, she is suggesting that the Census Bureau substitute two categories—“proficient speakers of English” and “beginning speakers of English”—for the current four and that the label “linguistically isolated” be eliminated.
“This effort is an example of some of the research and observations of anthropolitical linguistics actually being put into practice. These are the ways we try to help people understand that linguistic issues have serious consequences. Even though I’m looking at little things like who deletes the s and where, I’m much more interested in the attitude toward people who delete it and why they don’t see that French has gone through the process and is a highly respected language, while Dominicans have been turned into pariahs.”
In January, the Department of Ethnic Studies at the University of California at San Diego nominated Zentella for the 2010 Alice and Clifford Spendlove Prize in Social Justice, Diplomacy, and Tolerance for her four decades of activism on behalf of racial equality and linguistic diversity.
Anthropolitical linguist Ana Celia Zentella is a strong proponent of language diversity and respect for language rights.
By Carol Brévart-Demm
“Linguistic details are of great importance in determining class and regional background,” says Eugene M. Lang Visiting Professor for Issues of Social Change Ana Celia Zentella.
Who of us would ever have imagined that the letter s could be of any significance in issues of social status? For Ana Celia Zentella, the Eugene M. Lang Visiting Professor for Issues of Social Change, phenomena like the “s-ness” in pronunciation of Spanish language varieties offer important linguistic pointers on how speakers of those languages perceive themselves and others whose pronunciation differs from their own.
Zentella cites the example of Dominicans—especially among the working class—who, because they drop the final syllable s from their speech, suffer criticism from those who espouse more conservative pronunciation.
“There are linguistic details that are of great importance in determining class and regional background,” she says. For example, las costas (the coast) in prestigious Castilian Spanish, becomes la cota in Dominican Spanish, and because many Dominicans are poor and dark, this becomes a stigmatizing feature. (listen: Zentella’s faculty lecture)
“S-ness, in and of itself, has no status; it’s endowed with status because of attitudes about the class and racial background of speakers,” says Zentella, adding that the reason for Dominicans dropping the final syllable s can be traced back to Spanish spoken by the southern Spaniards who colonized the Caribbean. Yet linguistic features such as s-ness, Zentella says, are related to ideologies of power and who has a right to be recognized and respected.
A professor emerita in the Department of Ethnic Studies at the University of California at San Diego, Zentella identifies herself as an anthropolitical linguist.
“I thought that by calling my field anthropolitical linguistics, the word ‘political’ would bring to the forefront the importance of social structures and political ideologies,” she says. “And it’s not just an interesting theoretical construct. I see the terrible fallout in schools and communities, in the increase in violence against Latinos in the last few years—a 40 percent increase since 2003.”
Many of these attacks involve people either mimicking Spanish or yelling something insulting about the Spanish language without regard for or understanding of the particular Hispanic ethnicity they’re attacking, she says, citing the November 2008 stabbing of Ecuadorean Marcelo Lucero, 37, in Long Island, N.Y., by seven teenagers because “he looked Mexican.”
Zentella is the daughter of a Mexican father and Puerto Rican mother who grew up in the South Bronx, N.Y. She decries the process of homogenization that has taken place in the United States with respect to what is generally referred to as “the Hispanic community”—more than 45 million people with roots in more than a dozen different countries, all with their own cultures, political systems, and varieties of Spanish. The repercussions of this homogenization include threats to the survival of the various groups’ distinctive linguistic traits and have created a sense of insecurity, especially among young people.
“This issue can divide families, with some members believing in the importance of holding on to their community’s way of speaking, while others believe they should learn and speak only the standard varieties of whichever language is their heritage. Still others believe we should forget altogether about those inherited languages and just adopt English,” Zentella says. “I see the repercussions in terms of increased linguistic intolerance and academic failure of students who are told they have to forget their home languages and focus on English only.”
Zentella believes that espousing “English-only” laws and anti-bilingual education ostensibly for the benefit of immigrant groups is misguided and counterproductive if the goal is to encourage fluency in English while contributing to the cohesion of immigrant families and to linguistic diversity and tolerance in the United States.
In fall 2009, Zentella taught the course Language, Race, and Ethnic Identities, during which she asked the large turnout of 39 students to write term papers on topics of their choice about the languages spoken in Philadelphia. She’ll seek funding to edit the students’ papers and publish them as a book titled Multilingual Philadelphia: Portraits of Language and Social Change. The publication will resemble one produced while teaching at San Diego, called Multilingual San Diego: Portraits of Language Loss and Revitalization.
In her spring semester course, Latino Languages and Dialects in Contact in Families, Schools, and Communities, Zentella’s students are investigating, among other things, the phenomenon of Spanglish—the alternation of Spanish and English, which includes the adoption of some English words that are usually either shorter than the Spanish expression or reflective of a different cultural reality. Her own position is that Spanglish deserves respect as a systematic way of speaking bilingually.
Referring to different points of view among linguists, she explains: “We’re agreed about the vitality of this way of speaking and its linguistic correctness, the rule-governed nature of it, its social importance, and its communicative strength. And we know that in all these different groups of young bilinguals, where there is close and intense contact between groups, they will begin to alternate languages. They do it because they have to alternate between their parents on the one hand and their younger brothers and sisters on the other. So it actually begins at home, and extends to other members of the larger community,” Zentella says. She explains that the alternation becomes a hallmark of bilingualism that indicates belonging in and sharing two worlds, between which and within which those who share this talent can move and communicate with ease.
She further points out that Latinos did not invent the practice of alternating between languages. She cites the existence of Greenglish (Greek/English), Konglish (Korean/English), and Japlish (Japanese/English).
The debate about Spanglish, Zentella continues, is not about the language’s structure or strength but rather about whether as a label it is damaging to its speakers. Zentella’s opponents consider the use of the term Spanglish derogatory, indicative of a mish-mash, sending the message that its speakers are illiterate, alingual, or semilingual, lacking fluency in either language.
Having grown up speaking Spanglish herself, Zentella acknowledges these assertions but approves of the label because it is undergoing a process of what she calls a “semantic inversion, like what black people in the United States did with the label ‘black’ or what homosexuals did with the word ‘queer.’” Many are investing Spanglish with a pride and a strength that recognizes its origins in ways that the suggested alternative terms such as U.S. Spanish or Spanish of the United States do not, she says.
Although the label “U.S. Spanish” might acknowledge the language from a linguistic point of view as being on an equal footing with the other forms of Spanish such as Mexican or Argentinian Spanish, it fails to highlight the fact as the label “Spanglish” does from the standpoint of anthropolitical linguistics that this language was created within two communities that have been in close (yet by no means equal) contact with each other.
“The children who are trying to identify with both groups by creating this wonderful mesh of two languages are doing things that are not happening in Mexico or in Argentina,” Zentella says.
In her advocacy for equality of language, Zentella has been engaged for the past five years in discussions with the U.S. Census Bureau about its discriminatory method of classifying the language abilities of immigrants. Questions on the census form inquiring about languages other than English spoken in homes categorize English proficiency levels spoken by non-native English speakers by offering four options—“not at all,” “not well,” “well,” or “very well”—on the form.
In evaluating the responses, Zentella says, the Census Bureau groups all responses other than “very well” into one class called “linguistically isolated”—a categorization she abhors and is striving hard to have changed. She says that even children who speak only English at home, if living with nobody over the age of 14 who speaks “very well,” are classified as “linguistically isolated.
“This distorts the real picture. Many people say they speak only ‘well’ because they believe that ‘very well’ is how they speak their native language. They don’t put English on the same level as that,” Zentella says.
With the backing of five national organizations, she is suggesting that the Census Bureau substitute two categories—“proficient speakers of English” and “beginning speakers of English”—for the current four and that the label “linguistically isolated” be eliminated.
“This effort is an example of some of the research and observations of anthropolitical linguistics actually being put into practice. These are the ways we try to help people understand that linguistic issues have serious consequences. Even though I’m looking at little things like who deletes the s and where, I’m much more interested in the attitude toward people who delete it and why they don’t see that French has gone through the process and is a highly respected language, while Dominicans have been turned into pariahs.”
In January, the Department of Ethnic Studies at the University of California at San Diego nominated Zentella for the 2010 Alice and Clifford Spendlove Prize in Social Justice, Diplomacy, and Tolerance for her four decades of activism on behalf of racial equality and linguistic diversity.
New CEP on ELL performance on state tests
Wed, Apr 7, 2010 11:53 am
New CEP on ELL performance on state tests
State Test Score Trends Through 2007-08, Part 6: Has Progress Been Made in Raising Achievement for English Language Learners?
Today the Center on Education Policy released a report that examines the achievement of English language learners on state math and reading tests and discusses the issues surrounding the classification and testing of these students. State Test Score Trends Through 2007-08, Part 6: Has Progress Been Made in Raising Achievement for English Language Learners? is posted on the CEP Web site (www.cep-dc.org
http://www.cep-dc.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=document_ext.showDocumentByID&nodeID=1&DocumentID=305
Diane Stark Rentner
Director of National Programs
Center on Education Policy
1001 Connecticut Avenue NW Suite 522
Washington, D.C. 20036
Ph. 202-822-8065
Fax 202-822-6008
Web www.cep-dc.org
New CEP on ELL performance on state tests
State Test Score Trends Through 2007-08, Part 6: Has Progress Been Made in Raising Achievement for English Language Learners?
Today the Center on Education Policy released a report that examines the achievement of English language learners on state math and reading tests and discusses the issues surrounding the classification and testing of these students. State Test Score Trends Through 2007-08, Part 6: Has Progress Been Made in Raising Achievement for English Language Learners? is posted on the CEP Web site (www.cep-dc.org
http://www.cep-dc.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=document_ext.showDocumentByID&nodeID=1&DocumentID=305
Diane Stark Rentner
Director of National Programs
Center on Education Policy
1001 Connecticut Avenue NW Suite 522
Washington, D.C. 20036
Ph. 202-822-8065
Fax 202-822-6008
Web www.cep-dc.org
Success of the LEAD Summit in San Bernardino April 9, 2010
Success of LEAD Summit, 04/09/2010
The national Latino Education & Advocacy Day (LEAD) summit was a huge historical success. Yet it flew under the radar of practically every major corporate media. With close to 200, 000 participants that day, if anything but self-interest, the media should have taken note since the very future of the U.S. economy and our place in the global competitive markets lies heavily on the educational outcomes of Latinos.
Many people this week have asked me about the success of our LEAD summit, inquiring about the formulaic steps. I found it impossible to articulate in words. I wrote this blog though, trying to offer at least a partial response.
Wed. April 7, 2010, Enrique G. Murillo, Jr., LEAD Coordinator:
The LEAD summit was a decade in the making! After 10 years of sharing research and practices, networking and dialogue among Latino educational professionals through the Journal of Latinos and Education, the National Latino Education Network, and the brand new Handbook of Latinos and Education, we were able to finally build enough momentum, maturation, and academic capital to host this inaugural summit. We have amassed a broad and deep understanding of the individual, interpersonal and structural factors affecting the educational outcomes of Latino students through the triumvirate of research, teaching, and administration, and have finally gained our place in the academy as a legitimate field of inquiry.
