I did read the book and I'm feelin aesthetic not authentic.
-Patricia
By Valerie Strauss | July 8, 2010
I am publishing an email I received from Diane Ravitch, the New York University education historian and author of the best-selling "The Death and Life of the Great American School System." Ravitch, once a supporter of No Child Left Behind and now a fierce critic of its impact, is traveling the country meeting thousands of teachers as she critiques the Obama administration's education policies. In the last few months I have written a lot about Ravitch, and published a number of her pieces not because I agree with her every word but because I think she is the most forceful voice right now speaking out for sane policy and our public school system would be far better off if administration policy better reflected her research and concerns.
By Diane Ravitch
Last Tuesday, I received an award from the National Education Association as its “Friend of Education” for 2010 and had the amazing experience of speaking at its convention in New Orleans to 10,000 teachers. In my talk (see above), I briefly described how high-stakes testing is corrupting education, how choice is being oversold, why NCLB [No Child Left Behind] is a disaster, and how NCLB and the Obama administration’s Race to the Top are tightly linked together. I got the most thunderous applause when I asked why the idea of a “race to the top” had replaced the idea of equal educational opportunity.
Almost immediately, Education Week posted a blog by one of its veteran reporters saying that I was singing to the choir and that some observers considered my evidence to be “selective.”
I responded to the post by wondering what was “selective” about the Stanford [University] CREDO study of charter schools—which found that only 17% of them outperformed a matched regular public school—or scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, which since 2003 have never shown an advantage for charter schools as compared to regular public schools. Or NAEP scores for Milwaukee, which I cited in my speech, which reveal that African American students in that city—after two decades of choice-- have lower scores than African American students in Mississippi and Louisiana. Nor have I seen any evidence to contradict my conclusions about the predictable effects of high-stakes testing: narrowing the curriculum, cheating, gaming the system, systematic inflation of scores, etc.
The reporter, Stephen Sawchuk, pointed out that I am not in total agreement with some of NEA’s policies, and he is right. I have been a strong critic of so-called “21st century skills,” but that didn’t stop NEA from selecting me as its honoree. I certainly haven’t changed my view that the push for these “skills” is a weak refrain of the same activity-based approaches that have been popular in ed schools for a century. And, to the extent that it is about pushing more technology into the schools, it is pointless, as technology will never take the place of good teachers. Would NEA teachers disagree?
Sawchuk also says that the NEA doesn’t agree with my stance on the importance of a rich, balanced, coherent curriculum, but I didn’t see any evidence of that when I spoke. In fact, when I talked about the way that test prep was reducing time for the arts, history, civics, science, foreign languages, and even physical education, I was drowned out by cheers and applause before I could get through the list of subjects that are minimized by the pursuit of higher scores in basic skills.
These are important issues, and it’s useful to get them out front for discussion. So, I say, thank you to Stephen Sawchuk for doing so.
What I have observed these past few months is people from different camps are coming together to support public education. The privatization movement has driven one-time ideological foes into the same camp. It turns out that debates about bilingual education or whole language or progressivism pale in comparison to the importance of maintaining public education and the principle of equal educational opportunity.
CORRECTION: This was initially published with the first name of Stephen Sawchuk spelled incorrectly. It is now correct.
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Thursday, July 22, 2010
Students disclose illegal status as part of push for immigration law reform
If only more people had courage to stand for justice like this we'd be a better world. My respect goes out to these youth.
There's a great book recently published by Nilda Flores-Gonzales called "Marcha: Latino Chicago and the Immigrant Rights Movement" that is a must read! Nilda is an wonderful researcher, teacher, and friend. I hope you all check out her book!
-Patricia
By Tara Bahrampour | Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, July 21, 2010
On a patch of asphalt outside the White House this week, Renata Teodoro, Maricela Aguilar and scores of other students are risking deportation simply by sharing their full names and immigration status with anyone who asks.
In an act of defiance unimaginable to many in their parents' generation, they are publicly declaring that they are in the United States illegally as a way to push for change that would help thousands of undocumented young people like them. And they are doing so in one of the most highly patrolled -- and politicized -- spots in the country.
"I'm not going to lie and say that I'm not afraid of someone coming in and trying to arrest me, but I can't let that fear take over my life," said Teodoro, 22, a student at the University of Massachusetts in Boston whose parents were deported back to Brazil a couple of years ago. "The only way of people finding out about my situation is to tell my story."
She and other undocumented high school and college students and graduates have been streaming into Washington this week to demand passage of the Dream Act, legislation that would give unauthorized young immigrants a path to legal residency if they contribute to the country by serving in the military or getting a college education.
Most of the students have lived in the United States from a young age and consider themselves Americans. They are attending "classes" at what organizers have dubbed the "Dream University," meeting with legislators, and, in a notable shift from previous years, giving out their full names and personal histories.
On Tuesday, almost two dozen activists went one step further, staging sit-ins inside the Senate Hart Office Building that resulted in 21 arrests for disorderly conduct. Those charged could be referred to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, although it is not a given that they would face deportation as a result.
"We don't necessarily take action on everyone who is referred to us," said Gillian Brigham, a spokeswoman for ICE.
Losing the fear
The willingness of these young people to confront authorities in Washington and elsewhere is a far cry from the approach of most illegal immigrants, who are usually anxious to avoid calling attention to themselves. Many are deeply worried about the passage of a controversial law in Arizona that will give police the power to question people they suspect of being illegal immigrants. Other states are considering similar measures.
"It is a bit of a surprise to see how bold and open a lot of the young people are about their status, and that's changed from the past," said Margie McHugh, co-director of the nonprofit Migration Policy Institute's National Center on Immigrant Integration Policy, who said it was unclear what the consequences for them could be.
The students typically come from families that have strived to stay off the radar of immigration authorities. Sometimes they do not even tell their children that they are here illegally, hoping that they will absorb the confidence and ambition of their American friends and neighbors.
Many have done just that, and increasingly are acting like typical American college students: openly embracing a cause they believe in.
"I think there's an empowerment that comes with giving your name," said Aguilar, 19, a political science and English major at Marquette University in Milwaukee who calls herself a Midwesterner and has the accent to prove it.
She and others said their public declarations are a relief from the tension of always hiding. In fact, they hope the tactic will advance their cause and protect them from deportation.
"Our friends and our family are always telling us not to do it," said Francisco Gutierrez, 18, a Georgetown University student who moved to the United States from Mexico when he was 3 and had just started giving out his name. "I tell them we can't be fearful any more. We can't live our lives afraid that there's always something going to happen to us, just because we are undocumented."
Carlos Saavedra, national coordinator of the United We Dream Network, agreed. "We are losing the fear," said Saavedra, whose organization, a coalition of immigrant youth groups, organized many of the events and plans to continue them into August.
He gestured at the 20 or so students sitting in rows, some holding umbrellas in sweltering Lafayette Square. No one in the group -- which included his brother Rodrigo, who is 16 and undocumented -- appeared nervous, although ICE headquarters is not far from the White House.
"They know we're here," Saavedra said, "and we have not seen anything more than park police telling us to move here and move there."
Brigham would not comment specifically on the students outside the White House, but she said ICE puts a priority on deporting illegal immigrants with criminal backgrounds. In the past two years, the percentage of those deported with criminal backgrounds has risen from 31 percent to 50 percent, she said. Of the 227,163 people removed in the first half of this year, 113,453 were identified as criminal aliens.
Meanwhile, an estimated 65,000 illegal immigrants graduate from U.S. high schools each year. Some are able to enroll in college, but they can have difficulty obtaining financial aid because of their status.
Protection via publicity
Although ICE could go after the students, they are making a calculation that publicity, even arrest, can work in their favor, said observers on both side of the immigration issue.
"In a sense, going forward to the media affords protection," said Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Washington-based Center for Immigration Studies, which favors tighter immigration controls. "They're striking a pose of bravado knowing perfectly well that there's absolutely no chance that they're going to be [deported] once they've given an interview to the newspaper."
Immigration activists cite the case of Eric Balderas, a Harvard undergraduate and immigrant from Mexico who was arrested last month for being in the United States illegally. Deportation proceedings against him were halted after extensive publicity and lobbying by Harvard officials and Sen. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.).
Deportation has been deferred for others in similar straits after their stories appeared in the news. Brigham said ICE grants deferments on a case-by-case basis.
But not everyone wants to test immigration authorities.
At a "Coming Out" rally in Chicago in March, some students gave only their first names. At a May 1 rally in Washington, several gave their names to reporters but avoided being arrested at a sit-in. In Arizona a few days later, undocumented students staged a protest in front of Republican Sen. John McCain's office. Three were arrested and are in deportation proceedings.
One of them, Mohammad Abdollahi, 24, whose family moved to Michigan from Iran when he was 3, said he is hoping the publicity surrounding his case will lead to a deferment, though he knows that there is no guarantee.
Aguilar, whose family moved to the U.S. from Mexico when she was 3, said she didn't reveal her status for years, even while working as an activist for undocumented students.
"You'd always say everything in the third person," she said. But this year, when activists were planning a series of "coming out" events, she decided it was time to switch to the first person.
Whether giving out their names will help the students achieve their goals remains to be seen.
"I think it's not possible to say yet if it's a safe or an extremely risky thing for them to do," McHugh said. "They are taking a great risk in putting themselves out there so publicly. In the end, they'll be judged to have been quite prescient if the law does end up happening and naïve if it doesn't."
There's a great book recently published by Nilda Flores-Gonzales called "Marcha: Latino Chicago and the Immigrant Rights Movement" that is a must read! Nilda is an wonderful researcher, teacher, and friend. I hope you all check out her book!
-Patricia
By Tara Bahrampour | Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, July 21, 2010
On a patch of asphalt outside the White House this week, Renata Teodoro, Maricela Aguilar and scores of other students are risking deportation simply by sharing their full names and immigration status with anyone who asks.
In an act of defiance unimaginable to many in their parents' generation, they are publicly declaring that they are in the United States illegally as a way to push for change that would help thousands of undocumented young people like them. And they are doing so in one of the most highly patrolled -- and politicized -- spots in the country.
"I'm not going to lie and say that I'm not afraid of someone coming in and trying to arrest me, but I can't let that fear take over my life," said Teodoro, 22, a student at the University of Massachusetts in Boston whose parents were deported back to Brazil a couple of years ago. "The only way of people finding out about my situation is to tell my story."
She and other undocumented high school and college students and graduates have been streaming into Washington this week to demand passage of the Dream Act, legislation that would give unauthorized young immigrants a path to legal residency if they contribute to the country by serving in the military or getting a college education.
Most of the students have lived in the United States from a young age and consider themselves Americans. They are attending "classes" at what organizers have dubbed the "Dream University," meeting with legislators, and, in a notable shift from previous years, giving out their full names and personal histories.
On Tuesday, almost two dozen activists went one step further, staging sit-ins inside the Senate Hart Office Building that resulted in 21 arrests for disorderly conduct. Those charged could be referred to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, although it is not a given that they would face deportation as a result.
"We don't necessarily take action on everyone who is referred to us," said Gillian Brigham, a spokeswoman for ICE.
Losing the fear
The willingness of these young people to confront authorities in Washington and elsewhere is a far cry from the approach of most illegal immigrants, who are usually anxious to avoid calling attention to themselves. Many are deeply worried about the passage of a controversial law in Arizona that will give police the power to question people they suspect of being illegal immigrants. Other states are considering similar measures.
"It is a bit of a surprise to see how bold and open a lot of the young people are about their status, and that's changed from the past," said Margie McHugh, co-director of the nonprofit Migration Policy Institute's National Center on Immigrant Integration Policy, who said it was unclear what the consequences for them could be.
The students typically come from families that have strived to stay off the radar of immigration authorities. Sometimes they do not even tell their children that they are here illegally, hoping that they will absorb the confidence and ambition of their American friends and neighbors.
Many have done just that, and increasingly are acting like typical American college students: openly embracing a cause they believe in.
"I think there's an empowerment that comes with giving your name," said Aguilar, 19, a political science and English major at Marquette University in Milwaukee who calls herself a Midwesterner and has the accent to prove it.
She and others said their public declarations are a relief from the tension of always hiding. In fact, they hope the tactic will advance their cause and protect them from deportation.
"Our friends and our family are always telling us not to do it," said Francisco Gutierrez, 18, a Georgetown University student who moved to the United States from Mexico when he was 3 and had just started giving out his name. "I tell them we can't be fearful any more. We can't live our lives afraid that there's always something going to happen to us, just because we are undocumented."
Carlos Saavedra, national coordinator of the United We Dream Network, agreed. "We are losing the fear," said Saavedra, whose organization, a coalition of immigrant youth groups, organized many of the events and plans to continue them into August.
He gestured at the 20 or so students sitting in rows, some holding umbrellas in sweltering Lafayette Square. No one in the group -- which included his brother Rodrigo, who is 16 and undocumented -- appeared nervous, although ICE headquarters is not far from the White House.
"They know we're here," Saavedra said, "and we have not seen anything more than park police telling us to move here and move there."
Brigham would not comment specifically on the students outside the White House, but she said ICE puts a priority on deporting illegal immigrants with criminal backgrounds. In the past two years, the percentage of those deported with criminal backgrounds has risen from 31 percent to 50 percent, she said. Of the 227,163 people removed in the first half of this year, 113,453 were identified as criminal aliens.
Meanwhile, an estimated 65,000 illegal immigrants graduate from U.S. high schools each year. Some are able to enroll in college, but they can have difficulty obtaining financial aid because of their status.
Protection via publicity
Although ICE could go after the students, they are making a calculation that publicity, even arrest, can work in their favor, said observers on both side of the immigration issue.
"In a sense, going forward to the media affords protection," said Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Washington-based Center for Immigration Studies, which favors tighter immigration controls. "They're striking a pose of bravado knowing perfectly well that there's absolutely no chance that they're going to be [deported] once they've given an interview to the newspaper."
Immigration activists cite the case of Eric Balderas, a Harvard undergraduate and immigrant from Mexico who was arrested last month for being in the United States illegally. Deportation proceedings against him were halted after extensive publicity and lobbying by Harvard officials and Sen. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.).
Deportation has been deferred for others in similar straits after their stories appeared in the news. Brigham said ICE grants deferments on a case-by-case basis.
But not everyone wants to test immigration authorities.
At a "Coming Out" rally in Chicago in March, some students gave only their first names. At a May 1 rally in Washington, several gave their names to reporters but avoided being arrested at a sit-in. In Arizona a few days later, undocumented students staged a protest in front of Republican Sen. John McCain's office. Three were arrested and are in deportation proceedings.
One of them, Mohammad Abdollahi, 24, whose family moved to Michigan from Iran when he was 3, said he is hoping the publicity surrounding his case will lead to a deferment, though he knows that there is no guarantee.
Aguilar, whose family moved to the U.S. from Mexico when she was 3, said she didn't reveal her status for years, even while working as an activist for undocumented students.
"You'd always say everything in the third person," she said. But this year, when activists were planning a series of "coming out" events, she decided it was time to switch to the first person.
Whether giving out their names will help the students achieve their goals remains to be seen.
"I think it's not possible to say yet if it's a safe or an extremely risky thing for them to do," McHugh said. "They are taking a great risk in putting themselves out there so publicly. In the end, they'll be judged to have been quite prescient if the law does end up happening and naïve if it doesn't."
The Feds Give an Update on ELL Demographics
Here's the NCES's recent report "Status and Trends in the Education of Racial and Ethnic Groups"
Here are the tables with data on bilingual learners (also referred to as English language learners).
-Patricia
Mary Ann Zehr | Ed Week
July 20, 2010
About 5 percent of all elementary and secondary students in the United States speak a language other than English at home and have difficulty speaking English, according to parent surveys, says a federal trend report.
"The Status and Trends in the Education of Racial and Ethnic Minorities" report provides the latest data describing English-language learners in this country. It says that in 2007, the most recent year for which data is available, 11 million school-age children spoke a language other than English at home. That equals 21 percent of all students. The report says that one in four of the students who spoke a native language other than English at home had difficulty with English, according to their parents.
Another way of stating that last statistic is that three out of four children who speak a language other than English at home speak English with ease. That indicates to me that commonly, the children of immigrants are learning English.
The categories for reporting English proficiency are "very well," "well," "not well," and "not at all." If parents reported that children spoke English less than "very well," they were counted as speaking English with difficulty.
Here are the tables with data on bilingual learners (also referred to as English language learners).
-Patricia
Mary Ann Zehr | Ed Week
July 20, 2010
About 5 percent of all elementary and secondary students in the United States speak a language other than English at home and have difficulty speaking English, according to parent surveys, says a federal trend report.
"The Status and Trends in the Education of Racial and Ethnic Minorities" report provides the latest data describing English-language learners in this country. It says that in 2007, the most recent year for which data is available, 11 million school-age children spoke a language other than English at home. That equals 21 percent of all students. The report says that one in four of the students who spoke a native language other than English at home had difficulty with English, according to their parents.
Another way of stating that last statistic is that three out of four children who speak a language other than English at home speak English with ease. That indicates to me that commonly, the children of immigrants are learning English.
The categories for reporting English proficiency are "very well," "well," "not well," and "not at all." If parents reported that children spoke English less than "very well," they were counted as speaking English with difficulty.
William V. Flores Joins Call for DREAM Act
Props to Flores!
-Patricia
by Reeve Hamilton | Texas Tribune
July 20, 2010
University of Houston-Downtown President William V. Flores voiced his desire for passage of the DREAM Act (Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors) this morning. He spoke on a conference call with college presidents from Northern Virginia Community College, Eastern Washington University and the University of California, Berkeley.
If passed by Congress, the DREAM Act would give undocumented immigrants brought to the U.S. as children a shot at permanent residency status, provided they have lived in the country for at least five years without getting in trouble with the law, that they have a high school diploma or equivalency and that they commit to two years of college or military service. According to recent polling, it has widespread support among U.S. voters.
UH-Downtown plays host to about 13,000 students in the middle of, as Flores noted, a "very international city." Approximately 39 percent of the school's students are Hispanic, 29 percent are black, 22 percent white, 5 percent are Asian and 5 percent are international students. Flores said that about 200 or fewer students would be affected by the DREAM Act.
"Tragic" is the word Flores used to describe the plights of students who are held back due to residency status. Many, he said, often can't speak or read their native language because they immigrated at such a young age. He says the DREAM Act would provide a necessary pathway to achievement. "It would be a very unusual way of treating someone to not allow them to contribute," Flores said. "Many of them want to become teachers, doctors, or lawyers and contribute to this society."
On the call, supporters of the act said that while the odds of a congressional vote on more comprehensive immigration reform coming this year appear to be dwindling, it might be easier, in the meantime, to secure passage of the DREAM Act on its own given the bipartisan nature of its support.
-Patricia
by Reeve Hamilton | Texas Tribune
July 20, 2010
University of Houston-Downtown President William V. Flores voiced his desire for passage of the DREAM Act (Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors) this morning. He spoke on a conference call with college presidents from Northern Virginia Community College, Eastern Washington University and the University of California, Berkeley.
If passed by Congress, the DREAM Act would give undocumented immigrants brought to the U.S. as children a shot at permanent residency status, provided they have lived in the country for at least five years without getting in trouble with the law, that they have a high school diploma or equivalency and that they commit to two years of college or military service. According to recent polling, it has widespread support among U.S. voters.
UH-Downtown plays host to about 13,000 students in the middle of, as Flores noted, a "very international city." Approximately 39 percent of the school's students are Hispanic, 29 percent are black, 22 percent white, 5 percent are Asian and 5 percent are international students. Flores said that about 200 or fewer students would be affected by the DREAM Act.
"Tragic" is the word Flores used to describe the plights of students who are held back due to residency status. Many, he said, often can't speak or read their native language because they immigrated at such a young age. He says the DREAM Act would provide a necessary pathway to achievement. "It would be a very unusual way of treating someone to not allow them to contribute," Flores said. "Many of them want to become teachers, doctors, or lawyers and contribute to this society."
On the call, supporters of the act said that while the odds of a congressional vote on more comprehensive immigration reform coming this year appear to be dwindling, it might be easier, in the meantime, to secure passage of the DREAM Act on its own given the bipartisan nature of its support.
Gallegos, HISD Spar on Data-Based Firings
Yesterday's hearing is worth watching for those of you who missed it. You can check it out here.
-Patricia
Elizabeth Titus | Texas Tribune
July 20, 2010
In the latest clash between the Houston Independent School District and those who question its use of "value-added data" to grade and even fire teachers, state Sen. Mario Gallegos Jr., D-Houston, grilled an HISD representative at today's Senate Education Committee hearing over what he decried as a transparency issue for the district.
Houston ISD has used the data — which purports to gauge how much each student improves under a particular teacher — to hand out bonuses to educators since 2007. In February, the city's Board of Education adopted a policy saying the data could be used in terminations as well, along with other factors. Both the rewards and punishments have come under criticism, especially from from the district's teachers union, the Houston Federation of Teachers. Adding to the controversy, the formula remains secret. Its developer, educational statistician William Sanders, and the district have shielded the system from public records laws by arguing that it is proprietary information, the release of which would harm Sander's business by empowering competitors.
Today, Gallegos took up the point with Ann Best, the district's chief human resources officer, who — along with academics, state officials and nonprofit representatives — had come to testify about teacher evaluations. "Let's make it real here," he told Best. Running data about teachers' effect on students through a "black box," he said, is unfair, leaving teachers in the dark as they try to meet the district's expectations.
Best deflected Gallegos' questions, saying she was not an expert on value-added data. She told The Tribune that the system, which evaluates third- through eighth-grade teachers in core subjects, is just one of three dozen factors used to evaluate teacher performance. "I don't think it's a black box," Best said, adding that "lots" of teachers go through professional development seminars that help them improve based on the data from the value-added system. And because this year was the district's fourth using Sanders' system, she said, teachers have trend data to learn from.
Houston teachers turned out in force in February to oppose the district's adoption of value-added data as the basis for firing under-performing instructors. It came as part of a larger fight over using students' test scores to award bonuses to teachers, and after President Obama broached the subject of merit pay for teachers nationally. In Houston, local politics played a key role: candidates backed by the union lost two HISD board races in the most recent election, giving a majority to members who often oppose the union and supported merit pay.
For now, Gallegos remains unsatisfied about the lack of details Houston teachers have to counter unfavorable evaluations. Under the current system, it's "here's your evaluation, vámanos," he said. "I don't like it at all."
With nearly 13,000 teachers and 202,000 students, HISD is the state's largest school district.
-Patricia
Elizabeth Titus | Texas Tribune
July 20, 2010
In the latest clash between the Houston Independent School District and those who question its use of "value-added data" to grade and even fire teachers, state Sen. Mario Gallegos Jr., D-Houston, grilled an HISD representative at today's Senate Education Committee hearing over what he decried as a transparency issue for the district.
Houston ISD has used the data — which purports to gauge how much each student improves under a particular teacher — to hand out bonuses to educators since 2007. In February, the city's Board of Education adopted a policy saying the data could be used in terminations as well, along with other factors. Both the rewards and punishments have come under criticism, especially from from the district's teachers union, the Houston Federation of Teachers. Adding to the controversy, the formula remains secret. Its developer, educational statistician William Sanders, and the district have shielded the system from public records laws by arguing that it is proprietary information, the release of which would harm Sander's business by empowering competitors.
Today, Gallegos took up the point with Ann Best, the district's chief human resources officer, who — along with academics, state officials and nonprofit representatives — had come to testify about teacher evaluations. "Let's make it real here," he told Best. Running data about teachers' effect on students through a "black box," he said, is unfair, leaving teachers in the dark as they try to meet the district's expectations.
Best deflected Gallegos' questions, saying she was not an expert on value-added data. She told The Tribune that the system, which evaluates third- through eighth-grade teachers in core subjects, is just one of three dozen factors used to evaluate teacher performance. "I don't think it's a black box," Best said, adding that "lots" of teachers go through professional development seminars that help them improve based on the data from the value-added system. And because this year was the district's fourth using Sanders' system, she said, teachers have trend data to learn from.
Houston teachers turned out in force in February to oppose the district's adoption of value-added data as the basis for firing under-performing instructors. It came as part of a larger fight over using students' test scores to award bonuses to teachers, and after President Obama broached the subject of merit pay for teachers nationally. In Houston, local politics played a key role: candidates backed by the union lost two HISD board races in the most recent election, giving a majority to members who often oppose the union and supported merit pay.
For now, Gallegos remains unsatisfied about the lack of details Houston teachers have to counter unfavorable evaluations. Under the current system, it's "here's your evaluation, vámanos," he said. "I don't like it at all."
With nearly 13,000 teachers and 202,000 students, HISD is the state's largest school district.
Private, For-Profit Colleges Under the Microscope
by Reeve Hamilton | Texas Tribune
July 20, 2010
Dallas personal injury lawyer Julie Johnson’s foray into the fight against private, for-profit colleges began with a handful of would-be interior designers.
A few years ago, a group of students had come to Johnson for help: They had forked over thousands of dollars at a private, for-profit school, but their non-accredited course work didn’t pass muster for an interior design license. Since then, Johnson has devoted most of her practice to hounding “proprietary” or “career” colleges for failing to make good on their claims.
She’s not alone in her focus. Career colleges find themselves in the hot seat this year, as U.S. Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, leads federal hearings on the need to regulate for-profit recruitment practices and the warnings of hedge-fund manager Steven Eisman (who famously predicted the crash of the housing market) that the student loan market is the next bubble to burst. And one of Johnson’s most recent cases — Dallas-based students claiming they were misled into believing that their psychology doctoral program was in the process of being accredited by the American Psychological Association — landed a prime-time slot on PBS’s Frontline.
Bob Cohen, senior vice president of the Career College Association, a national coalition of proprietary schools, dismisses what he describes as self-interested detractors who tend to generalize isolated incidents for the sake of publicity. “A lot of what we’re seeing is the attempt by short-sellers on Wall Street or trial lawyers who have made a specialty practice to try to drum up this story,” he says. “But the basic fact remains that you have 2.8 million students in career schools, and they’re getting a good education.”
The pitch at these schools — ITT Technical Institute, Everest Institute and Kaplan College are some of the more pervasive names in Texas — is simple: Without the hassles of developmental courses and required liberal arts courses, students can get career-focused training and join the workforce in less time. Cohen says for-profit schools avoid what he dubs the “scavenger hunt” for courses that can occur at community colleges. “There, a lot of the onus was put on the student to get over that steeplechase and graduate,” he says. “At career colleges, we say, forget all that.” To the dismay of education traditionalists, that’s not a tough sell for an increasing number of Texans, even if the short-term cost of attendance is steeper than comparable public-sector options.
Johnson argues that the pitch is too often made to the most vulnerable Texans, who might not be aware of other options like a traditional community college route. “The kids that go to these schools do not come from three generations of Longhorns,” she says. “They’re the first to go.”
The population served by career colleges — which accounts for about 5 percent (more than 72,000) of total fall enrollments in the state and 7 percent (more than 130,000) of 12-month enrollments — mirrors that of community colleges: Nearly two thirds are minorities, many of them first-generation college-goers. But unlike their counterparts at community colleges, students at proprietary schools have difficulty transferring their credits to other Texas schools. Often this is a matter of traditional universities opting to only recognize the more prestigious regional accrediting bodies, whereas for-profit schools are generally accredited by national organizations.
At an April 20 hearing of the House Higher Education Committee, Joe Fisher, the former chair of the Career Colleges and Schools of Texas and the current president of for-profit Hallmark College, laid out his understanding of the dynamic. “It’s a turf war,” he said. “It’s elitism."
More than half of institutions of post-secondary learning in Texas are for-profit schools. Of those 216 schools, 72 percent offer certification in less than two years, while only 7 percent offer four-year degrees. A number of the certificates offered are not often found in traditional academia. For example, according to the Career College Association, 97 percent of somatic bodywork and related therapeutic services awards in Texas come from career colleges, which account for approximately 46 percent of all awards for health and clinical-related professions in the state.
Getting those awards (certificates, associate's degrees, bachelor's degrees or beyond) doesn’t come cheap. Argosy University, for example, charges $510 per credit hour for undergraduate courses, as opposed to the $50 per credit hour charge for Texas residents at public universities. As is the case at most schools, the answer for many students lies in loans — primarily of the federal variety, which career college students receive at rates similar to and occasionally higher than they would at public and private non-profit schools.
[For a breakdown of federal grants — totals and averages — given to Texas students at different types of institutions, click here.]
Education is changing, Cohen says, and to maintain the working middle class, it needs to be more tailored toward professions with a “tangible” return. “It can’t be where you go to school for six years and come out with a degree in Chaucer,” he says.
Speaking of return on investment, what if you take out a big loan and end up with a credential that employers and schools won’t recognize? The 16.5 percent default rate for proprietary schools in Texas notably outpaces public schools (7.7 percent) and private nonprofit institutions (4.9 percent). And that debt never goes away — student loans cannot be discharged, even in bankruptcy.
Johnson says she fully understands why people like Eisman are calling it the next housing crisis. “These students are being charged for educations that are poorly run with promises of employment that are undeliverable,” she says. “What are they going to do?”
Cohen insists that the default rates are in line with the expectations for the less well-off population they serve. As for the credential they receive, and how and if they can use it, that’s up to the student. While some professional societies require certification, sometimes certificates earned at career colleges can only be used as a resume booster — at best. “There’s various ins and outs,” Cohen says, “and the students really need to do their homework to understand what the circumstances are going in.”
“There is an element of self-responsibility to getting an education and getting a job,” Johnson acknowledges. “I think that there are students who go to one of these schools and then, depending on the degree that they choose, may ultimately get a career. But those are fewer than the norm.”
One bet that can be taken to the bank: Career colleges aren’t going anywhere. Faced with a budget shortfall projected to be as much as $18 billion at a time of record enrollments in higher education, Texas needs all the capacity-expanders it can get.
“They play a unique role,” says state Rep. Dan Branch, R-Dallas, who chairs the higher ed committee. “But they’ve got to balance access and quality. Obviously, we don’t want the credential to be illusory.” The regulatory structure in place to prevent degree mills is provided by the two agencies: the Texas Workforce Commission, which licenses institutions to operate, and to a lesser extent the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board, which oversees degree programs. Currently, no state version of proposed federal regulations to curb predatory recruitment is in the works.
“We are monitoring the activities at the federal level, but I think Texas remains confident they have structured themselves right with the Workforce Commisson and the Coordinating Board,” says Jerry Valdez, a lobbyist for the Career Colleges and Schools of Texas.
Last session, Branch passed a bill bolstering (to the modest tune of $1.2 million) the Texas Career Opportunity Grant, which provides awards to economically disadvantaged Texans enrolled in career schools. He says career colleges are increasingly drawing attention as more education statisticians begin to count an individual with a certificate from a less-than-two-year program as a credentialed adult. Such considerations are important as Texas tries to close the achievement gaps that exist between it and other states in the next five years.
As proprietary schools stand to increase in numbers, capacity and relevance to the state’s higher education strategy, Johnson hopes that so, too, will the number of watchful eyes upon them.
July 20, 2010
Dallas personal injury lawyer Julie Johnson’s foray into the fight against private, for-profit colleges began with a handful of would-be interior designers.
A few years ago, a group of students had come to Johnson for help: They had forked over thousands of dollars at a private, for-profit school, but their non-accredited course work didn’t pass muster for an interior design license. Since then, Johnson has devoted most of her practice to hounding “proprietary” or “career” colleges for failing to make good on their claims.
She’s not alone in her focus. Career colleges find themselves in the hot seat this year, as U.S. Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, leads federal hearings on the need to regulate for-profit recruitment practices and the warnings of hedge-fund manager Steven Eisman (who famously predicted the crash of the housing market) that the student loan market is the next bubble to burst. And one of Johnson’s most recent cases — Dallas-based students claiming they were misled into believing that their psychology doctoral program was in the process of being accredited by the American Psychological Association — landed a prime-time slot on PBS’s Frontline.
Bob Cohen, senior vice president of the Career College Association, a national coalition of proprietary schools, dismisses what he describes as self-interested detractors who tend to generalize isolated incidents for the sake of publicity. “A lot of what we’re seeing is the attempt by short-sellers on Wall Street or trial lawyers who have made a specialty practice to try to drum up this story,” he says. “But the basic fact remains that you have 2.8 million students in career schools, and they’re getting a good education.”
The pitch at these schools — ITT Technical Institute, Everest Institute and Kaplan College are some of the more pervasive names in Texas — is simple: Without the hassles of developmental courses and required liberal arts courses, students can get career-focused training and join the workforce in less time. Cohen says for-profit schools avoid what he dubs the “scavenger hunt” for courses that can occur at community colleges. “There, a lot of the onus was put on the student to get over that steeplechase and graduate,” he says. “At career colleges, we say, forget all that.” To the dismay of education traditionalists, that’s not a tough sell for an increasing number of Texans, even if the short-term cost of attendance is steeper than comparable public-sector options.
Johnson argues that the pitch is too often made to the most vulnerable Texans, who might not be aware of other options like a traditional community college route. “The kids that go to these schools do not come from three generations of Longhorns,” she says. “They’re the first to go.”
The population served by career colleges — which accounts for about 5 percent (more than 72,000) of total fall enrollments in the state and 7 percent (more than 130,000) of 12-month enrollments — mirrors that of community colleges: Nearly two thirds are minorities, many of them first-generation college-goers. But unlike their counterparts at community colleges, students at proprietary schools have difficulty transferring their credits to other Texas schools. Often this is a matter of traditional universities opting to only recognize the more prestigious regional accrediting bodies, whereas for-profit schools are generally accredited by national organizations.
At an April 20 hearing of the House Higher Education Committee, Joe Fisher, the former chair of the Career Colleges and Schools of Texas and the current president of for-profit Hallmark College, laid out his understanding of the dynamic. “It’s a turf war,” he said. “It’s elitism."
More than half of institutions of post-secondary learning in Texas are for-profit schools. Of those 216 schools, 72 percent offer certification in less than two years, while only 7 percent offer four-year degrees. A number of the certificates offered are not often found in traditional academia. For example, according to the Career College Association, 97 percent of somatic bodywork and related therapeutic services awards in Texas come from career colleges, which account for approximately 46 percent of all awards for health and clinical-related professions in the state.
Getting those awards (certificates, associate's degrees, bachelor's degrees or beyond) doesn’t come cheap. Argosy University, for example, charges $510 per credit hour for undergraduate courses, as opposed to the $50 per credit hour charge for Texas residents at public universities. As is the case at most schools, the answer for many students lies in loans — primarily of the federal variety, which career college students receive at rates similar to and occasionally higher than they would at public and private non-profit schools.
[For a breakdown of federal grants — totals and averages — given to Texas students at different types of institutions, click here.]