That day, members of the academy reached out in partnership to the larger community as we convened stakeholders across a wide spectrum, sharing a common interest and commitment to the educational issues affecting Latinos. What really harnessed the momentum over the last six months was all the new generation of web-based services such as online social networks like YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, etc... The virtual world is well suited for activism, advocacy, and coalition-building, and holds tremendous potential to deliver benefits to the most vulnerable groups in our society by offering sources of advice, support and services. With these, we were able to reach tens of thousands of people, create relevant ties and build up social capital and community cohesion.
Our organizing committee's vision, passion, energy and leadership became contagious, and in a tremendous way we became architects of a democratic educational movement, that is only the beginning of greater things to follow.
What we did on March 29, 2010, was cross a technological border, moving our academic and social capital toward our intended goal of raising awareness of the Latino Educational crisis. The internet-based streaming technologies and electronic collaboration tools "democratized" our Latino educational movement, revolutionizing the very definition of citizen participation. It allowed thousands of ordinary people to plug in, in real-time, and participate in the making of history, something beyond and greater than themselves as any one individual. Although virtual, those tens of thousands participating in the LEAD summit via the town hall viewing events are indeed a community of real people, and for that day, the constraints of time and space were erased.
We proved that day that Education is as much a "cultural" phenomenon for Latinos, as it is political, moral, etc...
----------------------------------------------------
Enrique G. Murillo, Jr., Ph.D.
home web page: http://emurillo.org/
Coordinator, Latino Education and Advocacy Day (LEAD)
http://lead.csusb.edu/
College of Education
California State University, San Bernardino
5500 University Parkway
San Bernardino, CA 92407-2397
The national Latino Education & Advocacy Day (LEAD) summit was a huge historical success. Yet it flew under the radar of practically every major corporate media. With close to 200, 000 participants that day, if anything but self-interest, the media should have taken note since the very future of the U.S. economy and our place in the global competitive markets lies heavily on the educational outcomes of Latinos.
Many people this week have asked me about the success of our LEAD summit, inquiring about the formulaic steps. I found it impossible to articulate in words. I wrote this blog though, trying to offer at least a partial response.
Wed. April 7, 2010, Enrique G. Murillo, Jr., LEAD Coordinator:
The LEAD summit was a decade in the making! After 10 years of sharing research and practices, networking and dialogue among Latino educational professionals through the Journal of Latinos and Education, the National Latino Education Network, and the brand new Handbook of Latinos and Education, we were able to finally build enough momentum, maturation, and academic capital to host this inaugural summit. We have amassed a broad and deep understanding of the individual, interpersonal and structural factors affecting the educational outcomes of Latino students through the triumvirate of research, teaching, and administration, and have finally gained our place in the academy as a legitimate field of inquiry.
That day, members of the academy reached out in partnership to the larger community as we convened stakeholders across a wide spectrum, sharing a common interest and commitment to the educational issues affecting Latinos. What really harnessed the momentum over the last six months was all the new generation of web-based services such as online social networks like YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, etc... The virtual world is well suited for activism, advocacy, and coalition-building, and holds tremendous potential to deliver benefits to the most vulnerable groups in our society by offering sources of advice, support and services. With these, we were able to reach tens of thousands of people, create relevant ties and build up social capital and community cohesion.
Our organizing committee's vision, passion, energy and leadership became contagious, and in a tremendous way we became architects of a democratic educational movement, that is only the beginning of greater things to follow.
What we did on March 29, 2010, was cross a technological border, moving our academic and social capital toward our intended goal of raising awareness of the Latino Educational crisis. The internet-based streaming technologies and electronic collaboration tools "democratized" our Latino educational movement, revolutionizing the very definition of citizen participation. It allowed thousands of ordinary people to plug in, in real-time, and participate in the making of history, something beyond and greater than themselves as any one individual. Although virtual, those tens of thousands participating in the LEAD summit via the town hall viewing events are indeed a community of real people, and for that day, the constraints of time and space were erased.
We proved that day that Education is as much a "cultural" phenomenon for Latinos, as it is political, moral, etc...
----------------------------------------------------
Enrique G. Murillo, Jr., Ph.D.
home web page: http://emurillo.org/
Coordinator, Latino Education and Advocacy Day (LEAD)
http://lead.csusb.edu/
College of Education
California State University, San Bernardino
5500 University Parkway
San Bernardino, CA 92407-2397
Diane Ravitch’s letter to Florida lawmakers
Interesting letter. Wish there was more emphasis on the historical negligence that many of our students of Color continue to endure across the nation.
-Patricia
From: Diane Ravitch
Dear Members,
I wish that I could be in Tallahassee to address you personally but prior commitments make it impossible to do so.
I am a historian of American education at New York University. I served as Assistant Secretary of Research and Improvement in the administration of President George H.W. Bush. I was a founding member of the Koret Task Force of the Hoover Institution. I was also a founding trustee of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation. I have been studying and writing about American education for 40 years.
I write to oppose SB 6/HB 7189.
I understand that this bill would prohibit districts from paying teachers in relation to their experience and education, but would base teachers’ salaries mainly on student gains on standardized tests. I further understand that it is the law’s intent to develop new tests for every subject area, paid for by reducing operating expenses by 5 percent in the schools.
I strongly believe that this bill will have very negative consequences for the children of the state of Florida. I believe that it will dumb down their education. I believe that it will cause many of your best teachers to leave the profession or the state because this legislation is so profoundly disrespectful towards the education profession.
I urge you not to pass this bill.
My new book, "The Death and Life of the Great American School System," demonstrates that pay-for-scores schemes don’t work. The main reason they don’t work is that the measures were not intended for that purpose. Standardized tests are intended to evaluate whether students have learned what they were taught. They are not designed to assess teacher effectiveness or teacher quality. The more that teachers focus on these measures, the more they rob children of time for instruction and for the activities that engage children in their education and promote comprehension.
Teachers are not solely the cause of student progress. If students fail to make progress in their studies, there are many reasons for their failure. The causes of academic success or failure include the students’ own effort; the students’ regular attendance or lack thereof; the family’s support or lack thereof; the family’s poverty and its effects on the student’s health and well-being; the school’s resources; the district’s oversight or lack thereof; and the quality of the test itself, which may be subject to random variation. It makes no sense to hold the teacher alone accountable when student performance is affected by so many different influences.
Should the teacher get a bad evaluation if students have a poor attendance record?
Should the teacher be harshly judged if her students don’t speak English or move frequently from school to school? Should the teacher get an F if the student has poor eyesight or suffers from other undiagnosed health problems? Should the teacher be considered a failure if the student’s family offers no support for his learning?
Since the 1920s, American schools have experimented with merit pay plans. None has ever demonstrated success. Teachers will bend their efforts to raise test scores, but achievement nonetheless lags. The reason for this is that teaching-to-the-test does not yield good education. The students may learn test-taking skills, but they don’t learn how to generalize what they have learned to new situations. Thus, even when state reading scores go up, in response to intensive coaching, national test scores remain flat. As the national tests become more demanding—in 8th grade—the scores don’t rise at all.
Our nation has now had eight consecutive years of rising reading scores at the state level, yet the national scores for 8th grade students have not budged from 1998-2009. The reason for the discrepancy is that students are learning test-taking skills, but they are unable to understand complex materials or to demonstrate their progress on a test that is not the state test.
Test scores do not identify the most effective teachers. A teacher who produces big score gains one year may produce none the next year, depending on which students happen to be in his or her class.
The legislation now under consideration will not improve education in Florida. It will harm kids and their teachers.
I urge you to stop and reflect. The research on teacher effectiveness does not support the policies of SB 6/HB 7189. Please defeat this legislation.
Yours truly,
Diane Ravitch
-Patricia
From: Diane Ravitch
Dear Members,
I wish that I could be in Tallahassee to address you personally but prior commitments make it impossible to do so.
I am a historian of American education at New York University. I served as Assistant Secretary of Research and Improvement in the administration of President George H.W. Bush. I was a founding member of the Koret Task Force of the Hoover Institution. I was also a founding trustee of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation. I have been studying and writing about American education for 40 years.
I write to oppose SB 6/HB 7189.
I understand that this bill would prohibit districts from paying teachers in relation to their experience and education, but would base teachers’ salaries mainly on student gains on standardized tests. I further understand that it is the law’s intent to develop new tests for every subject area, paid for by reducing operating expenses by 5 percent in the schools.
I strongly believe that this bill will have very negative consequences for the children of the state of Florida. I believe that it will dumb down their education. I believe that it will cause many of your best teachers to leave the profession or the state because this legislation is so profoundly disrespectful towards the education profession.
I urge you not to pass this bill.
My new book, "The Death and Life of the Great American School System," demonstrates that pay-for-scores schemes don’t work. The main reason they don’t work is that the measures were not intended for that purpose. Standardized tests are intended to evaluate whether students have learned what they were taught. They are not designed to assess teacher effectiveness or teacher quality. The more that teachers focus on these measures, the more they rob children of time for instruction and for the activities that engage children in their education and promote comprehension.
Teachers are not solely the cause of student progress. If students fail to make progress in their studies, there are many reasons for their failure. The causes of academic success or failure include the students’ own effort; the students’ regular attendance or lack thereof; the family’s support or lack thereof; the family’s poverty and its effects on the student’s health and well-being; the school’s resources; the district’s oversight or lack thereof; and the quality of the test itself, which may be subject to random variation. It makes no sense to hold the teacher alone accountable when student performance is affected by so many different influences.
Should the teacher get a bad evaluation if students have a poor attendance record?
Should the teacher be harshly judged if her students don’t speak English or move frequently from school to school? Should the teacher get an F if the student has poor eyesight or suffers from other undiagnosed health problems? Should the teacher be considered a failure if the student’s family offers no support for his learning?
Since the 1920s, American schools have experimented with merit pay plans. None has ever demonstrated success. Teachers will bend their efforts to raise test scores, but achievement nonetheless lags. The reason for this is that teaching-to-the-test does not yield good education. The students may learn test-taking skills, but they don’t learn how to generalize what they have learned to new situations. Thus, even when state reading scores go up, in response to intensive coaching, national test scores remain flat. As the national tests become more demanding—in 8th grade—the scores don’t rise at all.
Our nation has now had eight consecutive years of rising reading scores at the state level, yet the national scores for 8th grade students have not budged from 1998-2009. The reason for the discrepancy is that students are learning test-taking skills, but they are unable to understand complex materials or to demonstrate their progress on a test that is not the state test.
Test scores do not identify the most effective teachers. A teacher who produces big score gains one year may produce none the next year, depending on which students happen to be in his or her class.
The legislation now under consideration will not improve education in Florida. It will harm kids and their teachers.
I urge you to stop and reflect. The research on teacher effectiveness does not support the policies of SB 6/HB 7189. Please defeat this legislation.
Yours truly,
Diane Ravitch
Quantcast Teachers agree to shorten LAUSD school year
This is very sad news.
-Patricia
Union members OK the deal that could save the district up to $140 million, save about 2,100 jobs and maintain class sizes. It will become effective if approved by the school board Tuesday.
By Jason Song | LA Times
April 11, 2010
Los Angeles teachers union members have ratified a deal to shorten the school calendar this and next year, officials announced Saturday.