Education is changing, Cohen says, and to maintain the working middle class, it needs to be more tailored toward professions with a “tangible” return. “It can’t be where you go to school for six years and come out with a degree in Chaucer,” he says.
Speaking of return on investment, what if you take out a big loan and end up with a credential that employers and schools won’t recognize? The 16.5 percent default rate for proprietary schools in Texas notably outpaces public schools (7.7 percent) and private nonprofit institutions (4.9 percent). And that debt never goes away — student loans cannot be discharged, even in bankruptcy.
Johnson says she fully understands why people like Eisman are calling it the next housing crisis. “These students are being charged for educations that are poorly run with promises of employment that are undeliverable,” she says. “What are they going to do?”
Cohen insists that the default rates are in line with the expectations for the less well-off population they serve. As for the credential they receive, and how and if they can use it, that’s up to the student. While some professional societies require certification, sometimes certificates earned at career colleges can only be used as a resume booster — at best. “There’s various ins and outs,” Cohen says, “and the students really need to do their homework to understand what the circumstances are going in.”
“There is an element of self-responsibility to getting an education and getting a job,” Johnson acknowledges. “I think that there are students who go to one of these schools and then, depending on the degree that they choose, may ultimately get a career. But those are fewer than the norm.”
One bet that can be taken to the bank: Career colleges aren’t going anywhere. Faced with a budget shortfall projected to be as much as $18 billion at a time of record enrollments in higher education, Texas needs all the capacity-expanders it can get.
“They play a unique role,” says state Rep. Dan Branch, R-Dallas, who chairs the higher ed committee. “But they’ve got to balance access and quality. Obviously, we don’t want the credential to be illusory.” The regulatory structure in place to prevent degree mills is provided by the two agencies: the Texas Workforce Commission, which licenses institutions to operate, and to a lesser extent the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board, which oversees degree programs. Currently, no state version of proposed federal regulations to curb predatory recruitment is in the works.
“We are monitoring the activities at the federal level, but I think Texas remains confident they have structured themselves right with the Workforce Commisson and the Coordinating Board,” says Jerry Valdez, a lobbyist for the Career Colleges and Schools of Texas.
Last session, Branch passed a bill bolstering (to the modest tune of $1.2 million) the Texas Career Opportunity Grant, which provides awards to economically disadvantaged Texans enrolled in career schools. He says career colleges are increasingly drawing attention as more education statisticians begin to count an individual with a certificate from a less-than-two-year program as a credentialed adult. Such considerations are important as Texas tries to close the achievement gaps that exist between it and other states in the next five years.
As proprietary schools stand to increase in numbers, capacity and relevance to the state’s higher education strategy, Johnson hopes that so, too, will the number of watchful eyes upon them.
Affirmative Action Suit Challenges UT Admission Policy
Check out the Obama Administration's Amicus Brief
Also check out the appellate briefs and the district court's opinion
-Patricia
Morgan Smith | Texas Tribune
July 21, 2010
If two young women have their way, the University of Texas may soon rival the University of Michigan as the nation's top breeding ground for affirmative action jurisprudence.
Abigail Fisher and her co-plaintiff, Rachel Michalewicz, are the faces of a movement to overturn a landmark 2003 U.S. Supreme Court opinion allowing the use of race in the admissions process at the Michigan Law School. Their chosen target is UT, which denied them both admission in 2008. They believe that happened because they're white.
On Aug. 3, the federal 5th Circuit Court of Appeals will hear oral arguments in their lawsuit, which has attracted widespread attention from the legal community, including an amicus brief from the Obama administration in support of the university’s position. The case threatens to reinvigorate an ideological skirmish that reached its peak in the late 1990s.
Fisher and Michalewicz’s challenge to the use of race is the first in an undergraduate setting since the high court handed down Grutter v. Bollinger and its companion case, Gratz v. Bollinger — a pair of decisions that articulated how schools could use race-based affirmative action to select their incoming classes. The current plaintiffs lost in district court, in a 2009 ruling that affirmed the university’s policies were within constitutional bounds set forth in Grutter, which allows schools to use race as factor in the holistic consideration of candidates. (Explore annotated versions of both sides' appellate briefs and the district court's opinion here.)
For the conservative activists bankrolling the case, Texas’ history with affirmative action makes it the ideal incubator for a challenge to standing precedent. That’s because the courts already have shot down race-based admissions in a now-famous 1996 case, Hopwood v. Texas, which forced state universities to search for race-neutral methods of increasing diversity on campus. That will allow Fisher and Michalewicz to argue that the race-based admissions used in their case were unnecessary given the proven success of race-neutral alternatives.
In Hopwood, an applicant to the University of Texas law school sued the state for its race-based admissions policies. The 5th Circuit ruled against UT — making the case the first successful challenge to a university’s affirmative action policy. In a controversial move that followed, then-Attorney General Dan Morales extended the court’s decision to all state schools. The Legislature reacted by passing the top 10 percent rule in 1997, which guaranteed admission to all state-funded universities for students who graduate in the top 10 percent of their high school class.
Combined with a program of socioeconomic-based affirmative action, the top 10 percent rule increased the number of minority admissions because of the demographic patterns of Texas school districts, where minority students are often clustered in the same schools. It received praise for promoting diversity in a racially neutral manner. But after Grutter, UT reworked its admissions policies to consider race as a factor for the students it accepted outside of the portion admitted under the rule.
That’s where Fisher and Michalewicz come in. Fisher, a native of Sugar Land, was in the top 12 percent of her class. Michalewicz — whom UT ranked in the upper 10.14 percent of her class — just missed the top 10 percent mark at her high school in Buda. Because race was a factor in UT’s review of their applications, they allege, the university violated their rights under the 14th Amendment, which requires a state to treat its citizens equally under the law — something their brief says is not happening because the policy "benefits African-American and Hispanic students and consequently works to the detriment of White and Asian-American students.” Specifically, they believe that under Grutter, the use of race as a factor in admissions is constitutional only as a “last resort.” Because of UT’s success in the past in promoting diversity without using race, it should be prohibited from doing so in its current policies.
The D.C.-based Project for Fair Representation handpicked Fisher and Michalewicz as plaintiffs and is paying their attorneys. Former Houstonian and anti-affirmative-action crusader Edward Blum founded the group in 2005 specifically to challenge what he regards as the unconstitutional use of race in public policy. Since then, the Project has brought four different lawsuits across the country, including the recent Supreme Court Voting Rights Act case out of Austin, Northwest Austin Municipal v. Holder.
Blum, who also serves as a fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, says he first became interested in what he calls “race jurisprudence” in 1992, when he lost a congressional race in Houston’s 18th district (the seat Sheila Jackson Lee currently holds) and successfully brought a suit arguing that the district was unfairly gerrymandered based on race. After first coming into contact with Fisher through a family connection, he launched a website called UTnotfair.org to find more high schools students like her. Michalewicz was one of them.
Texas is a “very unique candidate for a challenge” to Grutter, Blum says, because Hopwood forced the state to consider alternatives to race-based affirmative action. A caveat in the Grutter opinion, Fisher and Michalewicz argue, means that — because of the racial diversity the university was able to achieve under the top 10 percent plan — it can no longer legally use race as a factor in its admissions process. Richard Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation who writes on affirmative action policies, explains that while the case “was for the most part supportive of using race in admissions,” there was a provision that said, “[I]f you can get racial diversity using non-racial means, then it would be illegal to use race per se.”
Patti Ohlendorf, UT’s vice president of legal affairs, says the university’s undergraduate admission policy is “completely appropriate” legally. That’s because the top 10 percent rule did not achieve the “full diversity that the university believes it should,” she says, which necessitated adding race as a factor in admissions. The university, represented by Texas Solicitor General James Ho, points to what it believes are Fisher and Michalewicz’s true motives in its appellate brief: The 5th Circuit “is a little more than a way station for the Plaintiffs’ real ambitions, which fall within the exclusive province of the U.S. Supreme Court.” UT’s brief also takes issue with their characterization of the Grutter holding, saying that it doesn't require a university to exhaust "every conceivable race-neutral alternative” — and nowhere does it say the use of race can only be as a “last resort” to achieve diversity.
Burt Rein, a partner at the Washington, D.C., law firm representing Fisher and Michalewicz, says the goal of promoting diversity isn’t on trial. "It's not an easy issue. I don't think anybody questions that it is desirable to have diversity and subject people to different points of view in an active academic environment,” he says. “The question is how do we get from here to there."
Kahlenberg, who supports socioeconomic rather than race-based affirmative action, calls the choice of Texas as the legal battleground “a shrewd decision” by opponents of affirmative action — especially those with an eye on taking their appeal to nation’s highest court. If the high court rules against UT, Kahlenberg says, it could leave universities vulnerable to litigation charging they had not sufficiently explored alternatives to race-based affirmative action, effectively opening up an issue the 2003 decisions supposedly settled.
“This case is tailor-made for Justice Kennedy and conservatives on the Supreme Court to undercut affirmative action without technically overruling Grutter," he says.
Rein downplays his clients’ Supreme Court aspirations. “You can’t make the Supreme Court take any case,” he says. But here’s the high court calculus that has supporters of affirmative action nervous about the case’s prospects: Sandra Day O’Connor was the swing vote in the 5-4 Grutter decision. Now, since the more conservative Samuel Alito has replaced O’Connor, the swing vote will likely go to Anthony Kennedy — who joined the dissent in Grutter, opposing race-based admissions.
ourt, in its current makeup, has taken up the issue of affirmative action in education since Grutter. Two 2008 cases addressed the use of race by school districts to assign students to public schools. Parents Involved v. Seattle School District No. 1, decided along with Meredith v. Jefferson County Board of Education, was another 5-4 standoff that had Kennedy and Clarence Thomas concurring with a plurality opinion. The Parents Involved court took a critical approach to the use of race in a K-12 setting and struck down the districts' policies. However, in that case, Blum’s group filed an amicus brief specifically asking the court to overturn Grutter — and it declined. Chief Justice John Roberts, writing the plurality opinion, reiterated that while the case did not apply to public high schools, it still stood as good law governing university admissions.
Blum denied access to Fisher and Michalewicz for this article, saying they weren’t out to become “national figures in their cause.” Both now enrolled in other universities, he says, “they are just two outstanding students who want to live garden variety lives and feel UT's treatment of them and hundreds of other students was unfair and unlawful.”
Also check out the appellate briefs and the district court's opinion
-Patricia
Morgan Smith | Texas Tribune
July 21, 2010
If two young women have their way, the University of Texas may soon rival the University of Michigan as the nation's top breeding ground for affirmative action jurisprudence.
Abigail Fisher and her co-plaintiff, Rachel Michalewicz, are the faces of a movement to overturn a landmark 2003 U.S. Supreme Court opinion allowing the use of race in the admissions process at the Michigan Law School. Their chosen target is UT, which denied them both admission in 2008. They believe that happened because they're white.
On Aug. 3, the federal 5th Circuit Court of Appeals will hear oral arguments in their lawsuit, which has attracted widespread attention from the legal community, including an amicus brief from the Obama administration in support of the university’s position. The case threatens to reinvigorate an ideological skirmish that reached its peak in the late 1990s.
Fisher and Michalewicz’s challenge to the use of race is the first in an undergraduate setting since the high court handed down Grutter v. Bollinger and its companion case, Gratz v. Bollinger — a pair of decisions that articulated how schools could use race-based affirmative action to select their incoming classes. The current plaintiffs lost in district court, in a 2009 ruling that affirmed the university’s policies were within constitutional bounds set forth in Grutter, which allows schools to use race as factor in the holistic consideration of candidates. (Explore annotated versions of both sides' appellate briefs and the district court's opinion here.)
For the conservative activists bankrolling the case, Texas’ history with affirmative action makes it the ideal incubator for a challenge to standing precedent. That’s because the courts already have shot down race-based admissions in a now-famous 1996 case, Hopwood v. Texas, which forced state universities to search for race-neutral methods of increasing diversity on campus. That will allow Fisher and Michalewicz to argue that the race-based admissions used in their case were unnecessary given the proven success of race-neutral alternatives.
In Hopwood, an applicant to the University of Texas law school sued the state for its race-based admissions policies. The 5th Circuit ruled against UT — making the case the first successful challenge to a university’s affirmative action policy. In a controversial move that followed, then-Attorney General Dan Morales extended the court’s decision to all state schools. The Legislature reacted by passing the top 10 percent rule in 1997, which guaranteed admission to all state-funded universities for students who graduate in the top 10 percent of their high school class.
Combined with a program of socioeconomic-based affirmative action, the top 10 percent rule increased the number of minority admissions because of the demographic patterns of Texas school districts, where minority students are often clustered in the same schools. It received praise for promoting diversity in a racially neutral manner. But after Grutter, UT reworked its admissions policies to consider race as a factor for the students it accepted outside of the portion admitted under the rule.
That’s where Fisher and Michalewicz come in. Fisher, a native of Sugar Land, was in the top 12 percent of her class. Michalewicz — whom UT ranked in the upper 10.14 percent of her class — just missed the top 10 percent mark at her high school in Buda. Because race was a factor in UT’s review of their applications, they allege, the university violated their rights under the 14th Amendment, which requires a state to treat its citizens equally under the law — something their brief says is not happening because the policy "benefits African-American and Hispanic students and consequently works to the detriment of White and Asian-American students.” Specifically, they believe that under Grutter, the use of race as a factor in admissions is constitutional only as a “last resort.” Because of UT’s success in the past in promoting diversity without using race, it should be prohibited from doing so in its current policies.
The D.C.-based Project for Fair Representation handpicked Fisher and Michalewicz as plaintiffs and is paying their attorneys. Former Houstonian and anti-affirmative-action crusader Edward Blum founded the group in 2005 specifically to challenge what he regards as the unconstitutional use of race in public policy. Since then, the Project has brought four different lawsuits across the country, including the recent Supreme Court Voting Rights Act case out of Austin, Northwest Austin Municipal v. Holder.
Blum, who also serves as a fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, says he first became interested in what he calls “race jurisprudence” in 1992, when he lost a congressional race in Houston’s 18th district (the seat Sheila Jackson Lee currently holds) and successfully brought a suit arguing that the district was unfairly gerrymandered based on race. After first coming into contact with Fisher through a family connection, he launched a website called UTnotfair.org to find more high schools students like her. Michalewicz was one of them.
Texas is a “very unique candidate for a challenge” to Grutter, Blum says, because Hopwood forced the state to consider alternatives to race-based affirmative action. A caveat in the Grutter opinion, Fisher and Michalewicz argue, means that — because of the racial diversity the university was able to achieve under the top 10 percent plan — it can no longer legally use race as a factor in its admissions process. Richard Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation who writes on affirmative action policies, explains that while the case “was for the most part supportive of using race in admissions,” there was a provision that said, “[I]f you can get racial diversity using non-racial means, then it would be illegal to use race per se.”
Patti Ohlendorf, UT’s vice president of legal affairs, says the university’s undergraduate admission policy is “completely appropriate” legally. That’s because the top 10 percent rule did not achieve the “full diversity that the university believes it should,” she says, which necessitated adding race as a factor in admissions. The university, represented by Texas Solicitor General James Ho, points to what it believes are Fisher and Michalewicz’s true motives in its appellate brief: The 5th Circuit “is a little more than a way station for the Plaintiffs’ real ambitions, which fall within the exclusive province of the U.S. Supreme Court.” UT’s brief also takes issue with their characterization of the Grutter holding, saying that it doesn't require a university to exhaust "every conceivable race-neutral alternative” — and nowhere does it say the use of race can only be as a “last resort” to achieve diversity.
Burt Rein, a partner at the Washington, D.C., law firm representing Fisher and Michalewicz, says the goal of promoting diversity isn’t on trial. "It's not an easy issue. I don't think anybody questions that it is desirable to have diversity and subject people to different points of view in an active academic environment,” he says. “The question is how do we get from here to there."
Kahlenberg, who supports socioeconomic rather than race-based affirmative action, calls the choice of Texas as the legal battleground “a shrewd decision” by opponents of affirmative action — especially those with an eye on taking their appeal to nation’s highest court. If the high court rules against UT, Kahlenberg says, it could leave universities vulnerable to litigation charging they had not sufficiently explored alternatives to race-based affirmative action, effectively opening up an issue the 2003 decisions supposedly settled.
“This case is tailor-made for Justice Kennedy and conservatives on the Supreme Court to undercut affirmative action without technically overruling Grutter," he says.
Rein downplays his clients’ Supreme Court aspirations. “You can’t make the Supreme Court take any case,” he says. But here’s the high court calculus that has supporters of affirmative action nervous about the case’s prospects: Sandra Day O’Connor was the swing vote in the 5-4 Grutter decision. Now, since the more conservative Samuel Alito has replaced O’Connor, the swing vote will likely go to Anthony Kennedy — who joined the dissent in Grutter, opposing race-based admissions.
ourt, in its current makeup, has taken up the issue of affirmative action in education since Grutter. Two 2008 cases addressed the use of race by school districts to assign students to public schools. Parents Involved v. Seattle School District No. 1, decided along with Meredith v. Jefferson County Board of Education, was another 5-4 standoff that had Kennedy and Clarence Thomas concurring with a plurality opinion. The Parents Involved court took a critical approach to the use of race in a K-12 setting and struck down the districts' policies. However, in that case, Blum’s group filed an amicus brief specifically asking the court to overturn Grutter — and it declined. Chief Justice John Roberts, writing the plurality opinion, reiterated that while the case did not apply to public high schools, it still stood as good law governing university admissions.
Blum denied access to Fisher and Michalewicz for this article, saying they weren’t out to become “national figures in their cause.” Both now enrolled in other universities, he says, “they are just two outstanding students who want to live garden variety lives and feel UT's treatment of them and hundreds of other students was unfair and unlawful.”
Education study ranks Hidalgo County near the bottom among large metro areas
Neal Morton | The Monitor
July 21, 2010
McALLEN — McAllen remains among the nation’s worst cities for educational success, a think tank reported this week, but some business and education leaders gleaned hope from the area’s third-to-last ranking for bachelor’s degree achievement.
Releasing its “State of Metropolitan America” study on Monday, the Washington, D.C.-based Brookings Institute ranked the McAllen-Edinburg-Mission area — which comprises all of Hidalgo County — 98th among the country’s 100 largest metro areas based on the proportion of residents age 25 and older with a bachelor’s degree.
Only 15.1 percent of that age group, or 58,811 people, had a bachelor’s degree in 2008.
In 1990 and 2000, Greater McAllen stood at dead last on the list.
University of Texas-Pan American President Robert Nelsen hailed the movement up the ranking since then as good news for the area.
“We only came up by two, but my optimism is large,” Nelsen said. “Sometimes I’m asked if we need to recruit in Houston or in Dallas. No, we don’t.
“There are so many students here available,” he said. “We just need to make certain they know they have the opportunity.”
Nelsen said many hurdles stand between metro McAllen and the 35 percent national average for degree attainment.
One key factor in the area’s low education rates represented what Nelsen called a vicious circle.
“We have a lot of poverty in the (Rio Grande) Valley,” he said. “I think of lot of that is because of the low number of bachelor’s (degrees) we have here. An educated populace is what will turn around that trend.”
Demonstrating the vicious circle, the metro report illuminated tough prospects for individuals without post-secondary educations.
In 2008, less than 60 percent of residents with only a high school diploma or less had a job, compared to over 86 percent employment for residents with a bachelor’s degree.
Joe Brown, president and CEO of Border Capital Bank and board chairman of the McAllen Chamber of Commerce, said the low numbers of bachelor’s degrees in the area reflected a student mindset that hurts the area.
“We’ve lost some of that mental capital to other areas of the state,” Brown said. “We have a lot of our kids leaving the Valley to go to school. … They get enamored with life in the big city and we lose them.”
Brown’s own daughter received a master’s degree in Austin and has yet to return.
He said the dislocation of education-oriented students might change as more institutions of higher learning like South Texas College establish themselves in South Texas.
STC’s vice president of academic affairs, Juan Mejia, agreed.
“We are playing catch-up more than anything,” Mejia said.
“Here, our focus is to prepare a workforce for jobs that exist in our area,” he said. “We do environmental scans on what potential new jobs are coming so we can be ready to roll out a program as soon as possible.”
As their schools renovate engineering, health care and information technology programs, Mejia and Nelsen said they were coordinating efforts to provide training for jobs specific to the region.
Their optimism was supported by some increases reported in the metro study.
The McAllen area’s enrollment in college or graduate schools beat the national trend as it jumped 7.8 points from 23.5 percent of the age 18-24 population in 2000 to 31.3 percent in 2008.
Bachelor’s degree attainment among residents age 25 and older also went up — 12.9 percent in 2000 versus 15.1 percent in 2008. Meanwhile, associate degree attainment in that age group increased half a percentage point to 3.4 percent.
Even high school graduation rates for the age 25-and-up crowd increased, from 50.5 percent in 2000 to 58.3 percent in 2008.
High school was the place Nelsen saw the most potential for change in the Valley’s college-ready culture.
“You have to get these kids early on,” he said. “You have to be moving as quickly and early as you can to introduce them to the idea of college.”
He referenced a San Juan school district program that helps parents get their general equivalency diplomas and noted the community aspect to such efforts.
“If the parents get the GED, then their kids are more likely to go to college,” Nelsen said. “It has to be multi-pronged. Just the university or STC can’t do it alone. We all have to do it together.”
July 21, 2010
McALLEN — McAllen remains among the nation’s worst cities for educational success, a think tank reported this week, but some business and education leaders gleaned hope from the area’s third-to-last ranking for bachelor’s degree achievement.
Releasing its “State of Metropolitan America” study on Monday, the Washington, D.C.-based Brookings Institute ranked the McAllen-Edinburg-Mission area — which comprises all of Hidalgo County — 98th among the country’s 100 largest metro areas based on the proportion of residents age 25 and older with a bachelor’s degree.
Only 15.1 percent of that age group, or 58,811 people, had a bachelor’s degree in 2008.
In 1990 and 2000, Greater McAllen stood at dead last on the list.
University of Texas-Pan American President Robert Nelsen hailed the movement up the ranking since then as good news for the area.
“We only came up by two, but my optimism is large,” Nelsen said. “Sometimes I’m asked if we need to recruit in Houston or in Dallas. No, we don’t.
“There are so many students here available,” he said. “We just need to make certain they know they have the opportunity.”
Nelsen said many hurdles stand between metro McAllen and the 35 percent national average for degree attainment.
One key factor in the area’s low education rates represented what Nelsen called a vicious circle.
“We have a lot of poverty in the (Rio Grande) Valley,” he said. “I think of lot of that is because of the low number of bachelor’s (degrees) we have here. An educated populace is what will turn around that trend.”
Demonstrating the vicious circle, the metro report illuminated tough prospects for individuals without post-secondary educations.
In 2008, less than 60 percent of residents with only a high school diploma or less had a job, compared to over 86 percent employment for residents with a bachelor’s degree.
Joe Brown, president and CEO of Border Capital Bank and board chairman of the McAllen Chamber of Commerce, said the low numbers of bachelor’s degrees in the area reflected a student mindset that hurts the area.
“We’ve lost some of that mental capital to other areas of the state,” Brown said. “We have a lot of our kids leaving the Valley to go to school. … They get enamored with life in the big city and we lose them.”
Brown’s own daughter received a master’s degree in Austin and has yet to return.
He said the dislocation of education-oriented students might change as more institutions of higher learning like South Texas College establish themselves in South Texas.
STC’s vice president of academic affairs, Juan Mejia, agreed.
“We are playing catch-up more than anything,” Mejia said.
“Here, our focus is to prepare a workforce for jobs that exist in our area,” he said. “We do environmental scans on what potential new jobs are coming so we can be ready to roll out a program as soon as possible.”
As their schools renovate engineering, health care and information technology programs, Mejia and Nelsen said they were coordinating efforts to provide training for jobs specific to the region.
Their optimism was supported by some increases reported in the metro study.
The McAllen area’s enrollment in college or graduate schools beat the national trend as it jumped 7.8 points from 23.5 percent of the age 18-24 population in 2000 to 31.3 percent in 2008.
Bachelor’s degree attainment among residents age 25 and older also went up — 12.9 percent in 2000 versus 15.1 percent in 2008. Meanwhile, associate degree attainment in that age group increased half a percentage point to 3.4 percent.
Even high school graduation rates for the age 25-and-up crowd increased, from 50.5 percent in 2000 to 58.3 percent in 2008.
High school was the place Nelsen saw the most potential for change in the Valley’s college-ready culture.
“You have to get these kids early on,” he said. “You have to be moving as quickly and early as you can to introduce them to the idea of college.”
He referenced a San Juan school district program that helps parents get their general equivalency diplomas and noted the community aspect to such efforts.
“If the parents get the GED, then their kids are more likely to go to college,” Nelsen said. “It has to be multi-pronged. Just the university or STC can’t do it alone. We all have to do it together.”
Wednesday, July 21, 2010
Defining 'College Ready,' Nationally
Citation from within:
-Angela
Defining 'College Ready,' Nationally
September 21, 2009
That too many young people come out of high school ill-prepared for college or the work force is little disputed. The questions of why that's so and how to fix the situation, however, have too often resulted in finger pointing, with many college faculty members complaining that high schools are asking too little of their students and high school officials saying that colleges send mixed signals about what they want students to be able to do.
The stagnation and even deterioration created by that logjam has contributed to the situation in which the United States now finds itself: sliding down the list of countries in the proportion of young adults with college credentials, prompting President Obama and others to propose investing tens of billions of dollars to get more people into and out of college. But despite a lot of talk, the "holy grail" solution to the preparation problem -- better aligning high school and college curriculums so that more students leave K-12 ready to do college work or with work-ready skills -- has often seemed out of reach.
Today represents a milestone, though, for a potential breakthrough that could have major implications for higher education. The Council of Chief State School Officers and the National Governors Association have released common standards for core curriculums in mathematics and reading and writing that, because of a confluence of events, could create a set of widely embraced national (but not federal) standards for what high school students need to know to be "college ready" or to have the skills to enter the work force. (Comments are invited through October 21.)
All states but Texas and Alaska have signed on to the groups' Common Core Standards Initiative, the federal government has tied participation in the project to qualifying for a huge new pool of federal funds for school districts, and the American Council on Education (in conjunction with scholarly societies) is organizing teams of college faculty members to review the standards. (Note: This paragraph has been updated from an earlier version to correct an error.)
While the process of stitching the standards down into high school curriculums and linking them upwards to colleges' admissions or placement policies will take years, K-12 and higher education experts who have toiled in this terrain for years describe the development of the core standards as clearing a major hurdle.
"This is the first time the K-12 people have stood up and said, 'College readiness is our goal,' " says Kati Haycock, president of Education Trust, which advocates for low-income students. "Higher ed people ought not to underestimate how big a deal this is."
"Progress in this area has been painfully slow, and it is a very long road from agreeing on standards to fully implementing them and ultimately assessing their effectiveness," says Molly Corbett Broad, president of the American Council on Education. "But every journey starts with a first important step, and this is the first time we have seen this kind of momentum."
Getting to This Point
The formal process of developing national standards may be just coming into public view, but serious work on improving the college readiness of high school students has been underway for more than a decade.
"Back in 1990s, it started being clear to us that a whole lot of kids who were following all the rules and doing fine on exams in high school were entering college and finding themselves having to take remedial courses and learning things they should have learned in high school," says Haycock. That suggested a clear lack of "alignment" between what students were learning in high school and what they were expected to be able to do once they got to college.
To attack that problem, Education Trust in 2001 teamed up with the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation and Achieve, Inc., to create the American Diploma Project. Its goal was to bring governors, state superintendents of education, business executives and college leaders in a state together to raise high school standards and align them with the requirements of colleges and employers.
The focus was on states for a variety of reasons, but not least because of the opposition that can arise among states' rights advocates whenever talk turns to creating "national" standards in education -- since "national" often equates to "federal."
State by state, in 35 of them, teams of officials have worked through the American Diploma Project to develop high school standards that have been approved by college faculty members and have buy-in from public colleges -- which in various ways have sought to connect their own admissions or placement standards to the high school goals.
The state-by-state progress has been useful, but the international data showing slippage in the United States' standing prompted groups to redouble their efforts to find a more cohesive approach, says Scott Montgomery, deputy executive director of the Council of Chief State School Officers. "It struck us that other countries that have national curriculums have advantages over us," he says. "We asked, what could we legitimately do in that regard that was state-led, not federally led, that would increase rigor, and that would aim to make people college ready?"
Despite its state-by-state focus, the American Diploma Project provided a ready-made head start toward a common national curriculum. That's because the individual state groups used as one of their key starting points a set of benchmarks developed by the diploma project, such that "the results of the state processes had way more in common" than they had differences, says Haycock of Education Trust.
"That foundation allowed people to start dreaming that this was a moment to actually go to common nationwide standards," she adds.
The school officers' group and the National Governors Association announced the formal creation of the common standards effort in June, in conjunction not only with Achieve but with ACT, Inc., and the College Board, too. (Note: This paragraph has been updated from an earlier version to correct an error.)
Backing From Washington
That effort has received a big push from another source: the Obama administration. Although direct involvement by the federal government could be a death knell for many school-based initiatives, given the pushback from local school boards against involvement in curriculum setting, the administration has lent its weight to the project with its favored tool: money.
As part of the economic stimulus legislation that Congress enacted last winter, Education Secretary Arne Duncan agreed to set aside $350 million (as part of the administration's Race to the Top fund) for states to develop new tests and other measures tied to the Common Standards initiative. More fundamentally, the rules for states to participate in the $4.35 billion Race to the Top fund (which is designed to stimulate innovation among high schools) require that states join the Common Standards effort to tap into the federal money.
The tight timeline for distributing the federal stimulus money has sped up the process for implementing the core standards initiative. The second draft of the standards (which update earlier drafts for mathematics and reading/writing and were developed by panels of educators, including some university professors) will, upon their release today, be reviewed by panels quickly convened by the American Council on Education based on advice from the Modern Language Association and the Conference Board of the Mathematical Sciences.
"We felt it was really important that faculty around the country see that the standards were reviewed by organizations that had credence and in a way that was independent" of the groups that created the standards, said Jacqueline E. King, assistant vice president for policy analysis at ACE.
Once the national standards have been agreed on, an enormous amount of work remains to be done by the Common Standards project to "back map" the standards down through the secondary and elementary school grades, so that teachers in various grades know what they need to do to keep their students on track to meet the standards by the time they near high school graduation -- and students can tell at various steps along the way whether they're on track.
At the same time, to make the standards meaningful for students once they leave high school, colleges will need to decide if and how they want to use the guidelines in their own policies. Exactly what that looks like will vary from state to state and probably institution to institution, says Haycock of Education Trust, because of the great variation in the expectations at more and less selective public colleges, two-year and four-year.
Some may use the core standards as placement tools, says King of ACE, like the California State University System has done with its Early Assessment Program to gauge the college readiness of 11th graders in the state. Other institutions may adapt their course requirements for admissions to ensure that they match those that the Common Standards effort has deemed to make students "college ready."
The standards are not designed to be used to create admissions tests, says Haycock of Education Trust, because they are focused on content (what students should know and be able to do) not performance (how well they do those things). But as higher education administrators and professors and faculty members have blamed high school teachers for producing too many students who can't do college-level work, K-12 instructors have sometimes bristled because of the wide variation in how different colleges define quality.
"What the teachers are saying is, 'We'll step up, but you can't hold us accountable for multiple different definitions of what we need to step up to,' " Haycock says.
"There's a different standard for credit bearing work in English at [the University of California at] Berkeley and at a California community college," she says. "But you can decide that certain students are entering with weaker writing skills than others, and that they can and should do something else. The goal here is to get to a common and high standard that should be sufficient to allow students to get to the next step."
— Doug Lederman
© Copyright 2010 Inside Higher Ed
Today represents a milestone, though, for a potential breakthrough that could have major implications for higher education. The Council of Chief State School Officers and the National Governors Association have released common standards for core curriculums in mathematics and reading and writing that, because of a confluence of events, could create a set of widely embraced national (but not federal) standards for what high school students need to know to be "college ready" or to have the skills to enter the work force. (Comments are invited through October 21.)
"Progress in this area has been painfully slow, and it is a very long road from agreeing on standards to fully implementing them and ultimately assessing their effectiveness," says Molly Corbett Broad, president of the American Council on Education. "But every journey starts with a first important step, and this is the first time we have seen this kind of momentum."
-Angela
Defining 'College Ready,' Nationally
September 21, 2009
That too many young people come out of high school ill-prepared for college or the work force is little disputed. The questions of why that's so and how to fix the situation, however, have too often resulted in finger pointing, with many college faculty members complaining that high schools are asking too little of their students and high school officials saying that colleges send mixed signals about what they want students to be able to do.
The stagnation and even deterioration created by that logjam has contributed to the situation in which the United States now finds itself: sliding down the list of countries in the proportion of young adults with college credentials, prompting President Obama and others to propose investing tens of billions of dollars to get more people into and out of college. But despite a lot of talk, the "holy grail" solution to the preparation problem -- better aligning high school and college curriculums so that more students leave K-12 ready to do college work or with work-ready skills -- has often seemed out of reach.
Today represents a milestone, though, for a potential breakthrough that could have major implications for higher education. The Council of Chief State School Officers and the National Governors Association have released common standards for core curriculums in mathematics and reading and writing that, because of a confluence of events, could create a set of widely embraced national (but not federal) standards for what high school students need to know to be "college ready" or to have the skills to enter the work force. (Comments are invited through October 21.)
All states but Texas and Alaska have signed on to the groups' Common Core Standards Initiative, the federal government has tied participation in the project to qualifying for a huge new pool of federal funds for school districts, and the American Council on Education (in conjunction with scholarly societies) is organizing teams of college faculty members to review the standards. (Note: This paragraph has been updated from an earlier version to correct an error.)
While the process of stitching the standards down into high school curriculums and linking them upwards to colleges' admissions or placement policies will take years, K-12 and higher education experts who have toiled in this terrain for years describe the development of the core standards as clearing a major hurdle.
"This is the first time the K-12 people have stood up and said, 'College readiness is our goal,' " says Kati Haycock, president of Education Trust, which advocates for low-income students. "Higher ed people ought not to underestimate how big a deal this is."
"Progress in this area has been painfully slow, and it is a very long road from agreeing on standards to fully implementing them and ultimately assessing their effectiveness," says Molly Corbett Broad, president of the American Council on Education. "But every journey starts with a first important step, and this is the first time we have seen this kind of momentum."
Getting to This Point
The formal process of developing national standards may be just coming into public view, but serious work on improving the college readiness of high school students has been underway for more than a decade.
"Back in 1990s, it started being clear to us that a whole lot of kids who were following all the rules and doing fine on exams in high school were entering college and finding themselves having to take remedial courses and learning things they should have learned in high school," says Haycock. That suggested a clear lack of "alignment" between what students were learning in high school and what they were expected to be able to do once they got to college.