Nearly 80% of United Teachers Los Angeles members who cast ballots approved of the deal, which could save the Los Angeles Unified School District up to $140 million, save the jobs of about 2,100 employees and maintain class sizes.
Under the agreement, which was negotiated over several months, teachers would take an unpaid day off the Friday before Memorial Day and schools would close four days earlier for summer vacation. Seven additional instructional days would be cut from the 2010-11 academic year.
The school district is facing a budget deficit of up to $640 million and has been searching for ways to cut costs. Several unions, including those representing cafeteria workers and bus drivers, have agreed to take unpaid days off. Many non-unionized district employees, including upper management, have also begun to take furloughs.
School district and union leaders had previously said they were against shortening the school year because it would hurt instruction and amount to a pay cut for teachers. But officials decided it was the best option to preserve classroom jobs.
"I appreciate the understanding of the district's teachers and the sacrifices they are making in instructional time and salary," Supt. Ramon C. Cortines said in a statement.
Instructors will have to condense their lesson plans to fit the schedule, and many parents will have to make alternative child-care plans.
The agreement will become effective if approved by the school board Tuesday.
"I have no reason to think it won't" be approved, said board member Yolie Flores, who called it the best choice under the circumstances.
The administrators union has tentatively agreed to a similar deal. Members are voting by mail and results should be known this week. Administrators union members have said they expect the deal to be approved.
Even if the deals are approved, school district officials will have to cut millions to avoid going into the red. Teachers union President A.J. Duffy said he would keep pressing for more cuts to the district's bureaucracy.
"We will be vigilant in continuing to force the district to be more efficient and to drive resources to local school sites," Duffy said.
-Patricia
Union members OK the deal that could save the district up to $140 million, save about 2,100 jobs and maintain class sizes. It will become effective if approved by the school board Tuesday.
By Jason Song | LA Times
April 11, 2010
Los Angeles teachers union members have ratified a deal to shorten the school calendar this and next year, officials announced Saturday.
Nearly 80% of United Teachers Los Angeles members who cast ballots approved of the deal, which could save the Los Angeles Unified School District up to $140 million, save the jobs of about 2,100 employees and maintain class sizes.
Under the agreement, which was negotiated over several months, teachers would take an unpaid day off the Friday before Memorial Day and schools would close four days earlier for summer vacation. Seven additional instructional days would be cut from the 2010-11 academic year.
The school district is facing a budget deficit of up to $640 million and has been searching for ways to cut costs. Several unions, including those representing cafeteria workers and bus drivers, have agreed to take unpaid days off. Many non-unionized district employees, including upper management, have also begun to take furloughs.
School district and union leaders had previously said they were against shortening the school year because it would hurt instruction and amount to a pay cut for teachers. But officials decided it was the best option to preserve classroom jobs.
"I appreciate the understanding of the district's teachers and the sacrifices they are making in instructional time and salary," Supt. Ramon C. Cortines said in a statement.
Instructors will have to condense their lesson plans to fit the schedule, and many parents will have to make alternative child-care plans.
The agreement will become effective if approved by the school board Tuesday.
"I have no reason to think it won't" be approved, said board member Yolie Flores, who called it the best choice under the circumstances.
The administrators union has tentatively agreed to a similar deal. Members are voting by mail and results should be known this week. Administrators union members have said they expect the deal to be approved.
Even if the deals are approved, school district officials will have to cut millions to avoid going into the red. Teachers union President A.J. Duffy said he would keep pressing for more cuts to the district's bureaucracy.
"We will be vigilant in continuing to force the district to be more efficient and to drive resources to local school sites," Duffy said.
Fake document allegations arise in HISD
By ERICKA MELLON | Houston Chronicle
April 8, 2010
The Houston school district is investigating whether employees fabricated documents in a complex scheme to fraudulently report dozens of students who dropped out as transfers to other campuses, Superintendent Terry Grier confirmed today.
The investigation centers on Kashmere High School this academic year and its feeder campus, Key Middle School, last year. Several of the Key employees followed their principal, Mable Caleb, when she was promoted to Kashmere this year.
Grier said early results of the investigation do not implicate Caleb, who is on leave following a related probe that accuses her of overseeing financial fraud, cheating on state tests and nepotism at Key. Grier declined to name the two employees suspected of running the dropout scam.
A school's dropout or graduation rate can affect its state and federal academic ratings, not to mention its public image. The Houston Independent School District came under national scrutiny in 2003 when a state investigation found it had miscounted thousands of dropouts. A computer specialist at Sharpstown High School was indicted on a document tampering charge, but the case was later dismissed.
Preliminary evidence in the current episode shows that employees created fake letters from other school districts claiming to have enrolled Kashmere and Key students who had dropped out, according to Grier.
“Because of the complaints, we're going in and looking at the records of every student who was listed as a transfer out to verify whether or not the transfer actually occurred or whether it was a student who dropped out of school and who had a false transfer request letter put in their file,” Grier said.
The Texas Education Agency, which already is investigating alleged cheating at Key last school year, is expected to expand its probe.
“We don't have any official information yet, but it's illegal to falsify governmental records,” said Debbie Ratcliffe, a TEA spokeswoman. “It calls into question their accountability rating and their accreditation ratings if this is true.”
Key Middle School earned the state's “recognized” rating — the second-best label — last year. It reported that three students, out of 545, dropped out in the 2007-08 school year, the most recent year available. Key's annual dropout rate of 0.6 percent is slightly worse than HISD's overall middle school dropout rate of 0.5 percent.
Kashmere High School earned the state's “academically unacceptable” rating in 2009 because of its low graduation rate before Caleb's arrival. The school reported that 61 percent of the Class of 2008 had graduated or was continuing high school. That meant 58 students, or 39 percent, dropped out, according to the data reported to the TEA.
April 8, 2010
The Houston school district is investigating whether employees fabricated documents in a complex scheme to fraudulently report dozens of students who dropped out as transfers to other campuses, Superintendent Terry Grier confirmed today.
The investigation centers on Kashmere High School this academic year and its feeder campus, Key Middle School, last year. Several of the Key employees followed their principal, Mable Caleb, when she was promoted to Kashmere this year.
Grier said early results of the investigation do not implicate Caleb, who is on leave following a related probe that accuses her of overseeing financial fraud, cheating on state tests and nepotism at Key. Grier declined to name the two employees suspected of running the dropout scam.
A school's dropout or graduation rate can affect its state and federal academic ratings, not to mention its public image. The Houston Independent School District came under national scrutiny in 2003 when a state investigation found it had miscounted thousands of dropouts. A computer specialist at Sharpstown High School was indicted on a document tampering charge, but the case was later dismissed.
Preliminary evidence in the current episode shows that employees created fake letters from other school districts claiming to have enrolled Kashmere and Key students who had dropped out, according to Grier.
“Because of the complaints, we're going in and looking at the records of every student who was listed as a transfer out to verify whether or not the transfer actually occurred or whether it was a student who dropped out of school and who had a false transfer request letter put in their file,” Grier said.
The Texas Education Agency, which already is investigating alleged cheating at Key last school year, is expected to expand its probe.
“We don't have any official information yet, but it's illegal to falsify governmental records,” said Debbie Ratcliffe, a TEA spokeswoman. “It calls into question their accountability rating and their accreditation ratings if this is true.”
Key Middle School earned the state's “recognized” rating — the second-best label — last year. It reported that three students, out of 545, dropped out in the 2007-08 school year, the most recent year available. Key's annual dropout rate of 0.6 percent is slightly worse than HISD's overall middle school dropout rate of 0.5 percent.
Kashmere High School earned the state's “academically unacceptable” rating in 2009 because of its low graduation rate before Caleb's arrival. The school reported that 61 percent of the Class of 2008 had graduated or was continuing high school. That meant 58 students, or 39 percent, dropped out, according to the data reported to the TEA.
The worst classroom bullies? Politicians
A toxic brew of meddling and failure to teach the basics has set teachers against pupils, says Francis Gilbert.
By Francis Gilbert
07 Apr 2010
Luke had his victim, another 13-year-old pupil, in an armlock and was smashing his fists against his face. Things weren't going according to my lesson plan. I rushed over to the fighting boys and yanked them apart, yelling at them to go back to their seats. The victim assented, but Luke stomped out of the classroom, saying he was going "to tell on me".
Although my actions had the backing of the 1996 Education Act, which had just given teachers the right to intervene in fights, my senior manager felt I had a case to answer. Fortunately, Luke's mother was sympathetic, apologising for her son's actions, and the case was swiftly dropped. She confessed that she'd totally lost control of her son.
I thought of Luke when Ed Balls, the Schools Secretary, stood up at the annual conference of the NASUWT union to say that teachers must not be afraid to use physical force to break up fights. How disingenuous. We have been allowed to use reasonable force since the Act was passed; but a decade of Government intervention in the classroom has given pupils power at the expense of teacher autonomy and classroom discipline.
A toxic brew of government meddling, poor parenting and a collective failure to teach the basics has left our children angrier than ever, and their teachers are suffering the fallout. Almost every school day there is a violent attack on a teacher in England, with as many as 176,000 children being excluded from school more than once last year.
Despite the chaos in many classrooms, the Government persists in handing yet more power to the youngsters. One of their recent schemes, "Student Voice", allows pupils a say in the selection and appointment of their teachers.
So while Mr Balls is happy to tell a conference of pedagogues that they can knock sense into their pupils if they feel so moved, he is also encouraging those pupils to report any such misdemeanour. Talk about mixed messages. It's a wonder there are any teachers left.
Over the past 10 years, the Government has eroded public trust in the profession. It has sent out the message that classroom teachers aren't up to the job and need to be constantly spied upon by Ofsted, senior managers, other sundry bureaucrats, and now the pupils themselves.
Spending millions to create this surveillance culture hasn't driven up standards – far from it. Last year, less than half of our nation's teenagers got 5 A*-C grades at GCSE, with only one in three students getting an A*-C grade in a modern foreign language.
It is a national scandal that more than 20 per cent of youngsters leave school unable to read. It is possible to teach pupils to enjoy reading but only if teachers are properly trained – and too few are. Instead of funding the crucial training that enables teachers to deliver the basics, precious money is frittered away on self-defeating policies such as Student Voice. I suppose, with the election underway, we shouldn't be surprised that the classroom, already something of a battleground in real life, has become a political one too. But the politicians still won't listen to those on the front line. This was well-illustrated a few weeks ago, when I was invited on to Newsnight with a parent and some other teachers to question Mr Balls and his Conservative and LibDem counterparts. We were ignored as the politicians began squabbling among themselves. The next day, a pupil who saw the show said the politicians wouldn't last a second in a real classroom because they didn't listen. "They'd have a riot on their hands before they knew it, wouldn't they?" he said. It would be interesting to see how Mr Balls would deal with that.
Francis Gilbert's 'Working The System – How To Get The Very Best State Education For Your Child' is published by Short Books.
By Francis Gilbert
07 Apr 2010
Luke had his victim, another 13-year-old pupil, in an armlock and was smashing his fists against his face. Things weren't going according to my lesson plan. I rushed over to the fighting boys and yanked them apart, yelling at them to go back to their seats. The victim assented, but Luke stomped out of the classroom, saying he was going "to tell on me".