To attack that problem, Education Trust in 2001 teamed up with the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation and Achieve, Inc., to create the American Diploma Project. Its goal was to bring governors, state superintendents of education, business executives and college leaders in a state together to raise high school standards and align them with the requirements of colleges and employers.
The focus was on states for a variety of reasons, but not least because of the opposition that can arise among states' rights advocates whenever talk turns to creating "national" standards in education -- since "national" often equates to "federal."
State by state, in 35 of them, teams of officials have worked through the American Diploma Project to develop high school standards that have been approved by college faculty members and have buy-in from public colleges -- which in various ways have sought to connect their own admissions or placement standards to the high school goals.
The state-by-state progress has been useful, but the international data showing slippage in the United States' standing prompted groups to redouble their efforts to find a more cohesive approach, says Scott Montgomery, deputy executive director of the Council of Chief State School Officers. "It struck us that other countries that have national curriculums have advantages over us," he says. "We asked, what could we legitimately do in that regard that was state-led, not federally led, that would increase rigor, and that would aim to make people college ready?"
Despite its state-by-state focus, the American Diploma Project provided a ready-made head start toward a common national curriculum. That's because the individual state groups used as one of their key starting points a set of benchmarks developed by the diploma project, such that "the results of the state processes had way more in common" than they had differences, says Haycock of Education Trust.
"That foundation allowed people to start dreaming that this was a moment to actually go to common nationwide standards," she adds.
The school officers' group and the National Governors Association announced the formal creation of the common standards effort in June, in conjunction not only with Achieve but with ACT, Inc., and the College Board, too. (Note: This paragraph has been updated from an earlier version to correct an error.)
Backing From Washington
That effort has received a big push from another source: the Obama administration. Although direct involvement by the federal government could be a death knell for many school-based initiatives, given the pushback from local school boards against involvement in curriculum setting, the administration has lent its weight to the project with its favored tool: money.
As part of the economic stimulus legislation that Congress enacted last winter, Education Secretary Arne Duncan agreed to set aside $350 million (as part of the administration's Race to the Top fund) for states to develop new tests and other measures tied to the Common Standards initiative. More fundamentally, the rules for states to participate in the $4.35 billion Race to the Top fund (which is designed to stimulate innovation among high schools) require that states join the Common Standards effort to tap into the federal money.
The tight timeline for distributing the federal stimulus money has sped up the process for implementing the core standards initiative. The second draft of the standards (which update earlier drafts for mathematics and reading/writing and were developed by panels of educators, including some university professors) will, upon their release today, be reviewed by panels quickly convened by the American Council on Education based on advice from the Modern Language Association and the Conference Board of the Mathematical Sciences.
"We felt it was really important that faculty around the country see that the standards were reviewed by organizations that had credence and in a way that was independent" of the groups that created the standards, said Jacqueline E. King, assistant vice president for policy analysis at ACE.
Once the national standards have been agreed on, an enormous amount of work remains to be done by the Common Standards project to "back map" the standards down through the secondary and elementary school grades, so that teachers in various grades know what they need to do to keep their students on track to meet the standards by the time they near high school graduation -- and students can tell at various steps along the way whether they're on track.
At the same time, to make the standards meaningful for students once they leave high school, colleges will need to decide if and how they want to use the guidelines in their own policies. Exactly what that looks like will vary from state to state and probably institution to institution, says Haycock of Education Trust, because of the great variation in the expectations at more and less selective public colleges, two-year and four-year.
Some may use the core standards as placement tools, says King of ACE, like the California State University System has done with its Early Assessment Program to gauge the college readiness of 11th graders in the state. Other institutions may adapt their course requirements for admissions to ensure that they match those that the Common Standards effort has deemed to make students "college ready."
The standards are not designed to be used to create admissions tests, says Haycock of Education Trust, because they are focused on content (what students should know and be able to do) not performance (how well they do those things). But as higher education administrators and professors and faculty members have blamed high school teachers for producing too many students who can't do college-level work, K-12 instructors have sometimes bristled because of the wide variation in how different colleges define quality.
"What the teachers are saying is, 'We'll step up, but you can't hold us accountable for multiple different definitions of what we need to step up to,' " Haycock says.
"There's a different standard for credit bearing work in English at [the University of California at] Berkeley and at a California community college," she says. "But you can decide that certain students are entering with weaker writing skills than others, and that they can and should do something else. The goal here is to get to a common and high standard that should be sufficient to allow students to get to the next step."
— Doug Lederman
© Copyright 2010 Inside Higher Ed
Tuesday, July 20, 2010
Discrimination Against English Language Learner Students
From David Hinojosa at MALDEF.
Angela
Here is the latest guidance from the US Department of Justice, Civil Rights Division regarding obligations under the EEOA (also located at: http://www.justice.gov/crt/edo/ellpage.php ). Not perfect or all-encompassing but it seems like a pretty big step forward—for the government. We especially seem to have a number of complaints on numbers 1-7. Hasta,
Discrimination Against English Language Learner Students
En Español http://www.justice.gov/crt/edo/ellpage_spanish.php
The Educational Opportunities Section of the Civil Rights Division is charged with enforcing the Equal Educational Opportunities Act of 1974 (EEOA). Section 1703(f) of the EEOA requires state educational agencies (SEAs) and school districts to take action to overcome language barriers that impede English Language Learner (ELL) students from participating equally in school districts’ educational programs. As part of its efforts to enforce the EEOA, the Section investigates complaints that SEAs or school districts are not providing adequate services to ELL students. The Section does not need to receive a written complaint to start an investigation. The Section also may initiate a review of an SEA’s or school district’s compliance with its EEOA obligations in the absence of a complaint. If an SEA or school district is violating the EEOA, the SEA or school district is given notice of the conditions that violate the EEOA and an opportunity to take corrective action. If within a reasonable time after such notice is given, the SEA or school district fails to take appropriate remedial action, the Section may bring a lawsuit on behalf of the United States. The United States also may intervene in a lawsuit brought by a third party.
Although section 1703(f) of the EEOA does not require schools to adopt a particular type of language acquisition program such as an English as a Second Language (ESL) program, courts generally consider three factors to assess compliance: (1) whether the school’s program is based upon sound educational theory or principles; (2) whether the school’s program is reasonably calculated to implement the educational theory effectively; and (3) whether, after a period of time sufficient to give the program a legitimate trial, the results of the program show that language barriers are actually being overcome. Examples of conditions that may violate the EEOA include the following:
1. A school fails to provide a language acquisition program to its ELL students;
2. A school fails to provide resources to implement its language acquisition program effectively (e.g., an ESL program lacks ESL teachers or ESL materials);
3. A school fails to take steps to identify students who are not proficient in English;
4. A school does not exit ELL students from a language acquisition program when the ELL students have acquired English proficiency, or a school exits ELL students without written parental or guardian permission before the students acquire English proficiency;
5. A school fails to communicate meaningfully with non-English-speaking or limited-English-speaking parents and guardians of ELL students by not providing such parents and guardians with written or oral translations of important notices or documents;
6. A school fails to provide language acquisition assistance to ELL students because they receive special education services, or a school fails to provide special education services to ELL students when they qualify for special education services; and
7. A school excludes ELL students from gifted and talented programs based on their limited English proficiency when such programs do not require English proficiency.
If you believe that an SEA or school district is violating its EEOA obligations to ELL students, please contact the Educational Opportunities Section by telephone at (202) 514-4092 or 1-877-292-3804 (toll-free), by facsimile at (202) 514-8337, or by letter to this address:
U.S. Department of Justice
Civil Rights Division
Educational Opportunities Section, PHB
Re: ELL Initiative
950 Pennsylvania Avenue, N.W.
Washington, D.C. 20530
Angela
Here is the latest guidance from the US Department of Justice, Civil Rights Division regarding obligations under the EEOA (also located at: http://www.justice.gov/crt/edo/ellpage.php ). Not perfect or all-encompassing but it seems like a pretty big step forward—for the government. We especially seem to have a number of complaints on numbers 1-7. Hasta,
Discrimination Against English Language Learner Students
En Español http://www.justice.gov/crt/edo/ellpage_spanish.php
The Educational Opportunities Section of the Civil Rights Division is charged with enforcing the Equal Educational Opportunities Act of 1974 (EEOA). Section 1703(f) of the EEOA requires state educational agencies (SEAs) and school districts to take action to overcome language barriers that impede English Language Learner (ELL) students from participating equally in school districts’ educational programs. As part of its efforts to enforce the EEOA, the Section investigates complaints that SEAs or school districts are not providing adequate services to ELL students. The Section does not need to receive a written complaint to start an investigation. The Section also may initiate a review of an SEA’s or school district’s compliance with its EEOA obligations in the absence of a complaint. If an SEA or school district is violating the EEOA, the SEA or school district is given notice of the conditions that violate the EEOA and an opportunity to take corrective action. If within a reasonable time after such notice is given, the SEA or school district fails to take appropriate remedial action, the Section may bring a lawsuit on behalf of the United States. The United States also may intervene in a lawsuit brought by a third party.
Although section 1703(f) of the EEOA does not require schools to adopt a particular type of language acquisition program such as an English as a Second Language (ESL) program, courts generally consider three factors to assess compliance: (1) whether the school’s program is based upon sound educational theory or principles; (2) whether the school’s program is reasonably calculated to implement the educational theory effectively; and (3) whether, after a period of time sufficient to give the program a legitimate trial, the results of the program show that language barriers are actually being overcome. Examples of conditions that may violate the EEOA include the following:
1. A school fails to provide a language acquisition program to its ELL students;
2. A school fails to provide resources to implement its language acquisition program effectively (e.g., an ESL program lacks ESL teachers or ESL materials);
3. A school fails to take steps to identify students who are not proficient in English;
4. A school does not exit ELL students from a language acquisition program when the ELL students have acquired English proficiency, or a school exits ELL students without written parental or guardian permission before the students acquire English proficiency;
5. A school fails to communicate meaningfully with non-English-speaking or limited-English-speaking parents and guardians of ELL students by not providing such parents and guardians with written or oral translations of important notices or documents;
6. A school fails to provide language acquisition assistance to ELL students because they receive special education services, or a school fails to provide special education services to ELL students when they qualify for special education services; and
7. A school excludes ELL students from gifted and talented programs based on their limited English proficiency when such programs do not require English proficiency.
If you believe that an SEA or school district is violating its EEOA obligations to ELL students, please contact the Educational Opportunities Section by telephone at (202) 514-4092 or 1-877-292-3804 (toll-free), by facsimile at (202) 514-8337, or by letter to this address:
U.S. Department of Justice
Civil Rights Division
Educational Opportunities Section, PHB
Re: ELL Initiative
950 Pennsylvania Avenue, N.W.
Washington, D.C. 20530
Testing the Test: The Texas Education Agency now has several ways to count failing students as passing--and lawmakers aren't happy about it.
Testing the Test
The Texas Education Agency now has several ways to count failing students as passing--and lawmakers aren't happy about it.
by ABBY RAPOPORT
Published on: Monday, July 12, 2010
A 16 year-old gets ready to get her driver's license. She successfully gets through the eye exam and passes the actual driving part, although she's a little shaky on parallel parking. So far, so good. But on the written portion, she flunks entirely—she can't identify a single traffic sign. The state decides that while she didn't pass, she's quite likely to learn the information later and would probably pass the test another time. While she doesn't get her own license, the driving school who produced her lacking skills gets to count her as a success.
It's also rather similar to the state Education Agency's latest testing policies, which allow schools to count students who fail a state exam—but are likely to pass later. For instance, at Houston's Benavidas Elementary, kids who pass the state reading and math exams only need to do is show up to their writing test. Even if they get no credit for their writing attempts, they’ll be projected to pass the writing exam, and therefore count towards the school's passing rate in writing. Depending on the combination of scores and the school’s history, students can get literally zero points in the state exam and their school can count the students in the passing category. They can thank the Texas Projection Measure. (Read our earlier coverage of the measure here.)
In Texas, a single set of standardized tests—the TAKS—serve to answer a wide range of questions, from how much a single student learned to whether the school as a whole adequately educates minority and at-risk kids. Each year, the Texas Education Agency rolls out the latest TAKS results, and the news is generally good. More kids are proficient in math, writing, you name it—this year there was improvement in every grade except sixth and eighth. But whether the tests actually reflect high standards is a different question—and one lawmakers are raising. After all, last year there were only 43 school districts with top ranking. Now there are 117, and all but one of the new districts acquired its status thanks to projections that its student will pass. Call it predicted excellence. As more and more rides on test-performance, the state has implemented different strategies to showcase different statistics. Rep. Scott Hochberg, D-Houston, argues it masks the problems in the system.
"You set out what you call a ‘tough accountability system,’ and then you find a dozen ways to make it weaker," says Hochberg.
Hochberg, who chairs the appropriations subcommittee on education, has made it his mission to iron out some of the biggest concerns. His primary target: what counts as “passing.” Schools, obviously, get credit for each student who passes. But there are some handy loopholes that help boost a school’s rating for students who aren’t quite at the bar. Thanks to the Projection Measure, used last year as part of a voluntary federal pilot program, schools can also count students who fail a test but are projected to pass later based on their school and their other scores. And while a school must also show passing rates for subgroups like minority and at-risk students, those districts that have a lot of different subgroups—Black fourth graders, at-risk fifth graders, etc.—can still get credit even if one group isn’t performing up to standards. (Some districts can discount as many as four sub-groups.)
According to Prof. Ed Fuller, the latter’s not such a terrible thing. "If you have 25 cells, and one is low performing, does that really mean your whole school is low performing?” he says. “Not so much."
Little comfort to Hochberg, who sees the Agency’s policy as a contradiction to legislative goals. “You can take a mulligan on a few of them!” he exclaims. “That was never the intention.”
But it’s on the projection policy that Hochberg created a buzz amongst education experts. At an appropriations subcommittee meeting on education last week, the infamously nerdy legislator came in armed with data to question Education Agency officials. (The agency’s assessments expert, Criss Cloudt, did not respond to interview requests.) While currently the TAKS only test broad subject areas (like reading and math) as opposed to specific subject areas (like Texas History or Algebra), it's still not easy to figure out the projection measures. Hochberg spent time testing schools in his district with different combinations of scores on the tests, discovering that in some schools, kids who failed certain tests miserably still counted as "passes" based on the projection models. He had expected to ask Education Commissioner Robert Scott the questions, but when Scott did not appear at the meeting, Hochberg pounced on Cloudt and the agency's chief operating officer, Adam Jones. While he hammered the officials on the statistical basis for the projection measures, Hochberg found little comfort in the testimony.
"I'm starting to get to the point where I don't trust any assertions coming from the agency," he says a few days after the hearing. "...As I walked out of the hearing, the administration was still adamantly defending the system as it stands. I didn't hear any recognition by [the agency] that there was anything wrong with the current system."
He points to the moment when he asked Cloudt how accurate the projection measures actually are. "I think they're quite good," she said, pointing out they're right 90 percent of the time. It only took Hochberg a few seconds to find the flaw in her logic. Kids who are already safely passing or clearly failing are easy to predict—they'll likely continue to pass or fail (whichever the case may be.) But those kids aren't as affected by the projection measure.
"The part that you're using for accountability purposes are the kids that are below standard that your projecting upward to meet standard." Hochberg said. The ones on the borderline between passing and failing.
The rate for those kids turns out to be much lower, between 52 and 80 percent. "The place where you'll have your most inaccurate projections are right around the passing," Cloudt acknowledged under Hochberg's questions. In other words, the calculator's main use is in predicting the performance of those borderline students, where the calculator is least accurate.
The current system certainly has already been under fire recently. The Houston Chronicle's Rick Casey slammed the agency for the projection measures and, previously, for the fact that students can pass some of the TAKS tests answeringonly 44 percent of questions correctly. Hochberg isn’t the only lawmaker worked up about the news.
"The idea that we're gonna inflate a school's ranking based on what we predict what they're going to do the next three years into the future," says San Antonio Rep. Mike Villarreal. "That's just crazy!"
Villarreal worries that the data is becoming less and less useful, and Fuller echoes the sentiment, concerned that the tests themselves are becoming less effective measures. He says the projection measure that Texas uses doesn’t consider how the students actually do or how much they improve from one year to the next. And anyways, he says, rewarding schools for percent passing isn’t the best measure. A school that gets a lot of border-line students to answer a few more questions correctly and pass the test gets credit from the agency while a school that dramatically increases the number of questions students get right, but doesn’t get the students up to passing gets almost no credit. "The school with the greater increase in passing doesn't have greater growth," Fuller points out. Based on the agency’s measure, "it doesn't matter how much better they do,” he says. “It's just: did they get over a certain hurdle?"
The agency, on the other hand, isn’t offering any apologies for the current system. While they acknowledged Hochberg's arguments and did not argue with his facts, the staffers did not waver in support of the system and stood firm that their data was valid. In fact, while Hochberg hopes the agency will suspend using the measures, Cloudt alluded to their usefulness when the agency begins to implement a new battery of tests in 2012.
"At the end of the day," chief operating officer Jones told the lawmakers, "these numbers are driven by performance."
And it’s that line of thought that leaves Hochberg concerned. “The argument that I guess was being made [by the agency] was, ‘Well this wasn't perfect but it was the best we could do under the circumstances,’” Hochberg says a few days after the hearing. “And that's not good enough. This is far from perfect—it's seriously flawed.”
Updated to reflect new information.
The Texas Education Agency now has several ways to count failing students as passing--and lawmakers aren't happy about it.
by ABBY RAPOPORT
Published on: Monday, July 12, 2010
A 16 year-old gets ready to get her driver's license. She successfully gets through the eye exam and passes the actual driving part, although she's a little shaky on parallel parking. So far, so good. But on the written portion, she flunks entirely—she can't identify a single traffic sign. The state decides that while she didn't pass, she's quite likely to learn the information later and would probably pass the test another time. While she doesn't get her own license, the driving school who produced her lacking skills gets to count her as a success.
It's also rather similar to the state Education Agency's latest testing policies, which allow schools to count students who fail a state exam—but are likely to pass later. For instance, at Houston's Benavidas Elementary, kids who pass the state reading and math exams only need to do is show up to their writing test. Even if they get no credit for their writing attempts, they’ll be projected to pass the writing exam, and therefore count towards the school's passing rate in writing. Depending on the combination of scores and the school’s history, students can get literally zero points in the state exam and their school can count the students in the passing category. They can thank the Texas Projection Measure. (Read our earlier coverage of the measure here.)
In Texas, a single set of standardized tests—the TAKS—serve to answer a wide range of questions, from how much a single student learned to whether the school as a whole adequately educates minority and at-risk kids. Each year, the Texas Education Agency rolls out the latest TAKS results, and the news is generally good. More kids are proficient in math, writing, you name it—this year there was improvement in every grade except sixth and eighth. But whether the tests actually reflect high standards is a different question—and one lawmakers are raising. After all, last year there were only 43 school districts with top ranking. Now there are 117, and all but one of the new districts acquired its status thanks to projections that its student will pass. Call it predicted excellence. As more and more rides on test-performance, the state has implemented different strategies to showcase different statistics. Rep. Scott Hochberg, D-Houston, argues it masks the problems in the system.
"You set out what you call a ‘tough accountability system,’ and then you find a dozen ways to make it weaker," says Hochberg.
Hochberg, who chairs the appropriations subcommittee on education, has made it his mission to iron out some of the biggest concerns. His primary target: what counts as “passing.” Schools, obviously, get credit for each student who passes. But there are some handy loopholes that help boost a school’s rating for students who aren’t quite at the bar. Thanks to the Projection Measure, used last year as part of a voluntary federal pilot program, schools can also count students who fail a test but are projected to pass later based on their school and their other scores. And while a school must also show passing rates for subgroups like minority and at-risk students, those districts that have a lot of different subgroups—Black fourth graders, at-risk fifth graders, etc.—can still get credit even if one group isn’t performing up to standards. (Some districts can discount as many as four sub-groups.)
According to Prof. Ed Fuller, the latter’s not such a terrible thing. "If you have 25 cells, and one is low performing, does that really mean your whole school is low performing?” he says. “Not so much."
Little comfort to Hochberg, who sees the Agency’s policy as a contradiction to legislative goals. “You can take a mulligan on a few of them!” he exclaims. “That was never the intention.”
But it’s on the projection policy that Hochberg created a buzz amongst education experts. At an appropriations subcommittee meeting on education last week, the infamously nerdy legislator came in armed with data to question Education Agency officials. (The agency’s assessments expert, Criss Cloudt, did not respond to interview requests.) While currently the TAKS only test broad subject areas (like reading and math) as opposed to specific subject areas (like Texas History or Algebra), it's still not easy to figure out the projection measures. Hochberg spent time testing schools in his district with different combinations of scores on the tests, discovering that in some schools, kids who failed certain tests miserably still counted as "passes" based on the projection models. He had expected to ask Education Commissioner Robert Scott the questions, but when Scott did not appear at the meeting, Hochberg pounced on Cloudt and the agency's chief operating officer, Adam Jones. While he hammered the officials on the statistical basis for the projection measures, Hochberg found little comfort in the testimony.
"I'm starting to get to the point where I don't trust any assertions coming from the agency," he says a few days after the hearing. "...As I walked out of the hearing, the administration was still adamantly defending the system as it stands. I didn't hear any recognition by [the agency] that there was anything wrong with the current system."
He points to the moment when he asked Cloudt how accurate the projection measures actually are. "I think they're quite good," she said, pointing out they're right 90 percent of the time. It only took Hochberg a few seconds to find the flaw in her logic. Kids who are already safely passing or clearly failing are easy to predict—they'll likely continue to pass or fail (whichever the case may be.) But those kids aren't as affected by the projection measure.
"The part that you're using for accountability purposes are the kids that are below standard that your projecting upward to meet standard." Hochberg said. The ones on the borderline between passing and failing.
The rate for those kids turns out to be much lower, between 52 and 80 percent. "The place where you'll have your most inaccurate projections are right around the passing," Cloudt acknowledged under Hochberg's questions. In other words, the calculator's main use is in predicting the performance of those borderline students, where the calculator is least accurate.
The current system certainly has already been under fire recently. The Houston Chronicle's Rick Casey slammed the agency for the projection measures and, previously, for the fact that students can pass some of the TAKS tests answeringonly 44 percent of questions correctly. Hochberg isn’t the only lawmaker worked up about the news.
"The idea that we're gonna inflate a school's ranking based on what we predict what they're going to do the next three years into the future," says San Antonio Rep. Mike Villarreal. "That's just crazy!"
Villarreal worries that the data is becoming less and less useful, and Fuller echoes the sentiment, concerned that the tests themselves are becoming less effective measures. He says the projection measure that Texas uses doesn’t consider how the students actually do or how much they improve from one year to the next. And anyways, he says, rewarding schools for percent passing isn’t the best measure. A school that gets a lot of border-line students to answer a few more questions correctly and pass the test gets credit from the agency while a school that dramatically increases the number of questions students get right, but doesn’t get the students up to passing gets almost no credit. "The school with the greater increase in passing doesn't have greater growth," Fuller points out. Based on the agency’s measure, "it doesn't matter how much better they do,” he says. “It's just: did they get over a certain hurdle?"
The agency, on the other hand, isn’t offering any apologies for the current system. While they acknowledged Hochberg's arguments and did not argue with his facts, the staffers did not waver in support of the system and stood firm that their data was valid. In fact, while Hochberg hopes the agency will suspend using the measures, Cloudt alluded to their usefulness when the agency begins to implement a new battery of tests in 2012.
"At the end of the day," chief operating officer Jones told the lawmakers, "these numbers are driven by performance."
And it’s that line of thought that leaves Hochberg concerned. “The argument that I guess was being made [by the agency] was, ‘Well this wasn't perfect but it was the best we could do under the circumstances,’” Hochberg says a few days after the hearing. “And that's not good enough. This is far from perfect—it's seriously flawed.”
Updated to reflect new information.
How schools get credit for a TAKS zero
Check out Hochberg's website on this: http://scotthochberg.com/staterep.shtml
I should have posted these earlier.
Angela
Houston state Rep. Scott Hochberg isn't your normal glad-handing politician.
Known as perhaps the only elected official in Texas who really understands the state's byzantine school finance system, Hochberg is at least as happy sitting alone crunching numbers as he is schmoozing with constituents or even lobbyists.
But he wasn't so happy when he sat at his computer a few weeks ago trying to figure out the new formula that more than doubled the number of "exemplary" schools in Texas last year and magically made the number of "unacceptable" schools about one-tenth of what it would otherwise be.
As he pored over the mounds of data available on the Texas Education website, and then used a handy calculator provided on the site to see how the new Texas Projection Measure turns failing TAKS scores for students into passing TAKS scores for schools, he found something that stunned him.
"I was literally sick over it," Hochberg told me. "I walked away and said this couldn't be right."
What he found was so unbelievable that he asked me not to report it until he had a chance to show what he had found to TEA officials at a public hearing. He wanted to make sure he hadn't made a foolish miscalculation.
The good news is that, as chairman of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Education, Hochberg can summon TEA officials to a public hearing.
The bad news is that, when he did exactly that last week, the hearing drew almost no public attention.
As with most hearings, there was a fair amount of tedium. But one dramatic moment made up for it.
Chriss Cloudt (pronounced Klute) is TEA's associate commissioner for assessment, accountability and data quality. In other words, she's the top official when it comes to the TAKS test and the accountability system that rates the state's schools. Cloudt was testifying alongside Adam Jones, TEA's chief operating officer and second in command to Commissioner Robert Scott.
Hochberg asked them what accounted for the huge increase in the number of schools and school districts rated as "recognized" and "exemplary" in 2009.
Jones said he couldn't "intelligently answer that question," but Cloudt jumped in.
"Yes, I can," she said. "Performance."
She elaborated that the percentage of schools and districts rated in the top two categories had gone from the teens to the 60s because the state "defined a body of knowledge that students must learn and demonstrate knowledge of, your testing program measures that content and what you want to see is increases in performance on that test over time."
'Projected' numbers
Hochberg appeared skeptical. He noted that the number of school districts given the top rating of "exemplary" based on TAKS scores had risen from 43 in 2008 to 117 in 2009.
He also noted that 73 of the 74 additional "exemplary" districts used the Texas Projection Measure to attain that distinction.
TEA says the Projection Measure is an effort to give schools and districts "credit" for students who hadn't passed the TAKS, but were showing improvement. So Hochberg asked Cloudt to use a calculator on the TEA website that adjusts scores according to the "projection" formula. The results were beamed to a screen on the wall.
The "projection" is based on an analysis indicating that if a child does well on math and reading, other scores will improve.
Magic, or manipulation?
The formula includes a small adjustment according to the student's school, so Hochberg cited specific schools and asked Cloudt to assume the student made the minimum passing score for math and reading.
After a couple of examples in which a school got to count a student as "passing" with depressingly low scores, Hochberg asked Cloudt and an associate to see how many correct answers a fourth-grader with barely passing math and reading scores at Benavidez Elementary in Houston needed to be counted as "passing" the writing test.
The unbelievable answer Hochberg had reached himself was confirmed by Cloudt: The child needed zero correct answers for his or her teachers and administrators to get credit for his or her "improvement."
That's right: zero.
Coming Friday: Hochberg shows that TEA's top officials either don't understand this magical "accountability" system, or are lying about it.
rick.casey@chron.com
I should have posted these earlier.
Angela
Houston state Rep. Scott Hochberg isn't your normal glad-handing politician.
Known as perhaps the only elected official in Texas who really understands the state's byzantine school finance system, Hochberg is at least as happy sitting alone crunching numbers as he is schmoozing with constituents or even lobbyists.
But he wasn't so happy when he sat at his computer a few weeks ago trying to figure out the new formula that more than doubled the number of "exemplary" schools in Texas last year and magically made the number of "unacceptable" schools about one-tenth of what it would otherwise be.
As he pored over the mounds of data available on the Texas Education website, and then used a handy calculator provided on the site to see how the new Texas Projection Measure turns failing TAKS scores for students into passing TAKS scores for schools, he found something that stunned him.
"I was literally sick over it," Hochberg told me. "I walked away and said this couldn't be right."
What he found was so unbelievable that he asked me not to report it until he had a chance to show what he had found to TEA officials at a public hearing. He wanted to make sure he hadn't made a foolish miscalculation.
The good news is that, as chairman of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Education, Hochberg can summon TEA officials to a public hearing.
The bad news is that, when he did exactly that last week, the hearing drew almost no public attention.
As with most hearings, there was a fair amount of tedium. But one dramatic moment made up for it.
Chriss Cloudt (pronounced Klute) is TEA's associate commissioner for assessment, accountability and data quality. In other words, she's the top official when it comes to the TAKS test and the accountability system that rates the state's schools. Cloudt was testifying alongside Adam Jones, TEA's chief operating officer and second in command to Commissioner Robert Scott.
Hochberg asked them what accounted for the huge increase in the number of schools and school districts rated as "recognized" and "exemplary" in 2009.
Jones said he couldn't "intelligently answer that question," but Cloudt jumped in.
"Yes, I can," she said. "Performance."
She elaborated that the percentage of schools and districts rated in the top two categories had gone from the teens to the 60s because the state "defined a body of knowledge that students must learn and demonstrate knowledge of, your testing program measures that content and what you want to see is increases in performance on that test over time."
'Projected' numbers
Hochberg appeared skeptical. He noted that the number of school districts given the top rating of "exemplary" based on TAKS scores had risen from 43 in 2008 to 117 in 2009.
He also noted that 73 of the 74 additional "exemplary" districts used the Texas Projection Measure to attain that distinction.
TEA says the Projection Measure is an effort to give schools and districts "credit" for students who hadn't passed the TAKS, but were showing improvement. So Hochberg asked Cloudt to use a calculator on the TEA website that adjusts scores according to the "projection" formula. The results were beamed to a screen on the wall.
The "projection" is based on an analysis indicating that if a child does well on math and reading, other scores will improve.
Magic, or manipulation?
The formula includes a small adjustment according to the student's school, so Hochberg cited specific schools and asked Cloudt to assume the student made the minimum passing score for math and reading.
After a couple of examples in which a school got to count a student as "passing" with depressingly low scores, Hochberg asked Cloudt and an associate to see how many correct answers a fourth-grader with barely passing math and reading scores at Benavidez Elementary in Houston needed to be counted as "passing" the writing test.
The unbelievable answer Hochberg had reached himself was confirmed by Cloudt: The child needed zero correct answers for his or her teachers and administrators to get credit for his or her "improvement."
That's right: zero.
Coming Friday: Hochberg shows that TEA's top officials either don't understand this magical "accountability" system, or are lying about it.
rick.casey@chron.com
Hochberg unmasks TEA’s controversial rule
Check out Hochberg's website on this: http://scotthochberg.com/staterep.shtml
I should have posted these earlier.
Angela
Hochberg unmasks TEA’s controversial rule
By RICK CASEY
HOUSTON CHRONICLE
July 8, 2010, 9:19PM
Criss Cloudt understandably grew defensive last week as she tried to explain to a group of legislators how a student who got absolutely every question wrong on a TAKS writing test could be scored as passing it.
Cloudt was in the hot seat because she is the Texas Education Agency's associate commissioner in charge of the "accountability system" that administers the TAKS test and ranks schools and school districts on a four-tier scale from "unacceptable" to "exemplary."
She was also in the hot seat because the man presumably most responsible for instituting the controversial new "Texas Projection Measure" that is producing such absurd results, Education Commissioner Robert Scott, failed to show up. But that's another story. Today we look at the ways that Cloudt appeared to try to mislead Houston state Rep. Scott Hochberg and his Appropriations Subcommittee on Education, and how Hochberg repeatedly called her on it.
It began with Hochberg asking what accounted for a huge jump last year in the number of schools and school districts rated as "recognized" and "exemplary."
"Performance," said Cloudt.
But Hochberg got her to admit that 73 of the 74 additional "exemplary districts" that took us from 43 in 2008 to 117 in 2009 received that distinction only because the new Texas Projection Measure miraculously allowed nearly half the 1 million TAKS tests that had been failed to count as passing for the purpose of rating schools and districts.
Cloudt said the Texas Projection Measure is a "growth measure." To most of us, that would imply that it looked at how a child did this year compared to last.
Hochberg brought out that it doesn't. It looked only at last year's scores and, based on a formula devised from thousands of prior results, projected that children who pass reading or math were likely to pass other tests in future years.
Deciphering analysis
Cloudt claimed that based on analysis looking backward, the formulas used in the projections are "quite good, actually."
"Really?" said Hochberg. "What would you consider quite good?"
"They're on average in the 90s (percent) in terms of projection accurate," Cloudt said.
I assumed that she was referring to the cases in which failing children were counted as passing.
But Hochberg was on to her. He got her to admit that the predictions that were accurate more than 90 percent of the time included all children — those who did very well on all the TAKS tests (who can safely be predicted to pass) and those who did terribly an all the tests (who can safely be predicted to fail).
Hochberg revealed that TEA's own analysis showed that the accuracy rate for those whose performance was actually upgraded using the "projection measure" was in the range of 50 percent.
Failed projections
Cloudt continued to defend the projections, saying repeatedly that when a failing child was counted as passing it was because "hundreds and hundreds" of other children whose test scores fit the exact same pattern later passed.
But again, Hochberg was ready. He called as a witness an expert from Pearson, the national testing company that devised the Texas Projection Measure.
She explained that the formula used to "project" future success was not made by looking at the records of earlier kids with identical scoring patterns. It was based, again, on aggregate numbers that included the highest and lowest performing students as well as those in the middle.
Hochberg asked Cloudt if that was right.
"That's different than what I said before," she admitted. "It's a better explanation."
The question is, was Cloudt deliberately trying to mislead Hochberg and the public throughout the hearing, or did she really not understand the bizarre system that can turn a test score of zero to a passing score?
And which would be more disturbing?
Coming Sunday: The politics of this fiasco.
rick.casey@chron.com
I should have posted these earlier.
Angela
Hochberg unmasks TEA’s controversial rule
By RICK CASEY
HOUSTON CHRONICLE
July 8, 2010, 9:19PM
Criss Cloudt understandably grew defensive last week as she tried to explain to a group of legislators how a student who got absolutely every question wrong on a TAKS writing test could be scored as passing it.
Cloudt was in the hot seat because she is the Texas Education Agency's associate commissioner in charge of the "accountability system" that administers the TAKS test and ranks schools and school districts on a four-tier scale from "unacceptable" to "exemplary."
She was also in the hot seat because the man presumably most responsible for instituting the controversial new "Texas Projection Measure" that is producing such absurd results, Education Commissioner Robert Scott, failed to show up. But that's another story. Today we look at the ways that Cloudt appeared to try to mislead Houston state Rep. Scott Hochberg and his Appropriations Subcommittee on Education, and how Hochberg repeatedly called her on it.