Although my actions had the backing of the 1996 Education Act, which had just given teachers the right to intervene in fights, my senior manager felt I had a case to answer. Fortunately, Luke's mother was sympathetic, apologising for her son's actions, and the case was swiftly dropped. She confessed that she'd totally lost control of her son.
I thought of Luke when Ed Balls, the Schools Secretary, stood up at the annual conference of the NASUWT union to say that teachers must not be afraid to use physical force to break up fights. How disingenuous. We have been allowed to use reasonable force since the Act was passed; but a decade of Government intervention in the classroom has given pupils power at the expense of teacher autonomy and classroom discipline.
A toxic brew of government meddling, poor parenting and a collective failure to teach the basics has left our children angrier than ever, and their teachers are suffering the fallout. Almost every school day there is a violent attack on a teacher in England, with as many as 176,000 children being excluded from school more than once last year.
Despite the chaos in many classrooms, the Government persists in handing yet more power to the youngsters. One of their recent schemes, "Student Voice", allows pupils a say in the selection and appointment of their teachers.
So while Mr Balls is happy to tell a conference of pedagogues that they can knock sense into their pupils if they feel so moved, he is also encouraging those pupils to report any such misdemeanour. Talk about mixed messages. It's a wonder there are any teachers left.
Over the past 10 years, the Government has eroded public trust in the profession. It has sent out the message that classroom teachers aren't up to the job and need to be constantly spied upon by Ofsted, senior managers, other sundry bureaucrats, and now the pupils themselves.
Spending millions to create this surveillance culture hasn't driven up standards – far from it. Last year, less than half of our nation's teenagers got 5 A*-C grades at GCSE, with only one in three students getting an A*-C grade in a modern foreign language.
It is a national scandal that more than 20 per cent of youngsters leave school unable to read. It is possible to teach pupils to enjoy reading but only if teachers are properly trained – and too few are. Instead of funding the crucial training that enables teachers to deliver the basics, precious money is frittered away on self-defeating policies such as Student Voice. I suppose, with the election underway, we shouldn't be surprised that the classroom, already something of a battleground in real life, has become a political one too. But the politicians still won't listen to those on the front line. This was well-illustrated a few weeks ago, when I was invited on to Newsnight with a parent and some other teachers to question Mr Balls and his Conservative and LibDem counterparts. We were ignored as the politicians began squabbling among themselves. The next day, a pupil who saw the show said the politicians wouldn't last a second in a real classroom because they didn't listen. "They'd have a riot on their hands before they knew it, wouldn't they?" he said. It would be interesting to see how Mr Balls would deal with that.
Francis Gilbert's 'Working The System – How To Get The Very Best State Education For Your Child' is published by Short Books.
ELLs' Math, Reading Proficiency Rises, Study Finds
Check out the full report by CEP.
-Patricia
By Mary Ann Zehr | Ed Week
April 7, 2010
The percentage of English-language learners nationwide attaining proficiency in reading and mathematics on state tests increased in many states from the 2005-06 through the 2007-08 school years, says a report released today by the Washington-based Center on Education Policy. That increase was present at the elementary, middle, and high school levels, though it was less prevalent in high school than at the other levels, according to the center’s analysis.
But while the study found positive trends in test scores for ELLs, it notes that the gap in reading and math achievement between ELLs and non-ELLs remains huge in many states. The analysis didn’t look at whether that gap narrowed or widened in states in those school years.
The report includes a number of caveats to its findings, noting the frequent unreliability of data on English-learners.
“Our main finding is that, despite irregularities in terms of classifying kids and how the kids are tested, the overall trend is increased test scores for ELL students,” said Jack Jennings, the director of the center. He added that other reports by the center, an independent, nonprofit research organization, have shown that test scores have also increased for other kinds of students.
Read on
-Patricia
By Mary Ann Zehr | Ed Week
April 7, 2010
The percentage of English-language learners nationwide attaining proficiency in reading and mathematics on state tests increased in many states from the 2005-06 through the 2007-08 school years, says a report released today by the Washington-based Center on Education Policy. That increase was present at the elementary, middle, and high school levels, though it was less prevalent in high school than at the other levels, according to the center’s analysis.
But while the study found positive trends in test scores for ELLs, it notes that the gap in reading and math achievement between ELLs and non-ELLs remains huge in many states. The analysis didn’t look at whether that gap narrowed or widened in states in those school years.
The report includes a number of caveats to its findings, noting the frequent unreliability of data on English-learners.
“Our main finding is that, despite irregularities in terms of classifying kids and how the kids are tested, the overall trend is increased test scores for ELL students,” said Jack Jennings, the director of the center. He added that other reports by the center, an independent, nonprofit research organization, have shown that test scores have also increased for other kinds of students.
Read on
Advanced Placement: Good for top students, oversold to others?
By Scott Jaschik | Inside Higher Ed
March 30, 2010
The Advanced Placement program is becoming more and more popular, with 25% of high school graduates taking at least one AP examination, elite colleges expecting to see applicants' transcripts full of the courses, and politicians demanding that more and more high schools offer them. The program has become "the juggernaut of American high school education," according to the introduction to a new book, AP: A Critical Examination of the Advanced Placement Program.
The book, about to be released by Harvard Education Press, is the result of a 2007 conference at Harvard University that brought together leading education researchers to consider the evidence about AP. Despite the immense popularity of the program, the research evidence on its value is minimal, the book argues. The College Board, the program's sponsor, publishes or promotes its own research (favoring the program) and promotes "glowing accounts" of AP. But is this really the consensus?
STATE BY STATE: Failure rate for AP tests climbing
SUCCESS STORY: Maryland makes huge strides in AP scores
The research presented in the book — believed to be the most comprehensive gathering of studies to date — is decidedly mixed. Those who distrust AP out of a dislike of programs built around standardized tests won't find smoking guns about the test itself here. In fact, the research in the book suggests high levels of consistency and validity in the program's exams.
Further, the research studies in the book suggest that for most well-prepared students (and, increasingly, it is important to note that not all students in the program are well-prepared), AP tends to offer rigorous courses that advance their knowledge of the subject matter in meaningful ways. (One caution that the book notes about its findings is that they focus on the mathematics and science parts of AP, which have been the subject of more long-term study.)
But proponents of the program's rapid expansion come in for some tough criticism in the book. Claims that the program helps students graduate on time or save money are found generally to have no validity. And research in the book suggests that many of the efforts to push the program into more schools — a push that has been financed with many millions in state and federal funds — may be paying for poorly-prepared students to fail courses they shouldn't be taking in the first place. And the research suggests that not only is the money being misspent, but that the push may be skewing the decisions of low-income high schools that make adjustments to bring the program in — while being unable to afford improvements in other programs.
The book is frank throughout on the difficulties of conducting research on the program. High schools can't create control groups by giving some students AP courses and other students some sort of placebo version. And the student body for the courses is anything but random. Even with the growth in recent years, the AP courses are much more widely available in high schools that serve wealthier, well-prepared students. And students themselves opt to take or not take the courses, with self-selection drawing in better students.
As a result, several of the studies in the book say, while the College Board's claims that students who do well in the courses are likely to do well in college are true, that means very little. It's sort of like saying that students who are well-prepared to do college work and come from the socioeconomic groups that do the best in college are going to do well in college. Not a shocker.
But, using a variety of statistical tools, the various papers attempt to overcome the limitations in evaluating the program.
The analyses of the programs themselves suggest that AP students get a strong experience in high schools with good resources and high levels of student preparation. In part, this is because of the characteristics of the courses that need not be restricted to the AP program — factors like smaller class size and top teachers. But the verdict on such courses in a series of studies is favorable.
'Very rigorous'
As summed up by Philip Sadler, one of the co-editors of the volume and the F.W. Wright Senior Lecturer in Astronomy at Harvard, here is the outlook for students: "Advanced Placement courses offer you an opportunity to study a subject in a very rigorous and demanding fashion. You will probably be in a class that has fewer students, those students will likely have stronger backgrounds, and there will be fewer student discipline issues than you have experienced in other courses. Your teacher will have a strong subject matter background and excellent teaching skills."
Similarly, Sadler sums up the situation from the perspective of college admissions officers, and tells them that they are correct to assume that success in the courses is a meaningful measure of academic achievements (although he is quick to add that there are equally valid measures, such as success in other rigorous high school courses and dual enrollment programs in which high school students simultaneously take college courses).
But where Sadler's summary will challenge the College Board and others is in his description of the emphasis on expanding the program to serve more and more high schools. While the College Board shows no sign of pulling back from that goal, Sadler writes that the research evidence suggests that the growth has reached a point of "diminishing returns."
That conclusion is consistent with journalistic investigations of the program in the last year, in USA Today and The Dallas Morning News, documenting increased failure rates on the program's tests. In both cases, the articles focused on an increase in the number of students failing the program's tests.
The College Board largely dismissed the findings of both of those investigations, saying that students benefit even if they don't pass and that the many benefits of the program show it deserves even more growth. But research in the new book by Kristin Klopfenstein of the University of Texas at Dallas and M. Kathleen Thomas of Mississippi State University raises questions about those premises.
In one chapter, Klopfenstein and Thomas examine whether states should push — as the College Board has urged them to do — to have AP courses in all high schools, and to add to offerings whenever they can. They note assertions by Gaston Caperton, president of the College Board, that increasing the number of students who take courses in the program would encourage more students to go to college and improve their graduation rates once enrolled.
Klopfenstein and Thomas conclude that there is no evidence to back up these claims. They write that the flaw in the College Board's analysis is its failure to focus on "causation." When the researchers control for a variety of factors related to college-going and college success (such as student demographics, other courses taken, etc.), they find, the boost allegedly provided by the AP courses evaporates. "AP students are college-bound to begin with," they write. While taking AP courses may make some students more attractive to competitive colleges, they add, that is more of a benefit to the student than to society, raising questions about spending a lot of money to expand the program.
And in fact, they note a range of real costs to school districts for the program — costs that may be of particular concern in low-income districts. The program's courses almost always have smaller class sizes and some of the best teachers in a school. While the College Board boasts about the benefits for the students in the program, these same facts mean that the rest of a school's students have larger classes and less time with the best teachers.
Financing failure
That all might be justified if those in the program were achieving great success. But with the expansion, that's not the case — and there are large sums of money being spent on students who don't succeed, they write.
In California, they note, $2.8 million in federal funds are used to subsidize AP tests for students. With 41% of students failing, that means at least $1.1 million was spent on such students — with the number likely much higher since the failure rate and need for subsidies is greater for low-income students.
Similarly, William Lichten, a professor emeritus of physics, engineering and applied science at Yale University, writes about the growth of AP in the Philadelphia public schools — an effort supported by a variety of public funds. He writes that the success stories in the district come from high schools that, while serving low-income students, use selective admissions. Among other high schools, failure rates are high. "Many of these high schools did not have a single AP exam score as high as 3, the lowest score claimed as passing by the College Board," Lichten writes.
In some of the strongest criticism of the College Board in the book, Lichten questions why the College Board does not publicize the success rates of students school by school, in ways that might raise questions about the significant investments made in the program at schools where budgets are very much a zero-sum game and the program is showing no signs of success.
In an interview, Trevor Packer, who leads AP for the College Board, generally offered praise for the new book. He said that it was "tremendously stimulating and meaningful," and that the editors and contributors had performed a real service by significantly expanding the available research on the program and synthesizing it in the new volume.