It began with Hochberg asking what accounted for a huge jump last year in the number of schools and school districts rated as "recognized" and "exemplary."
"Performance," said Cloudt.
But Hochberg got her to admit that 73 of the 74 additional "exemplary districts" that took us from 43 in 2008 to 117 in 2009 received that distinction only because the new Texas Projection Measure miraculously allowed nearly half the 1 million TAKS tests that had been failed to count as passing for the purpose of rating schools and districts.
Cloudt said the Texas Projection Measure is a "growth measure." To most of us, that would imply that it looked at how a child did this year compared to last.
Hochberg brought out that it doesn't. It looked only at last year's scores and, based on a formula devised from thousands of prior results, projected that children who pass reading or math were likely to pass other tests in future years.
Deciphering analysis
Cloudt claimed that based on analysis looking backward, the formulas used in the projections are "quite good, actually."
"Really?" said Hochberg. "What would you consider quite good?"
"They're on average in the 90s (percent) in terms of projection accurate," Cloudt said.
I assumed that she was referring to the cases in which failing children were counted as passing.
But Hochberg was on to her. He got her to admit that the predictions that were accurate more than 90 percent of the time included all children — those who did very well on all the TAKS tests (who can safely be predicted to pass) and those who did terribly an all the tests (who can safely be predicted to fail).
Hochberg revealed that TEA's own analysis showed that the accuracy rate for those whose performance was actually upgraded using the "projection measure" was in the range of 50 percent.
Failed projections
Cloudt continued to defend the projections, saying repeatedly that when a failing child was counted as passing it was because "hundreds and hundreds" of other children whose test scores fit the exact same pattern later passed.
But again, Hochberg was ready. He called as a witness an expert from Pearson, the national testing company that devised the Texas Projection Measure.
She explained that the formula used to "project" future success was not made by looking at the records of earlier kids with identical scoring patterns. It was based, again, on aggregate numbers that included the highest and lowest performing students as well as those in the middle.
Hochberg asked Cloudt if that was right.
"That's different than what I said before," she admitted. "It's a better explanation."
The question is, was Cloudt deliberately trying to mislead Hochberg and the public throughout the hearing, or did she really not understand the bizarre system that can turn a test score of zero to a passing score?
And which would be more disturbing?
Coming Sunday: The politics of this fiasco.
rick.casey@chron.com
Monday, July 19, 2010
Gates Foundation playing pivotal role in changes for education system
By Nick Anderson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, July 12, 2010
TAMPA -- Across the country, public education is in the midst of a quiet revolution. States are embracing voluntary national standards for English and math, while schools are paying teachers based on student performance.
t's an agenda propelled in part by a flood of money from a billionaire prep-school graduate best known for his software empire: Bill Gates.
In the past 2 1/2 years, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has pledged more than $650 million to schools, public agencies and other groups that buy into its main education priorities.
The largest awards are powering experiments in teacher evaluation and performance pay. The Pittsburgh school district landed $40 million, Los Angeles charter schools $60 million and the Memphis schools $90 million. The Hillsborough County district, which includes Tampa, won the biggest grant: $100 million. That has set the nation's eighth-largest school system on a quest to reshape its 15,000-member teaching corps by rewarding student achievement instead of seniority.
The focus on teaching marks a significant shift for the foundation. In the past decade, it spent $2 billion to improve high schools, with a major emphasis on creating smaller schools. But Bill Gates said Saturday that new approaches are needed because the pace of improvement has been too slow. In many cities, a third or more of students fail to graduate from high school on time. Those who earn a diploma are often ill equipped for college.
"It's disappointing to everyone who looks at the facts," Gates told The Washington Post in a telephone interview. He said he is willing to do whatever it takes to help raise achievement. "There's a risk that we might not succeed," Gates said, "but I can tell you we'll keep trying."
It is unclear whether philanthropy -- even a charity led by one of the world's richest men -- can find large-scale solutions to problems that have beset schools for generations. But what is certain is that Gates grants have become a leading currency for a particular kind of education reform. That agenda has won praise from the Obama administration and others, while prompting questions from some about the foundation's pervasive presence and its emphasis on performance measures.
Data the foundation provided to The Post show the most comprehensive portrait of its educational ambitions over the past two years.
Since January 2008, more than 250 Gates grants have targeted causes such as charter schools, testing research, data systems, science and math education and common academic standards.
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Gates grants are propelling initiatives that otherwise might be put on hold because of tight budgets. The Prince George's County schools and the D.C. Public Education Fund, which supports the city school system, won separate $2.5 million grants for teacher evaluation and training.
Overall government spending on K-12 education, estimated at more than $500 billion a year, dwarfs what the foundation gives. But the Seattle-based charity, with a $35 billion endowment, towers over others in the field. It gives nearly four times as much annually to elementary and secondary education as the second-biggest player, the Walton Family Foundation.
"It has influence everywhere," said Tom Loveless, an education analyst at the Brookings Institution, "in absolutely every branch of education, whether you're talking about the federal, state or local levels of government, schools, the press, politicians or think tanks. Their motives could be 100 percent pure. But any time you have one big player that is influencing all of these groups, it is cause for concern."
The Gates Foundation is perhaps best known for its work overseas fighting malaria and HIV/AIDS. Domestically, foundation officials depict the charity as one player among many in a broad coalition to improve teaching and prepare more students for college.
"There's definitely a convergence of ideas," said Vicki L. Phillips, who oversees the foundation's elementary and secondary education grants, "not just between us and the administration but between us and many other reform-minded people who have been working on these issues for a long time."
(Melinda Gates, wife of the Microsoft chairman, and investor Warren E. Buffett, a major donor to the foundation, are both on The Washington Post Co. board of directors.)
Education Secretary Arne Duncan, who has recruited some key aides from the charity, described the foundation as "one of many stakeholders really interested in seeing things get better. I appreciate their commitment and stick-to-itiveness. They're in this for the long haul."
The foundation is a go-to funder for education groups inside the Capital Beltway and beyond. Its projects align so closely with President Obama's agenda that critics say it resembles an arm of the government, which Gates and Duncan strongly dispute.
The foundation gave 25 states and the District about $6 million to help them apply for Obama's Race to the Top school reform grants. It also has awarded more than $35 million since January 2008 to the Council of Chief State School Officers, the National Governors Association Center for Best Practices and other organizations that are developing and promoting common standards.
Obama praises the state-led standards movement but cannot fund it directly without risking a backlash against federal involvement in local schooling. The foundation has stepped into the void, becoming the movement's top funder. As a result, students in the District, Maryland and many other states -- Virginia is an exception -- will soon share for the first time common expectations for what they should learn from grade to grade. The initiative has put voluntary national standards, long considered a political impossibility, on the verge of becoming a reality.
Skeptics say the Microsoft founder is foisting a business-driven agenda on schools without understanding the challenges of public education. "I suspect that eight years from now, the Gates Foundation will say, 'Whoops, we made another big boo-boo. What should we do now?' " education historian Diane Ravitch said.
Gates acknowledged he is no expert. But he said: "I'm a very good student. I'm learning a lot." He said he is intrigued by the intricacies of education budgets and why mayors control some school systems but not others. Education professionals lead the foundation's efforts. Phillips, in her post since 2007, was previously Pennsylvania's education secretary and school superintendent in Portland, Ore. John E. Deasy, who resigned as Prince George's superintendent in late 2008 to become a Phillips deputy, was recently named deputy chief of Los Angeles schools.
The foundation also is wooing teachers unions as never before. It awarded $1.6 million to charitable arms of the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers and has sought in the past year to invest in school systems with good labor relations. It commissioned one of the broadest surveys ever of teachers to get their views on reform, and it is gathering footage from classrooms across the country to study what makes effective teaching. On Saturday, Gates addressed an AFT convention in Seattle. Such overtures have surprised labor leaders who had not regarded Gates as an ally. But the rationale was obvious: To make changes at the heart of public schools, foundation officials wanted teacher buy-in. That quest eventually led them to Florida.
The Hillsborough system, with 193,000 students, emerged last year as the foundation sifted thousands of candidates for a project nicknamed the "deep dive." Crucially, the Hillsborough Classroom Teachers Association had already accepted the idea of bonuses linked to test scores and other metrics.
Over seven years, the $100 million grant will fund staff development, testing, salary and other start-up costs for a career path that aims to elevate teachers who excel and encourage those who flounder to get help.
Every year, teachers here will be evaluated on a formula based on student achievement gains (40 percent), principal observation (30 percent) and peer observation (30 percent). By 2013, a four-tier pay scale will take effect that will reward high performers regardless of their academic degrees or years of experience -- a major break from precedent. Veteran teachers will be allowed to remain in the seniority-based pay scale or opt into the new one. New teachers will not have a choice and will be subject to more rigorous scrutiny before gaining tenure.
Many teachers remain wary of linking test scores to paychecks. But Gates and the school district have won converts. Miriam Everett, a veteran math-science teacher at Kimbell Elementary School in Tampa, was delighted last spring when Florida's governor vetoed a bill to weaken tenure protections and expand merit pay.
Yet Everett enlisted in the Hillsborough project to help evaluate other teachers. What made her amenable to performance pay this time? "They really are working with teachers," Everett said, "making sure we're comfortable with it and we have our say."
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, July 12, 2010
TAMPA -- Across the country, public education is in the midst of a quiet revolution. States are embracing voluntary national standards for English and math, while schools are paying teachers based on student performance.
t's an agenda propelled in part by a flood of money from a billionaire prep-school graduate best known for his software empire: Bill Gates.
In the past 2 1/2 years, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has pledged more than $650 million to schools, public agencies and other groups that buy into its main education priorities.
The largest awards are powering experiments in teacher evaluation and performance pay. The Pittsburgh school district landed $40 million, Los Angeles charter schools $60 million and the Memphis schools $90 million. The Hillsborough County district, which includes Tampa, won the biggest grant: $100 million. That has set the nation's eighth-largest school system on a quest to reshape its 15,000-member teaching corps by rewarding student achievement instead of seniority.
The focus on teaching marks a significant shift for the foundation. In the past decade, it spent $2 billion to improve high schools, with a major emphasis on creating smaller schools. But Bill Gates said Saturday that new approaches are needed because the pace of improvement has been too slow. In many cities, a third or more of students fail to graduate from high school on time. Those who earn a diploma are often ill equipped for college.
"It's disappointing to everyone who looks at the facts," Gates told The Washington Post in a telephone interview. He said he is willing to do whatever it takes to help raise achievement. "There's a risk that we might not succeed," Gates said, "but I can tell you we'll keep trying."
It is unclear whether philanthropy -- even a charity led by one of the world's richest men -- can find large-scale solutions to problems that have beset schools for generations. But what is certain is that Gates grants have become a leading currency for a particular kind of education reform. That agenda has won praise from the Obama administration and others, while prompting questions from some about the foundation's pervasive presence and its emphasis on performance measures.
Data the foundation provided to The Post show the most comprehensive portrait of its educational ambitions over the past two years.
Since January 2008, more than 250 Gates grants have targeted causes such as charter schools, testing research, data systems, science and math education and common academic standards.
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Gates grants are propelling initiatives that otherwise might be put on hold because of tight budgets. The Prince George's County schools and the D.C. Public Education Fund, which supports the city school system, won separate $2.5 million grants for teacher evaluation and training.
Overall government spending on K-12 education, estimated at more than $500 billion a year, dwarfs what the foundation gives. But the Seattle-based charity, with a $35 billion endowment, towers over others in the field. It gives nearly four times as much annually to elementary and secondary education as the second-biggest player, the Walton Family Foundation.
"It has influence everywhere," said Tom Loveless, an education analyst at the Brookings Institution, "in absolutely every branch of education, whether you're talking about the federal, state or local levels of government, schools, the press, politicians or think tanks. Their motives could be 100 percent pure. But any time you have one big player that is influencing all of these groups, it is cause for concern."
The Gates Foundation is perhaps best known for its work overseas fighting malaria and HIV/AIDS. Domestically, foundation officials depict the charity as one player among many in a broad coalition to improve teaching and prepare more students for college.
"There's definitely a convergence of ideas," said Vicki L. Phillips, who oversees the foundation's elementary and secondary education grants, "not just between us and the administration but between us and many other reform-minded people who have been working on these issues for a long time."
(Melinda Gates, wife of the Microsoft chairman, and investor Warren E. Buffett, a major donor to the foundation, are both on The Washington Post Co. board of directors.)
Education Secretary Arne Duncan, who has recruited some key aides from the charity, described the foundation as "one of many stakeholders really interested in seeing things get better. I appreciate their commitment and stick-to-itiveness. They're in this for the long haul."
The foundation is a go-to funder for education groups inside the Capital Beltway and beyond. Its projects align so closely with President Obama's agenda that critics say it resembles an arm of the government, which Gates and Duncan strongly dispute.
The foundation gave 25 states and the District about $6 million to help them apply for Obama's Race to the Top school reform grants. It also has awarded more than $35 million since January 2008 to the Council of Chief State School Officers, the National Governors Association Center for Best Practices and other organizations that are developing and promoting common standards.
Obama praises the state-led standards movement but cannot fund it directly without risking a backlash against federal involvement in local schooling. The foundation has stepped into the void, becoming the movement's top funder. As a result, students in the District, Maryland and many other states -- Virginia is an exception -- will soon share for the first time common expectations for what they should learn from grade to grade. The initiative has put voluntary national standards, long considered a political impossibility, on the verge of becoming a reality.
Skeptics say the Microsoft founder is foisting a business-driven agenda on schools without understanding the challenges of public education. "I suspect that eight years from now, the Gates Foundation will say, 'Whoops, we made another big boo-boo. What should we do now?' " education historian Diane Ravitch said.
Gates acknowledged he is no expert. But he said: "I'm a very good student. I'm learning a lot." He said he is intrigued by the intricacies of education budgets and why mayors control some school systems but not others. Education professionals lead the foundation's efforts. Phillips, in her post since 2007, was previously Pennsylvania's education secretary and school superintendent in Portland, Ore. John E. Deasy, who resigned as Prince George's superintendent in late 2008 to become a Phillips deputy, was recently named deputy chief of Los Angeles schools.
The foundation also is wooing teachers unions as never before. It awarded $1.6 million to charitable arms of the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers and has sought in the past year to invest in school systems with good labor relations. It commissioned one of the broadest surveys ever of teachers to get their views on reform, and it is gathering footage from classrooms across the country to study what makes effective teaching. On Saturday, Gates addressed an AFT convention in Seattle. Such overtures have surprised labor leaders who had not regarded Gates as an ally. But the rationale was obvious: To make changes at the heart of public schools, foundation officials wanted teacher buy-in. That quest eventually led them to Florida.
The Hillsborough system, with 193,000 students, emerged last year as the foundation sifted thousands of candidates for a project nicknamed the "deep dive." Crucially, the Hillsborough Classroom Teachers Association had already accepted the idea of bonuses linked to test scores and other metrics.
Over seven years, the $100 million grant will fund staff development, testing, salary and other start-up costs for a career path that aims to elevate teachers who excel and encourage those who flounder to get help.
Every year, teachers here will be evaluated on a formula based on student achievement gains (40 percent), principal observation (30 percent) and peer observation (30 percent). By 2013, a four-tier pay scale will take effect that will reward high performers regardless of their academic degrees or years of experience -- a major break from precedent. Veteran teachers will be allowed to remain in the seniority-based pay scale or opt into the new one. New teachers will not have a choice and will be subject to more rigorous scrutiny before gaining tenure.
Many teachers remain wary of linking test scores to paychecks. But Gates and the school district have won converts. Miriam Everett, a veteran math-science teacher at Kimbell Elementary School in Tampa, was delighted last spring when Florida's governor vetoed a bill to weaken tenure protections and expand merit pay.
Yet Everett enlisted in the Hillsborough project to help evaluate other teachers. What made her amenable to performance pay this time? "They really are working with teachers," Everett said, "making sure we're comfortable with it and we have our say."
Town Bolsters Security as Mexican Deaths Continue
by Brandi Grissom | Texas Tribune
July 15, 2010
[This is the second part in a series examining life in three pairs of sister cities along the Texas-Mexico border and how residents on both sides of the line are affected by the bloody drug war.]
They can’t keep burying the bodies here. Not just because the small cemetery in this remote desert town can’t handle the volume — because somebody could get killed.
On a still, sunny spring morning in Fort Hancock, about 60 miles east of El Paso, two elderly Hispanic men sit on the tailgate of a pickup, surrounded by graves. Francisco Estrada and Alberto Rosales munch on pieces of fruit, legs dangling above the dusty earth where many former residents of this rural outpost make their final repose. As caretakers for the Fort Hancock Cemetery, they put in about 20 hours a week. It's mostly quiet work, meant to occupy their aging minds and bodies. This spring, though, as the drug war enveloped Fort Hancock’s Mexican sister city, El Porvenir, their stress levels spiked. “What they’re starting over there, they’re going to finish here,” Estrada frets.
Estrada and Rosales point to white and yellow silk flowers that adorn one of the most recent additions to the cemetery: the resting place of Manuel Morales Lerma, who was shot at his home in El Porvenir. Fearing cartel leaders would next target his family, Morales Lerma’s relatives moved his funeral to Fort Hancock’s tiny cemetery. People here describe the ceremony like a scene out of a spaghetti western. Sheriffs’ deputies from all around came to stand guard. Some mourners hid in the bushes with guns, says Hudspeth County Judge Becky Dean Walker.