Generally, he said he views the book as saying that "AP is doing a good job of performing its original purpose" of providing rigorous courses and of helping to place students at appropriate levels as they start their college careers. He said he viewed the questions raised in the book as less about those functions than about "uses of AP that have emerged, particularly over the last decade."
The research in the book "shows that AP does a good job of doing what it set out to do," he said.
As to the criticisms in the book, Packer said he saw it focused on the "boosterism" about AP, and said, "I think there is something about the boosterism that I stand behind and some boosterism that I find flaws with."
He said that he has tried himself and has urged others to talk about AP not as allowing many students to finish college early, but as a tool for giving them more "flexibility" in designing their curriculum. (In fairness to Packer, he is less boosterish in the various College Board briefings about AP than is his boss, and than some government officials who want the program expanded.)
On the larger questions about the program's growth, he said he agreed with the idea that there should be more study of the benefits of the program as it moves into more schools, including those that — based on socioeconomics — don't do well. But he said he was troubled by the idea that the program may already be at "diminishing returns" because he still sees many high schools where the socioeconomics and educational background suggest that success would occur, but that don't have the program or have only limited offerings.
The College Board has generally argued in the past that students benefit even at schools with low passage rates. But Packer, while insisting that there was much success in low-income districts, also said: "In schools where they are seeing all scores of 1, I would agree wholeheartedly that resources might be better spent on middle schools."
At the same time, he said that reaching more low-income students who can succeed will mean some increases in failure rates. As a result, he said it is hard to tell just how much the program should grow. "What is the right threshold that AP should reach? What is the right [rate at which students succeed] of threshold?" he asked. "That's a really good question."
March 30, 2010
The Advanced Placement program is becoming more and more popular, with 25% of high school graduates taking at least one AP examination, elite colleges expecting to see applicants' transcripts full of the courses, and politicians demanding that more and more high schools offer them. The program has become "the juggernaut of American high school education," according to the introduction to a new book, AP: A Critical Examination of the Advanced Placement Program.
The book, about to be released by Harvard Education Press, is the result of a 2007 conference at Harvard University that brought together leading education researchers to consider the evidence about AP. Despite the immense popularity of the program, the research evidence on its value is minimal, the book argues. The College Board, the program's sponsor, publishes or promotes its own research (favoring the program) and promotes "glowing accounts" of AP. But is this really the consensus?
STATE BY STATE: Failure rate for AP tests climbing
SUCCESS STORY: Maryland makes huge strides in AP scores
The research presented in the book — believed to be the most comprehensive gathering of studies to date — is decidedly mixed. Those who distrust AP out of a dislike of programs built around standardized tests won't find smoking guns about the test itself here. In fact, the research in the book suggests high levels of consistency and validity in the program's exams.
Further, the research studies in the book suggest that for most well-prepared students (and, increasingly, it is important to note that not all students in the program are well-prepared), AP tends to offer rigorous courses that advance their knowledge of the subject matter in meaningful ways. (One caution that the book notes about its findings is that they focus on the mathematics and science parts of AP, which have been the subject of more long-term study.)
But proponents of the program's rapid expansion come in for some tough criticism in the book. Claims that the program helps students graduate on time or save money are found generally to have no validity. And research in the book suggests that many of the efforts to push the program into more schools — a push that has been financed with many millions in state and federal funds — may be paying for poorly-prepared students to fail courses they shouldn't be taking in the first place. And the research suggests that not only is the money being misspent, but that the push may be skewing the decisions of low-income high schools that make adjustments to bring the program in — while being unable to afford improvements in other programs.
The book is frank throughout on the difficulties of conducting research on the program. High schools can't create control groups by giving some students AP courses and other students some sort of placebo version. And the student body for the courses is anything but random. Even with the growth in recent years, the AP courses are much more widely available in high schools that serve wealthier, well-prepared students. And students themselves opt to take or not take the courses, with self-selection drawing in better students.
As a result, several of the studies in the book say, while the College Board's claims that students who do well in the courses are likely to do well in college are true, that means very little. It's sort of like saying that students who are well-prepared to do college work and come from the socioeconomic groups that do the best in college are going to do well in college. Not a shocker.
But, using a variety of statistical tools, the various papers attempt to overcome the limitations in evaluating the program.
The analyses of the programs themselves suggest that AP students get a strong experience in high schools with good resources and high levels of student preparation. In part, this is because of the characteristics of the courses that need not be restricted to the AP program — factors like smaller class size and top teachers. But the verdict on such courses in a series of studies is favorable.
'Very rigorous'
As summed up by Philip Sadler, one of the co-editors of the volume and the F.W. Wright Senior Lecturer in Astronomy at Harvard, here is the outlook for students: "Advanced Placement courses offer you an opportunity to study a subject in a very rigorous and demanding fashion. You will probably be in a class that has fewer students, those students will likely have stronger backgrounds, and there will be fewer student discipline issues than you have experienced in other courses. Your teacher will have a strong subject matter background and excellent teaching skills."
Similarly, Sadler sums up the situation from the perspective of college admissions officers, and tells them that they are correct to assume that success in the courses is a meaningful measure of academic achievements (although he is quick to add that there are equally valid measures, such as success in other rigorous high school courses and dual enrollment programs in which high school students simultaneously take college courses).
But where Sadler's summary will challenge the College Board and others is in his description of the emphasis on expanding the program to serve more and more high schools. While the College Board shows no sign of pulling back from that goal, Sadler writes that the research evidence suggests that the growth has reached a point of "diminishing returns."
That conclusion is consistent with journalistic investigations of the program in the last year, in USA Today and The Dallas Morning News, documenting increased failure rates on the program's tests. In both cases, the articles focused on an increase in the number of students failing the program's tests.
The College Board largely dismissed the findings of both of those investigations, saying that students benefit even if they don't pass and that the many benefits of the program show it deserves even more growth. But research in the new book by Kristin Klopfenstein of the University of Texas at Dallas and M. Kathleen Thomas of Mississippi State University raises questions about those premises.
In one chapter, Klopfenstein and Thomas examine whether states should push — as the College Board has urged them to do — to have AP courses in all high schools, and to add to offerings whenever they can. They note assertions by Gaston Caperton, president of the College Board, that increasing the number of students who take courses in the program would encourage more students to go to college and improve their graduation rates once enrolled.
Klopfenstein and Thomas conclude that there is no evidence to back up these claims. They write that the flaw in the College Board's analysis is its failure to focus on "causation." When the researchers control for a variety of factors related to college-going and college success (such as student demographics, other courses taken, etc.), they find, the boost allegedly provided by the AP courses evaporates. "AP students are college-bound to begin with," they write. While taking AP courses may make some students more attractive to competitive colleges, they add, that is more of a benefit to the student than to society, raising questions about spending a lot of money to expand the program.
And in fact, they note a range of real costs to school districts for the program — costs that may be of particular concern in low-income districts. The program's courses almost always have smaller class sizes and some of the best teachers in a school. While the College Board boasts about the benefits for the students in the program, these same facts mean that the rest of a school's students have larger classes and less time with the best teachers.
Financing failure
That all might be justified if those in the program were achieving great success. But with the expansion, that's not the case — and there are large sums of money being spent on students who don't succeed, they write.
In California, they note, $2.8 million in federal funds are used to subsidize AP tests for students. With 41% of students failing, that means at least $1.1 million was spent on such students — with the number likely much higher since the failure rate and need for subsidies is greater for low-income students.
Similarly, William Lichten, a professor emeritus of physics, engineering and applied science at Yale University, writes about the growth of AP in the Philadelphia public schools — an effort supported by a variety of public funds. He writes that the success stories in the district come from high schools that, while serving low-income students, use selective admissions. Among other high schools, failure rates are high. "Many of these high schools did not have a single AP exam score as high as 3, the lowest score claimed as passing by the College Board," Lichten writes.
In some of the strongest criticism of the College Board in the book, Lichten questions why the College Board does not publicize the success rates of students school by school, in ways that might raise questions about the significant investments made in the program at schools where budgets are very much a zero-sum game and the program is showing no signs of success.
In an interview, Trevor Packer, who leads AP for the College Board, generally offered praise for the new book. He said that it was "tremendously stimulating and meaningful," and that the editors and contributors had performed a real service by significantly expanding the available research on the program and synthesizing it in the new volume.
Generally, he said he views the book as saying that "AP is doing a good job of performing its original purpose" of providing rigorous courses and of helping to place students at appropriate levels as they start their college careers. He said he viewed the questions raised in the book as less about those functions than about "uses of AP that have emerged, particularly over the last decade."
The research in the book "shows that AP does a good job of doing what it set out to do," he said.
As to the criticisms in the book, Packer said he saw it focused on the "boosterism" about AP, and said, "I think there is something about the boosterism that I stand behind and some boosterism that I find flaws with."
He said that he has tried himself and has urged others to talk about AP not as allowing many students to finish college early, but as a tool for giving them more "flexibility" in designing their curriculum. (In fairness to Packer, he is less boosterish in the various College Board briefings about AP than is his boss, and than some government officials who want the program expanded.)
On the larger questions about the program's growth, he said he agreed with the idea that there should be more study of the benefits of the program as it moves into more schools, including those that — based on socioeconomics — don't do well. But he said he was troubled by the idea that the program may already be at "diminishing returns" because he still sees many high schools where the socioeconomics and educational background suggest that success would occur, but that don't have the program or have only limited offerings.
The College Board has generally argued in the past that students benefit even at schools with low passage rates. But Packer, while insisting that there was much success in low-income districts, also said: "In schools where they are seeing all scores of 1, I would agree wholeheartedly that resources might be better spent on middle schools."
At the same time, he said that reaching more low-income students who can succeed will mean some increases in failure rates. As a result, he said it is hard to tell just how much the program should grow. "What is the right threshold that AP should reach? What is the right [rate at which students succeed] of threshold?" he asked. "That's a really good question."
Schools pulling students out of Mexico
Violence in northern part of nation concerns Texas officials
I'm glad the universities are thinking about the safety of their students.
A question we should ask is how are we similarly devising a plan and protections for the youth in our public schools along the border who have to live with violence daily?
-Patricia
By JEANNIE KEVER | HOUSTON CHRONICLE
April 2, 2010
Violence across northern Mexico has prompted a growing number of universities to cancel planned study-abroad programs and urge students already there to return home.
The University of Texas at Austin asked six students enrolled in an exchange program at the Monterrey Institute of Technology and Higher Education to leave and has canceled programs scheduled there for the summer and fall.
Texas A&M University had one student in the Monterrey program; she decided to return earlier this week, spokesman Jason Cook said Friday.
The actions came after the U.S. State Department issued a travel warning for areas near the U.S.-Mexico border, urging U.S. citizens to avoid unnecessary travel to the northern Mexican states of Chihuahua, Coahuila, and Durango as a result of increasing drug-related violence.
Christian Clarke Casarez, director of international public affairs at UT, said privacy concerns prohibited her from saying whether the students have left Mexico yet.
The warning did not involve other areas of Mexico, and Clarke Casarez said UT has no plans to recall students studying elsewhere in Mexico.
But the University of Houston cancelled a geology class trip planned for central Mexico over Spring Break, opting to send the students for field work in northern New Mexico, instead.
UH has no students in northern Mexico, but one UH student is at a language school in Cuernavaca, south of Mexico City. The student will complete the program and return to Houston in mid-April, Jerald Strickland, assistant vice chancellor for international studies and programs, said in an e-mail.
The violence also prompted schools to reconsider plans to send students elsewhere in Mexico in the coming months.
The University of St. Thomas has cancelled a planned student trip to Merida this summer.
The school has sent students to Merida for 30 years, said Diana Garcia, program coordinator for study-abroad programs. No uptick in violence has been reported in the Yucatan, but Garcia said the school was concerned the violence will spread.
Another student recently approached her to ask about spending a semester in Mexico City.
“I hate discouraging students from studying abroad but Mexico City right now, I wouldn't encourage it,” she said
I'm glad the universities are thinking about the safety of their students.
A question we should ask is how are we similarly devising a plan and protections for the youth in our public schools along the border who have to live with violence daily?
-Patricia
By JEANNIE KEVER | HOUSTON CHRONICLE
April 2, 2010
Violence across northern Mexico has prompted a growing number of universities to cancel planned study-abroad programs and urge students already there to return home.
The University of Texas at Austin asked six students enrolled in an exchange program at the Monterrey Institute of Technology and Higher Education to leave and has canceled programs scheduled there for the summer and fall.
Texas A&M University had one student in the Monterrey program; she decided to return earlier this week, spokesman Jason Cook said Friday.
The actions came after the U.S. State Department issued a travel warning for areas near the U.S.-Mexico border, urging U.S. citizens to avoid unnecessary travel to the northern Mexican states of Chihuahua, Coahuila, and Durango as a result of increasing drug-related violence.
Christian Clarke Casarez, director of international public affairs at UT, said privacy concerns prohibited her from saying whether the students have left Mexico yet.
The warning did not involve other areas of Mexico, and Clarke Casarez said UT has no plans to recall students studying elsewhere in Mexico.
But the University of Houston cancelled a geology class trip planned for central Mexico over Spring Break, opting to send the students for field work in northern New Mexico, instead.
UH has no students in northern Mexico, but one UH student is at a language school in Cuernavaca, south of Mexico City. The student will complete the program and return to Houston in mid-April, Jerald Strickland, assistant vice chancellor for international studies and programs, said in an e-mail.
The violence also prompted schools to reconsider plans to send students elsewhere in Mexico in the coming months.
The University of St. Thomas has cancelled a planned student trip to Merida this summer.
The school has sent students to Merida for 30 years, said Diana Garcia, program coordinator for study-abroad programs. No uptick in violence has been reported in the Yucatan, but Garcia said the school was concerned the violence will spread.
Another student recently approached her to ask about spending a semester in Mexico City.
“I hate discouraging students from studying abroad but Mexico City right now, I wouldn't encourage it,” she said
Bipartisan Effort Vowed on Congressional Review of ‘No Child’ Law
by Charles Dervarics | Diverse Issues in Higher Ed
March 30, 2010
While gridlock is the norm on many domestic issues, Republicans and Democrats are pledging a joint effort to address the future of the No Child Left Behind law. Though work is just underway, the pledge is giving analysts some confidence that lawmakers will examine NCLB’s most difficult topics, from achievement among students of color to the future of persistently failing public schools.
“The need for change is indisputable,” National Education Association President Dennis Van Roekel says. With one-third of ninth-graders failing to graduate high school, the system “is failing to meet the needs of too many students, and educators are chafing under a system that unfairly measures schools and students based solely on test scores.”
Though there is some consensus that test scores alone cannot drive quality improvements, the possible solutions are many — a point that lawmakers note in their new effort to bring diverse views to the table.
“We all agree, along with teachers, parents, administrators and many others, that it needs significant changes. To get there, we need to be open to bold ideas that ‘disrupt’ our current system,” says Rep. George Miller, D-Calif., chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee in a written statement.
Under NCLB, schools are to report steadily increasing levels of achievement so that every child masters state academic requirements by 2014. Annual reports document each school’s Adequate Yearly Progress, which carries penalties for underachievers. In schools without 100 percent proficiency by 2014, states or other organizations may take over schools and teachers may be forced to reapply for their jobs.
About 15 percent of schools fail to meet progress each year, and some states have as many as 50 percent that are not able to reach the standards, NEA says.
While NCLB requires the reporting of student achievement by race and income, some analysts say the law has fallen short in serving the most disadvantaged students.
Low-income public schools are “excessively under-resourced,” says Dr. Antonio Flores, president of the Hispanic Association of Colleges and Universities.
Many HACU institutions work closely with their neighboring K-12 schools, he says, and it is clear many struggle because of a lack of funds. In addition, Hispanic students have few adult role models in their school buildings. While Hispanics are 22 percent of the K-12 student population in public schools, they represent only 5 percent of teachers and 3 percent of administrators.
Flores is calling on Congress to create new centers of excellence at Hispanic-serving colleges and universities that would help address this shortage.
Legal U.S. residents who earned college degrees in other countries may be another underused resource to bolster the ranks of Latino teachers. HSIs could play a role in developing career pathways for these individuals to enter the teaching profession in the U.S., he says.
HACU also is recommending a new federal aid program to the 2,100 school districts that enroll the most Hispanic students. Modeled after the Hispanic-serving college and university program in the Higher Education Act, the government would provide capacity-building funds to these schools for curriculum and physical plant improvements.
Elsewhere, a coalition of civil rights organizations is calling on Congress to give greater attention to high schools when it reviews the law.
The K-12 education statute “is fundamentally a civil rights law,” says Michael Wotorson, executive director of the Campaign for High School Equity, which includes civil rights organizations such as the NAACP, National Urban League and National Council of La Raza.
In many low-income schools, only half of African-American and Hispanic students who enter ninth grade complete high school four years later. Students in these schools also tend to have less access to academically rigorous courses that prepare them for college.
“We would like much more attention to high schools,” Wotorson says. “By failing to address the high school issue head-on, we’re solidifying the reality of ‘two Americas.’”
High schools serving low-income students lack sufficient funding and have less access to quality teachers. While NCLB has a requirement for districts to employ “highly qualified” teachers, this provision is “not monitored or enforced sufficiently,” Wotorson says.
As the House of Representatives launches a series of hearings on NCLB’s future, conservatives are calling for their own changes in the law. While pledging a bipartisan review of the law, House Republican leaders have outlined their own priorities for the legislation, which include restoring local control—with less federal input—and protecting taxpayers, a goal that may be at odds with others’ call for more funding.
“We have listened to parents, teachers, principals and school boards, and we know there is not a one-size-fits-all federal solution to the challenges that face our schools,” says Rep. John Kline (R-Minn.), the senior Republican on the House education panel.
Other GOP priorities are empowering teachers and more flexibility for teachers, removing what it terms “onerous” federal requirements.
The House kicked off its efforts in late February with a hearing on charter schools. There is no timetable for development of a bill, though the education committee has pledged an “open, transparent” review of the law this year.
March 30, 2010
While gridlock is the norm on many domestic issues, Republicans and Democrats are pledging a joint effort to address the future of the No Child Left Behind law. Though work is just underway, the pledge is giving analysts some confidence that lawmakers will examine NCLB’s most difficult topics, from achievement among students of color to the future of persistently failing public schools.
“The need for change is indisputable,” National Education Association President Dennis Van Roekel says. With one-third of ninth-graders failing to graduate high school, the system “is failing to meet the needs of too many students, and educators are chafing under a system that unfairly measures schools and students based solely on test scores.”
Though there is some consensus that test scores alone cannot drive quality improvements, the possible solutions are many — a point that lawmakers note in their new effort to bring diverse views to the table.
“We all agree, along with teachers, parents, administrators and many others, that it needs significant changes. To get there, we need to be open to bold ideas that ‘disrupt’ our current system,” says Rep. George Miller, D-Calif., chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee in a written statement.
Under NCLB, schools are to report steadily increasing levels of achievement so that every child masters state academic requirements by 2014. Annual reports document each school’s Adequate Yearly Progress, which carries penalties for underachievers. In schools without 100 percent proficiency by 2014, states or other organizations may take over schools and teachers may be forced to reapply for their jobs.
About 15 percent of schools fail to meet progress each year, and some states have as many as 50 percent that are not able to reach the standards, NEA says.
While NCLB requires the reporting of student achievement by race and income, some analysts say the law has fallen short in serving the most disadvantaged students.
Low-income public schools are “excessively under-resourced,” says Dr. Antonio Flores, president of the Hispanic Association of Colleges and Universities.
Many HACU institutions work closely with their neighboring K-12 schools, he says, and it is clear many struggle because of a lack of funds. In addition, Hispanic students have few adult role models in their school buildings. While Hispanics are 22 percent of the K-12 student population in public schools, they represent only 5 percent of teachers and 3 percent of administrators.
Flores is calling on Congress to create new centers of excellence at Hispanic-serving colleges and universities that would help address this shortage.
Legal U.S. residents who earned college degrees in other countries may be another underused resource to bolster the ranks of Latino teachers. HSIs could play a role in developing career pathways for these individuals to enter the teaching profession in the U.S., he says.
HACU also is recommending a new federal aid program to the 2,100 school districts that enroll the most Hispanic students. Modeled after the Hispanic-serving college and university program in the Higher Education Act, the government would provide capacity-building funds to these schools for curriculum and physical plant improvements.
Elsewhere, a coalition of civil rights organizations is calling on Congress to give greater attention to high schools when it reviews the law.
The K-12 education statute “is fundamentally a civil rights law,” says Michael Wotorson, executive director of the Campaign for High School Equity, which includes civil rights organizations such as the NAACP, National Urban League and National Council of La Raza.
In many low-income schools, only half of African-American and Hispanic students who enter ninth grade complete high school four years later. Students in these schools also tend to have less access to academically rigorous courses that prepare them for college.
“We would like much more attention to high schools,” Wotorson says. “By failing to address the high school issue head-on, we’re solidifying the reality of ‘two Americas.’”
High schools serving low-income students lack sufficient funding and have less access to quality teachers. While NCLB has a requirement for districts to employ “highly qualified” teachers, this provision is “not monitored or enforced sufficiently,” Wotorson says.
As the House of Representatives launches a series of hearings on NCLB’s future, conservatives are calling for their own changes in the law. While pledging a bipartisan review of the law, House Republican leaders have outlined their own priorities for the legislation, which include restoring local control—with less federal input—and protecting taxpayers, a goal that may be at odds with others’ call for more funding.
“We have listened to parents, teachers, principals and school boards, and we know there is not a one-size-fits-all federal solution to the challenges that face our schools,” says Rep. John Kline (R-Minn.), the senior Republican on the House education panel.
Other GOP priorities are empowering teachers and more flexibility for teachers, removing what it terms “onerous” federal requirements.
The House kicked off its efforts in late February with a hearing on charter schools. There is no timetable for development of a bill, though the education committee has pledged an “open, transparent” review of the law this year.
Less Testing, More Learning
Nice Op-Ed piece by Guisbond and Neill.
-Patricia
My guests are Lisa Guisbond and Monty Neill of the National Center for Fair and Open Testing, known as FairTest, a non-profit organization that works to end the misuse and flaws of standardized testing.
By Lisa Guisbond and Monty Neill
During his campaign, Barack Obama was a quick study, learning he could get wild applause and cheers by bashing No Child Left Behind, especially from audiences of public school teachers and parents.
Many felt hope, even exhilaration, to hear Obama say that “we can meet high standards without forcing teachers and students to spend most of the year preparing for a single, high-stakes test.”
They hoped that Obama understood, as they did, that while test makers were getting fat and happy with the NCLB-driven testing explosion, the people giving and taking the tests were getting little return for a huge investment of time and resources.
Now more than three years after No Child Left Behind came due for reauthorization, President Obama’s administration has unveiled its blueprint for reforming the law.
It’s good to see that Obama has finally ditched the preposterous demand that all students make “adequate yearly progress” toward 100% “proficiency” on state tests by 2014. That could be a real victory.
Overall, however, we at FairTest conclude that the blueprint’s details show a deeply disappointing failure to learn from NCLB’s many other big mistakes.
For instance, it still makes standardized testing the centerpiece of the law. (For a more detailed analysis, see this.)
George W. Bush’s education secretary, Margaret Spellings, often said we need to give state tests every year, because otherwise we would have no way of knowing if students were falling behind.
But that’s hogwash, as any teacher, student or parent could have told her.
In the classroom of any reasonably competent teacher, student progress is being evaluated constantly, each time he or she looks at classroom work, not to mention frequent quizzes, papers, projects, and discussions.
All of these allow for valuable, rapid feedback, producing information, or “data” if you wish, that can be used by teachers to address student weaknesses and build on student strengths. Want to make sure students don’t fall behind? Then pay close attention to this kind of data. Want to ensure teachers do this well? Then ensure they have time to work together and learn from one another.
The data from annual state testing, on the other hand, is just not that useful for improving instruction. For all the talk of “data-driven education”--and there is a lot of talk--by the time teachers receive the results of spring testing, usually the next fall, it’s too late to respond efficiently and effectively to their students’ needs.
Teachers lament, for example, that state test data may show one year’s fourth graders are weak in one area of the math curriculum, so there’s a big effort to rejigger things to address that weakness.
But the next year’s fourth graders’ weaknesses might lie in a completely different area. (Not to mention different strengths and weaknesses from student to student.) Oops, too bad. And with just a couple questions in any area, there is too little information to use for teaching. To say nothing of the fact that the tests are mostly multiple-choice.
What about the need for the public to hold schools accountable? To see whether district
A is falling behind and decide whether to intervene? Testing in a few grades, say 4th, 8th and 10th, along with high-quality ongoing assessment in between, would be more than adequate for both assessment and accountability purposes.
The Joint Organizational Statement on NCLB recommends the testing burden on states be decreased by allowing states to assess students annually in selected grades in elementary, middle schools, and high schools.
The statement has been endorsed by 151 national education, civil rights, religious, children’s, disability and civic organizations.
The Forum on Educational Accountability has a more detailed report on how to develop a high-quality assessment system from the classroom up. These provide an assessment blueprint for Congress that could turn NCLB into a tool for improvement, not overtesting and punishment.
If we did adopt this “less is more” approach to testing, we’d look more like high-achieving countries such as Finland, which has no high-stakes testing program, or Singapore, Hong Kong and typical European nations or Canadian provinces, which test the equivalent of once each in elementary, middle and high school.
In a nutshell, the feds should help states develop systems that build on the assessments teachers already do, ensure the quality is good and reasonably comparable across the state, and then use statewide tests as an occasional supplement. That will enable teachers to go back to teaching, not running test prep programs.
In the coming weeks, we will talk about other parts of the blueprint.
-Patricia
My guests are Lisa Guisbond and Monty Neill of the National Center for Fair and Open Testing, known as FairTest, a non-profit organization that works to end the misuse and flaws of standardized testing.
By Lisa Guisbond and Monty Neill
During his campaign, Barack Obama was a quick study, learning he could get wild applause and cheers by bashing No Child Left Behind, especially from audiences of public school teachers and parents.
Many felt hope, even exhilaration, to hear Obama say that “we can meet high standards without forcing teachers and students to spend most of the year preparing for a single, high-stakes test.”
They hoped that Obama understood, as they did, that while test makers were getting fat and happy with the NCLB-driven testing explosion, the people giving and taking the tests were getting little return for a huge investment of time and resources.
Now more than three years after No Child Left Behind came due for reauthorization, President Obama’s administration has unveiled its blueprint for reforming the law.
It’s good to see that Obama has finally ditched the preposterous demand that all students make “adequate yearly progress” toward 100% “proficiency” on state tests by 2014. That could be a real victory.
Overall, however, we at FairTest conclude that the blueprint’s details show a deeply disappointing failure to learn from NCLB’s many other big mistakes.
For instance, it still makes standardized testing the centerpiece of the law. (For a more detailed analysis, see this.)
George W. Bush’s education secretary, Margaret Spellings, often said we need to give state tests every year, because otherwise we would have no way of knowing if students were falling behind.
But that’s hogwash, as any teacher, student or parent could have told her.
In the classroom of any reasonably competent teacher, student progress is being evaluated constantly, each time he or she looks at classroom work, not to mention frequent quizzes, papers, projects, and discussions.
All of these allow for valuable, rapid feedback, producing information, or “data” if you wish, that can be used by teachers to address student weaknesses and build on student strengths. Want to make sure students don’t fall behind? Then pay close attention to this kind of data. Want to ensure teachers do this well? Then ensure they have time to work together and learn from one another.
The data from annual state testing, on the other hand, is just not that useful for improving instruction. For all the talk of “data-driven education”--and there is a lot of talk--by the time teachers receive the results of spring testing, usually the next fall, it’s too late to respond efficiently and effectively to their students’ needs.
Teachers lament, for example, that state test data may show one year’s fourth graders are weak in one area of the math curriculum, so there’s a big effort to rejigger things to address that weakness.
But the next year’s fourth graders’ weaknesses might lie in a completely different area. (Not to mention different strengths and weaknesses from student to student.) Oops, too bad. And with just a couple questions in any area, there is too little information to use for teaching. To say nothing of the fact that the tests are mostly multiple-choice.
What about the need for the public to hold schools accountable? To see whether district
A is falling behind and decide whether to intervene? Testing in a few grades, say 4th, 8th and 10th, along with high-quality ongoing assessment in between, would be more than adequate for both assessment and accountability purposes.
The Joint Organizational Statement on NCLB recommends the testing burden on states be decreased by allowing states to assess students annually in selected grades in elementary, middle schools, and high schools.
The statement has been endorsed by 151 national education, civil rights, religious, children’s, disability and civic organizations.
The Forum on Educational Accountability has a more detailed report on how to develop a high-quality assessment system from the classroom up. These provide an assessment blueprint for Congress that could turn NCLB into a tool for improvement, not overtesting and punishment.
If we did adopt this “less is more” approach to testing, we’d look more like high-achieving countries such as Finland, which has no high-stakes testing program, or Singapore, Hong Kong and typical European nations or Canadian provinces, which test the equivalent of once each in elementary, middle and high school.
In a nutshell, the feds should help states develop systems that build on the assessments teachers already do, ensure the quality is good and reasonably comparable across the state, and then use statewide tests as an occasional supplement. That will enable teachers to go back to teaching, not running test prep programs.
In the coming weeks, we will talk about other parts of the blueprint.
Student Loan Overhaul Approved by Congress
DAVID M. HERSZENHORN and TAMAR LEWIN | NY Times
March 25, 2010
WASHINGTON — Ending one of the fiercest lobbying fights in Washington, Congress voted Thursday to force commercial banks out of the federal student loan market, cutting off billions of dollars in profits in a sweeping restructuring of financial-aid programs and redirecting most of the money to new education initiatives.
The revamping of student-loan programs was included in — if overshadowed by — the final health care package. The vote was 56 to 43 in the Senate and 220 to 207 in the House, with Republicans unanimously opposed in both chambers.
Since the bank-based loan program began in 1965, commercial banks like Sallie Mae and Nelnet have received guaranteed federal subsidies to lend money to students, with the government assuming nearly all the risk. Democrats have long denounced the program, saying it fattened the bottom line for banks at the expense of students and taxpayers.
“Why are we paying people to lend the government’s money and then the government guarantees the loan and the government takes back the loan?” said Representative George Miller, Democrat of California and chairman of the Education and Labor Committee.
Democrats celebrated the legislation, a centerpiece of President Obama’s education agenda, as a far-reaching overhaul of federal financial aid, providing a huge infusion of money to the Pell grant program and offering new help to lower-income graduates in getting out from under crushing student debt. Still, the final bill is less ambitious than the original proposal.
Congressional allies of the student-loan industry attacked the overhaul as an overreaching government takeover. The legislation substitutes an expanded direct-lending program by the government for the bank-based program, directing $36 billion over 10 years to Pell grants, for students from low-income families.
“The Democratic majority decided, well look, while we’re at it, let’s have another Washington takeover,” said Senator Lamar Alexander, Republican of Tennessee and a former federal education secretary. “Let’s take over the federal student loan program.”
Even as the Democrats’ decision to attach the student-loan overhaul to the health care package virtually ensured its passage, banks fought fiercely up to the last minute, prompting some lawmakers, like Senator Ben Nelson, Democrat of Nebraska, where Nelnet has its headquarters, to cast their vote against the overall bill.
Although private banks will no longer be allowed to make student loans with federal money, many will continue to earn income by servicing those loans.
The Congressional Budget Office said the direct-lending approach would save taxpayers about $61 billion over 10 years. Roughly $40 billion of the savings will be redirected to higher education. Education programs will get an additional $10 billion from the health care package.
The bill includes some landmark changes, like automatic increases, tied to inflation, in the maximum Pell grant award. But for individual students, the increase in the maximum Pell grant — to $5,900 in 2019-20 from $5,550 for the 2010-11 school year — is minuscule, compared with the steep, inexorable rise in tuition for public and private colleges alike.
And because college costs are rising so quickly, the maximum Pell grant now covers only about a third of the average cost of attending a public university, compared with three-quarters in the 1970s, when the program began. So each year, more students graduate with debt of more than $20,000.
The legislation will make it easier to pay back student loans, by reducing the share of income that a graduate must devote to loan payments and by accelerating loan forgiveness — but not right away. Those who take out new loans after July 1, 2014, will have to devote 10 percent of their income to payments, down from the current 15 percent, and those who keep up their payments will have their loans forgiven after 20 years, reduced from the current 25.
“Income-based repayment is a fantastic addition to the Senate bill that will allow over a million students to avoid being crushed by unmanageable levels of debt,” said Rich Williams, a higher-education advocate at the U.S. Public Interest Research Group.
With the new legislation, students will have to take out their loans through their college’s financial aid office, instead of using a private bank.
The original proposal stood to save $87 billion over 10 years by ending the bank-based program, known formally as the Federal Family Education Loan program. But as the Senate delayed in taking up the legislation, colleges and universities began shifting to the direct-lending program, realizing the savings to the Treasury up front and cutting the amount of money available for future spending.
At the same time, an increase in the number of Americans enrolling in college and seeking financial aid, as a result of the recession, raised the projected costs of the enhanced Pell grant program.
In addition, to comply with the complex budget reconciliation rules, some of the savings from the education changes had to be redirected to pay for parts of the health care legislation.
In the scaled-back, final version, the administration scrapped $8 billion in proposed spending on early-childhood education. It also mostly erased a $12 billion “American Graduation Initiative,” which was announced with fanfare in the fall as an effort to bolster the work force by producing millions more community college graduates over the next decade, and building up high-quality free online courses.
Community colleges, the main provider of higher education for most low-income Americans, were slated to receive $10 billion under the administration’s original plan, but will instead get just $2 billion for job training.
“I’m disappointed,” said Eduardo J. Padrón, the president of Miami Dade College, one of the nation’s largest community colleges. “For the first time, we had a president who understood the importance of community colleges, and we were validated and recognized for our role in opening the doors of higher education.”
Untouched was the $2.55 billion to historically black and minority-serving colleges, a priority of the Congressional Black Caucus. If the new legislation had not passed, Obama administration officials say, Pell grants would have had to be cut to about $2,150, and some 500,000 students dropped from the program.
In lobbying fiercely against the overhaul, the private banks argued that it would eliminate jobs, even though the government will hire many of the same banks on a contract basis to service the loans and perform other back-office administration. Furthermore, the banks said that with the government as the only lender, students would not get the same level of service.
March 25, 2010
WASHINGTON — Ending one of the fiercest lobbying fights in Washington, Congress voted Thursday to force commercial banks out of the federal student loan market, cutting off billions of dollars in profits in a sweeping restructuring of financial-aid programs and redirecting most of the money to new education initiatives.
The revamping of student-loan programs was included in — if overshadowed by — the final health care package. The vote was 56 to 43 in the Senate and 220 to 207 in the House, with Republicans unanimously opposed in both chambers.
Since the bank-based loan program began in 1965, commercial banks like Sallie Mae and Nelnet have received guaranteed federal subsidies to lend money to students, with the government assuming nearly all the risk. Democrats have long denounced the program, saying it fattened the bottom line for banks at the expense of students and taxpayers.
“Why are we paying people to lend the government’s money and then the government guarantees the loan and the government takes back the loan?” said Representative George Miller, Democrat of California and chairman of the Education and Labor Committee.
Democrats celebrated the legislation, a centerpiece of President Obama’s education agenda, as a far-reaching overhaul of federal financial aid, providing a huge infusion of money to the Pell grant program and offering new help to lower-income graduates in getting out from under crushing student debt. Still, the final bill is less ambitious than the original proposal.
Congressional allies of the student-loan industry attacked the overhaul as an overreaching government takeover. The legislation substitutes an expanded direct-lending program by the government for the bank-based program, directing $36 billion over 10 years to Pell grants, for students from low-income families.
“The Democratic majority decided, well look, while we’re at it, let’s have another Washington takeover,” said Senator Lamar Alexander, Republican of Tennessee and a former federal education secretary. “Let’s take over the federal student loan program.”
Even as the Democrats’ decision to attach the student-loan overhaul to the health care package virtually ensured its passage, banks fought fiercely up to the last minute, prompting some lawmakers, like Senator Ben Nelson, Democrat of Nebraska, where Nelnet has its headquarters, to cast their vote against the overall bill.
Although private banks will no longer be allowed to make student loans with federal money, many will continue to earn income by servicing those loans.
The Congressional Budget Office said the direct-lending approach would save taxpayers about $61 billion over 10 years. Roughly $40 billion of the savings will be redirected to higher education. Education programs will get an additional $10 billion from the health care package.
The bill includes some landmark changes, like automatic increases, tied to inflation, in the maximum Pell grant award. But for individual students, the increase in the maximum Pell grant — to $5,900 in 2019-20 from $5,550 for the 2010-11 school year — is minuscule, compared with the steep, inexorable rise in tuition for public and private colleges alike.
And because college costs are rising so quickly, the maximum Pell grant now covers only about a third of the average cost of attending a public university, compared with three-quarters in the 1970s, when the program began. So each year, more students graduate with debt of more than $20,000.
The legislation will make it easier to pay back student loans, by reducing the share of income that a graduate must devote to loan payments and by accelerating loan forgiveness — but not right away. Those who take out new loans after July 1, 2014, will have to devote 10 percent of their income to payments, down from the current 15 percent, and those who keep up their payments will have their loans forgiven after 20 years, reduced from the current 25.
“Income-based repayment is a fantastic addition to the Senate bill that will allow over a million students to avoid being crushed by unmanageable levels of debt,” said Rich Williams, a higher-education advocate at the U.S. Public Interest Research Group.
With the new legislation, students will have to take out their loans through their college’s financial aid office, instead of using a private bank.
The original proposal stood to save $87 billion over 10 years by ending the bank-based program, known formally as the Federal Family Education Loan program. But as the Senate delayed in taking up the legislation, colleges and universities began shifting to the direct-lending program, realizing the savings to the Treasury up front and cutting the amount of money available for future spending.
At the same time, an increase in the number of Americans enrolling in college and seeking financial aid, as a result of the recession, raised the projected costs of the enhanced Pell grant program.
In addition, to comply with the complex budget reconciliation rules, some of the savings from the education changes had to be redirected to pay for parts of the health care legislation.
In the scaled-back, final version, the administration scrapped $8 billion in proposed spending on early-childhood education. It also mostly erased a $12 billion “American Graduation Initiative,” which was announced with fanfare in the fall as an effort to bolster the work force by producing millions more community college graduates over the next decade, and building up high-quality free online courses.
Community colleges, the main provider of higher education for most low-income Americans, were slated to receive $10 billion under the administration’s original plan, but will instead get just $2 billion for job training.
“I’m disappointed,” said Eduardo J. Padrón, the president of Miami Dade College, one of the nation’s largest community colleges. “For the first time, we had a president who understood the importance of community colleges, and we were validated and recognized for our role in opening the doors of higher education.”
Untouched was the $2.55 billion to historically black and minority-serving colleges, a priority of the Congressional Black Caucus. If the new legislation had not passed, Obama administration officials say, Pell grants would have had to be cut to about $2,150, and some 500,000 students dropped from the program.
In lobbying fiercely against the overhaul, the private banks argued that it would eliminate jobs, even though the government will hire many of the same banks on a contract basis to service the loans and perform other back-office administration. Furthermore, the banks said that with the government as the only lender, students would not get the same level of service.
Could schools cure our uncivil discourse?
Wow, sounds like Jay's advocating for schools to encourage teachers to foster a critical consciousness in students. I'm not sure about the comment about needing to add more time to the school day to achieve this as the solution. Maybe we need to re-think what a majority of time is committed to -- getting students to do well on our reductive assessments, maybe?
To achieve what Jay is proposing (and I would agree should be happening in education) we need to rethink our focus on narrow "outcomes" and our reliance on them to demonstrate "success."
We also need to think about the capacity of teachers to foster the kinds of "meeting of the minds" discussions Jay mentions. Perhaps we should consider that some of our teachers went through the same routine schooling process that we're critiquing, earned a degree to teach (or not), and are now instructing based on their capacity and the rigid rules created by our faulty policies.
More to this discussion than Jay's blog had space to expand upon.
-Patricia
By Jay Mathews | March 23, 2010
After apparently spending the weekend, as I did, watching the Congressional debate over health care, former diplomat and teacher Dave Rabadan of Annandale asked me this good question:
"What has happened to the teaching of critical skills, decision-making
based on weighing alternative policies or courses of action, and
respect for those who hold differing opinions on local and national
issues? And what about common sense in lieu of a remora-like
clinging to philosophies or tactics that specialize in denigrating,
if not demonizing opponents? How can we better teach and practice
civility in public discourse? Where do we draw the line on tactics
that thrive on ad hominem attacks, ridicule of opponents, and (most
worrisome) shouting down the opposition so that the other side is
unable to present its positions?"
My view is that the politicians who hurl insults and distortions at each other know how to argue in a more civilized and accurate way, but have learned their point of view gets little attention unless they heat it up. But maybe i am wrong.
Our high schools don't spend nearly as much time as they should having students practice public presentations, and intelligent debates. Some styles of the formal debates in which high school teams compete seem to respect rules of civil discourse, but others, at least ones I have seen, do not, or are just weird, like the rapid-speak style, whatever they call it.
If we had a bit more time in the school day, a favorite topic of mine, teachers would be encouraged to let students research issues, take different sides, and discuss them in a civil way. Good teachers could demonstrate the power of conceding points to your opponent. They might even experiment with forming a truly bipartisan mini-congress and try to work out a health care plan, or reduced budget, or modified Bowl Championship Series, that takes good ideas from all sides.
The more students experience the sense of accomplishment from a meeting of minds, perhaps the less respect they will have for office holders who listen to their media experts telling them you have to hit the enemy hard or lose the game.
As Rabadan said in a final remark: "All the math and science capacity and expertise will pale in importance if we lose the basic respect we must extend in debate -
even to those with whom we profoundly disagree."
To achieve what Jay is proposing (and I would agree should be happening in education) we need to rethink our focus on narrow "outcomes" and our reliance on them to demonstrate "success."
We also need to think about the capacity of teachers to foster the kinds of "meeting of the minds" discussions Jay mentions. Perhaps we should consider that some of our teachers went through the same routine schooling process that we're critiquing, earned a degree to teach (or not), and are now instructing based on their capacity and the rigid rules created by our faulty policies.
More to this discussion than Jay's blog had space to expand upon.
-Patricia
By Jay Mathews | March 23, 2010
After apparently spending the weekend, as I did, watching the Congressional debate over health care, former diplomat and teacher Dave Rabadan of Annandale asked me this good question:
"What has happened to the teaching of critical skills, decision-making
based on weighing alternative policies or courses of action, and
respect for those who hold differing opinions on local and national
issues? And what about common sense in lieu of a remora-like
clinging to philosophies or tactics that specialize in denigrating,
if not demonizing opponents? How can we better teach and practice
civility in public discourse? Where do we draw the line on tactics
that thrive on ad hominem attacks, ridicule of opponents, and (most
worrisome) shouting down the opposition so that the other side is
unable to present its positions?"
My view is that the politicians who hurl insults and distortions at each other know how to argue in a more civilized and accurate way, but have learned their point of view gets little attention unless they heat it up. But maybe i am wrong.
Our high schools don't spend nearly as much time as they should having students practice public presentations, and intelligent debates. Some styles of the formal debates in which high school teams compete seem to respect rules of civil discourse, but others, at least ones I have seen, do not, or are just weird, like the rapid-speak style, whatever they call it.
If we had a bit more time in the school day, a favorite topic of mine, teachers would be encouraged to let students research issues, take different sides, and discuss them in a civil way. Good teachers could demonstrate the power of conceding points to your opponent. They might even experiment with forming a truly bipartisan mini-congress and try to work out a health care plan, or reduced budget, or modified Bowl Championship Series, that takes good ideas from all sides.
The more students experience the sense of accomplishment from a meeting of minds, perhaps the less respect they will have for office holders who listen to their media experts telling them you have to hit the enemy hard or lose the game.
As Rabadan said in a final remark: "All the math and science capacity and expertise will pale in importance if we lose the basic respect we must extend in debate -
even to those with whom we profoundly disagree."
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)