Fewer than 20,000 people live in the Valle de Juárez, a 60-mile stretch of small villages that line the highway from Juárez to El Porvenir. In what was once a peaceful if desperately poor farming community, more than 75 people have fallen victim to the raging drug war so far this year. It’s an astonishing death rate. If the pace of killings continues this year, the murder rate could reach 1,600 homicides for every 100,000 people (in New Orleans, the 2009 murder rate was 52 per 100,000, the highest in the nation, according to FBI data). Cartel leaders have told entire towns to vacate or be decimated. They’ve burned homes and churches and left in their wake residents paralyzed with fear. The aftershocks extend far from the epicenter of the violence, bringing fear and confusion — along with legions of armed guards, and refugees from the bloodbath — to Fort Hancock and other rural Texas border outposts.
Morales Lerma’s funeral passed without another murder; the slaughter to the south has yet to bleed across the border. Yet no one disputes the need to be prepared: As El Porvenir and the rest of the Juárez Valley have descended into chaos, law enforcement has crushed into the small towns of Hudspeth County. More officers — state, local and federal — work more hours with more firepower during every hour of the day. Though Hudspeth County residents fret for their southern neighbors — especially family members who cannot escape to the United States — many welcome the protection from the nightmare just across the Rio Grande.
The number of uniforms in the Juárez Valley has increased, too. Mexican military troops set up checkpoints on the highway and patrol the villages with automatic weapons at the ready. Mexican federal police are ever present. But petrified residents say their presence has done little to curb the killing. Some believe the soldiers are at least complicit in the cartels’ dirty work and may be actively doing drug lords’ bidding. “The population is fearful of the soldiers,” one El Porvenir resident says. “They are always beating people up for information.”
Valle de muerte
Death and terror rule Highway 2, or Carretera Porvenir-Ciudad Juárez — the stretch of road that links the small towns of the Juárez Valley. Just east of Juárez, the sign on the highway says “Colonia de Esperanza.” It means Colony of Hope. Less than a hundred yards away, the blistered black shell of a pink cinderblock home sits idle. The frame of what used to be a single dining room chair sits outside the home, as if someone once sat there and watched the traffic fly by.
A block past, a single porch light illuminates an abandoned home; whoever fled must have left it on. Next door, the burned frame of another pink cinderblock home sits empty, ashes still piled on the ground. Across the street, another charred house. Black scars surround barred windows where flames licked out from within.
A small military convoy passes on the highway. A pickup loaded with soldiers gripping automatic rifles follows a drab olive-green semi-truck with military gear. Two women walk along the shoulder with three small children toting backpacks. They hardly notice. A couple of miles down the road, cars maneuver around two loose horses trotting along the road.
In Guadalupe, one of the largest town in the Valle de Juárez with about 9,000 people, a group of young factory workers gathers at a bus stop, waiting for a ride into Juárez. Federal police sit on benches at the edge of a park plaza, where a few children shoot hoops and romp around on bright colored play equipment. The town’s mayor, Jesús Manuel Lara Rodríguez, was shot down in Juárez last month. Two members of the town council were killed in 2009, according to the El Paso Times.
For decades, residents in these tiny, poor towns have toiled either in the cotton and alfalfa fields or in the giant maquilas of Juárez. If they wanted more than the paupers’ wages of the farm and factory, they worked for the drug cartels. Yet these communities remained peaceful until early this year, when the Juárez drug war bled into the farmland.
The terror fell perhaps hardest on El Porvenir. Off the highway, the only paved street, stray dogs prowl dusty roads. Plywood covers the windows in modest houses, mostly stucco and cinderblock, painted in pastels. Drying clothes swing in the light breeze. A padlock shuts off the park. The closet-sized police station — dark and barred shut, with a foot-long hole in its side — houses no police. The church has been burned. Many here have seen family members perish at the hands of the cartels.
On a sunny May afternoon, two men sitting on a bench near the town square are among the few people out in the daylight. They agree, nervously, to talk with reporters. “No names,” they say over and over again, constantly scanning the area for suspicious vehicles or people. A young man with a scraggly beard and a bejeweled Playboy bunny necklace says he has lived here all his life. All the soldiers, he says, don’t make a difference. The killings continue; he believes the soldiers work with the murderers. “They don’t do anything; they’re just cruising,” he says. He’s married and he has a job here in El Porvenir, so he can’t leave.
No one here knows who can be trusted, the older man says. Some work for the Army or the cartels as informants. And if anyone talks to someone whose name appears on a hit list, they risk having their own name added. Everyone here knows who is on the list, he says. Someone — he doesn’t know who — writes up the names, copies them and distributes them on fliers strewn around town. “They say, we are going to kill you one by one,” the older man says.
It didn’t used to be this way. This used to be a happy place, the two men say. Music filled the streets every weekend. People drank and danced. Now, only fear remains.
Mayberry of yesteryear
When he was a little boy, Jose Franco would ride his bicycle across the border into El Porvenir to play with friends. Now, as superintendent of the 540-student Fort Hancock Independent School District, he sees young boys and girls who come from El Porvenir so traumatized they can’t stand being in the same room with other children. “Ah, these kids could tell you stories,” he says, shaking his head. One teenager saw his mother shot and his grandfather attacked with an ice pick. A young girl getting ready for her quinceañera watched her father get executed while her grandmother was strapped to a chair, Franco says. A disabled elementary student saw television footage of his mother’s beaten and suffocated corpse wrapped in plastic. “The violence,” he says. “These guys are ruthless.”
This year, the tiny school district has seen its student population grow more than 10 percent. Fifty-four of the 63 new students are from Mexico, Franco says. They come to his schools years behind academically, shredded emotionally from what they’ve seen, what they still see in their minds every day. The children imagine horrors befalling their uncles, their fathers, their sisters, those who can’t come join them on the other side, Franco says.
He met with state officials to coordinate social services for the new students, and he hired a special teacher to help immerse them in their new language and academic culture. The district has also hired its own security, a constable who patrols the small campus. “I have a very compassionate staff,” Franco says, “and they pretty much do whatever it takes to help these children.”
The students are among dozens who call Fort Hancock their new home — at least part of the time. When the sun sets, a steady stream of cars make their way across the two-lane international bridge that joins El Porvenir and Fort Hancock, says Hudspeth County Deputy Sheriff Keith Hughes. One of the many ramshackle mobile homes that line Fort Hancock’s unpaved streets becomes a haven for as many as 16 people each night. “It’s hard to find a vacant house, and there are a lot of Mexican plates,” Hughes says.
It’s hard to know which of the nightly residents are victims and which are running from their own involvement in the drug trade. The uncertainty has made Fort Hancock’s residents a vigilant bunch. Though the violence has not crossed, Hughes gets calls all the time from people worried about suspicious vehicles and activities.
Hughes is one of 17 Hudspeth County deputies — up from 12 five years ago — who are working 16-hour days seven days a week to patrol the massive border county. Sheriff Arvin West has received grants from Gov. Rick Perry totalling nearly $3.6 million to hire more deputies and pay them for overtime patrols, and he’s used those dollars to beef up security as the violence in El Porvenir gets ever closer. In May, a shootout erupted right on the river. One person died on the Mexican side; four others were injured. The wounded made it across the river and had to be transported, with a sheriff’s escort, to the hospital in El Paso. West has moved all the men and money he can to Fort Hancock, he says. He has told the cotton farmers whose fields line the Rio Grande to arm themselves — not that they needed the prodding. “This used to be Mayberry,” says West, his own pistol perched in a holster around his paunchy waist.
The U.S. Border Patrol has surged here, too. Hundreds more agents in green uniforms man highway checkpoints and patrol back roads. Doug Mosier, spokesman for the Border Patrol’s El Paso Sector, which encompasses most of Hudspeth County, would not disclose the total number of agents in the area, but West estimates about 400 agents patrol here, twice as many as a few years ago. The increased presence has made a difference, Mosier says. Drug busts have slowed to a trickle, and agents are apprehending only about five illegal crossers a day.
Unlike the feared police presence in El Porvenir, the infusion of law enforcement comforts most of the residents of Fort Hancock. But some of the officers go too far, says Bill Addington, whose family owns farmland in Sierra Blanca, another tiny Hudspeth County border town. “Everywhere we go, we’re stopped,” he says. County Commissioner Jim Ed Miller says agents have repeatedly torn up his farm property by driving through it. And though he’s lived here for decades, farming cotton and alfalfa in the now majority-Hispanic town, agents regularly pull him over and ask if he’s a citizen. “I was stopped for making a ‘suspicious turn,’” he says. “Seven units put the habeas grabbus on me.”
No room in the cemetery
Estrada and Rosales slide off the back of the pickup to resume weed-pulling and flower-tending duties at the cemetery. Estrada, only half-joking, tells Rosales in Spanish that they need to start getting the place ready for all the new residents. “They just spray bullets; they don’t care who’s around,” Estrada says of the cartels.
The two have lived in this area for decades. Estrada says he used to do his shopping just across the bridge in Mexico, where goods were cheaper and more plentiful. Now he travels to El Paso. Rosales used to live in El Porvenir. His son still lives there, and Rosales fears for his safety. Recently, when his son came to Fort Hancock for a visit, he returned to Mexico to find his home had been set on fire, though federal police doused the blaze before it engulfed the whole house. Rosales says his son can’t seek asylum in the United States, because he has a family, a job and a home he can’t sell in El Porvenir. “I’m scared for him, but what can I do?” he asks in Spanish. “Nobody’s going to buy that house.”
In a way, Estrada hopes the violence in Mexico continues, because he worries that the cartel leaders will bring their fight north. Already, he says, they have buried too many people from El Porvenir. “It’s hard over there, but poor people can’t come over here,” he says. Since the Morales Lerma funeral, Estrada and Rosales say the number of uniformed officers in the region has spiked. And the board that oversees the cemetery has for the most part stopped burials from Mexico. The two say they feel safer.
The cemetery board now enforces a longstanding rule that only people who lived in town, or had a relative there, could be buried in the Fort Hancock Cemetery, says Mary Miller, a member of the board. “It’s real sad, because I have friends over there who … encourage people from here not to come over there, because they’re shooting people at funerals,” Miller says.
No one’s real sure how many people are buried among the tall, skinny pine trees and sparse brush of the cemetery. In the 1950s or 1960s, Miller says, a flood exhumed many of the bodies, and they floated away. What they do know, she says, is that the cemetery is too small to accommodate the death toll across the border. “The way they’re killing ‘em in Juárez and El Porvenir,” she explains, “there wouldn’t be any room left.”
July 15, 2010
[This is the second part in a series examining life in three pairs of sister cities along the Texas-Mexico border and how residents on both sides of the line are affected by the bloody drug war.]
They can’t keep burying the bodies here. Not just because the small cemetery in this remote desert town can’t handle the volume — because somebody could get killed.
On a still, sunny spring morning in Fort Hancock, about 60 miles east of El Paso, two elderly Hispanic men sit on the tailgate of a pickup, surrounded by graves. Francisco Estrada and Alberto Rosales munch on pieces of fruit, legs dangling above the dusty earth where many former residents of this rural outpost make their final repose. As caretakers for the Fort Hancock Cemetery, they put in about 20 hours a week. It's mostly quiet work, meant to occupy their aging minds and bodies. This spring, though, as the drug war enveloped Fort Hancock’s Mexican sister city, El Porvenir, their stress levels spiked. “What they’re starting over there, they’re going to finish here,” Estrada frets.
Estrada and Rosales point to white and yellow silk flowers that adorn one of the most recent additions to the cemetery: the resting place of Manuel Morales Lerma, who was shot at his home in El Porvenir. Fearing cartel leaders would next target his family, Morales Lerma’s relatives moved his funeral to Fort Hancock’s tiny cemetery. People here describe the ceremony like a scene out of a spaghetti western. Sheriffs’ deputies from all around came to stand guard. Some mourners hid in the bushes with guns, says Hudspeth County Judge Becky Dean Walker.
Fewer than 20,000 people live in the Valle de Juárez, a 60-mile stretch of small villages that line the highway from Juárez to El Porvenir. In what was once a peaceful if desperately poor farming community, more than 75 people have fallen victim to the raging drug war so far this year. It’s an astonishing death rate. If the pace of killings continues this year, the murder rate could reach 1,600 homicides for every 100,000 people (in New Orleans, the 2009 murder rate was 52 per 100,000, the highest in the nation, according to FBI data). Cartel leaders have told entire towns to vacate or be decimated. They’ve burned homes and churches and left in their wake residents paralyzed with fear. The aftershocks extend far from the epicenter of the violence, bringing fear and confusion — along with legions of armed guards, and refugees from the bloodbath — to Fort Hancock and other rural Texas border outposts.
Morales Lerma’s funeral passed without another murder; the slaughter to the south has yet to bleed across the border. Yet no one disputes the need to be prepared: As El Porvenir and the rest of the Juárez Valley have descended into chaos, law enforcement has crushed into the small towns of Hudspeth County. More officers — state, local and federal — work more hours with more firepower during every hour of the day. Though Hudspeth County residents fret for their southern neighbors — especially family members who cannot escape to the United States — many welcome the protection from the nightmare just across the Rio Grande.
The number of uniforms in the Juárez Valley has increased, too. Mexican military troops set up checkpoints on the highway and patrol the villages with automatic weapons at the ready. Mexican federal police are ever present. But petrified residents say their presence has done little to curb the killing. Some believe the soldiers are at least complicit in the cartels’ dirty work and may be actively doing drug lords’ bidding. “The population is fearful of the soldiers,” one El Porvenir resident says. “They are always beating people up for information.”
Valle de muerte
Death and terror rule Highway 2, or Carretera Porvenir-Ciudad Juárez — the stretch of road that links the small towns of the Juárez Valley. Just east of Juárez, the sign on the highway says “Colonia de Esperanza.” It means Colony of Hope. Less than a hundred yards away, the blistered black shell of a pink cinderblock home sits idle. The frame of what used to be a single dining room chair sits outside the home, as if someone once sat there and watched the traffic fly by.
A block past, a single porch light illuminates an abandoned home; whoever fled must have left it on. Next door, the burned frame of another pink cinderblock home sits empty, ashes still piled on the ground. Across the street, another charred house. Black scars surround barred windows where flames licked out from within.
A small military convoy passes on the highway. A pickup loaded with soldiers gripping automatic rifles follows a drab olive-green semi-truck with military gear. Two women walk along the shoulder with three small children toting backpacks. They hardly notice. A couple of miles down the road, cars maneuver around two loose horses trotting along the road.
In Guadalupe, one of the largest town in the Valle de Juárez with about 9,000 people, a group of young factory workers gathers at a bus stop, waiting for a ride into Juárez. Federal police sit on benches at the edge of a park plaza, where a few children shoot hoops and romp around on bright colored play equipment. The town’s mayor, Jesús Manuel Lara Rodríguez, was shot down in Juárez last month. Two members of the town council were killed in 2009, according to the El Paso Times.
For decades, residents in these tiny, poor towns have toiled either in the cotton and alfalfa fields or in the giant maquilas of Juárez. If they wanted more than the paupers’ wages of the farm and factory, they worked for the drug cartels. Yet these communities remained peaceful until early this year, when the Juárez drug war bled into the farmland.
The terror fell perhaps hardest on El Porvenir. Off the highway, the only paved street, stray dogs prowl dusty roads. Plywood covers the windows in modest houses, mostly stucco and cinderblock, painted in pastels. Drying clothes swing in the light breeze. A padlock shuts off the park. The closet-sized police station — dark and barred shut, with a foot-long hole in its side — houses no police. The church has been burned. Many here have seen family members perish at the hands of the cartels.
On a sunny May afternoon, two men sitting on a bench near the town square are among the few people out in the daylight. They agree, nervously, to talk with reporters. “No names,” they say over and over again, constantly scanning the area for suspicious vehicles or people. A young man with a scraggly beard and a bejeweled Playboy bunny necklace says he has lived here all his life. All the soldiers, he says, don’t make a difference. The killings continue; he believes the soldiers work with the murderers. “They don’t do anything; they’re just cruising,” he says. He’s married and he has a job here in El Porvenir, so he can’t leave.
No one here knows who can be trusted, the older man says. Some work for the Army or the cartels as informants. And if anyone talks to someone whose name appears on a hit list, they risk having their own name added. Everyone here knows who is on the list, he says. Someone — he doesn’t know who — writes up the names, copies them and distributes them on fliers strewn around town. “They say, we are going to kill you one by one,” the older man says.
It didn’t used to be this way. This used to be a happy place, the two men say. Music filled the streets every weekend. People drank and danced. Now, only fear remains.
Mayberry of yesteryear
When he was a little boy, Jose Franco would ride his bicycle across the border into El Porvenir to play with friends. Now, as superintendent of the 540-student Fort Hancock Independent School District, he sees young boys and girls who come from El Porvenir so traumatized they can’t stand being in the same room with other children. “Ah, these kids could tell you stories,” he says, shaking his head. One teenager saw his mother shot and his grandfather attacked with an ice pick. A young girl getting ready for her quinceañera watched her father get executed while her grandmother was strapped to a chair, Franco says. A disabled elementary student saw television footage of his mother’s beaten and suffocated corpse wrapped in plastic. “The violence,” he says. “These guys are ruthless.”
This year, the tiny school district has seen its student population grow more than 10 percent. Fifty-four of the 63 new students are from Mexico, Franco says. They come to his schools years behind academically, shredded emotionally from what they’ve seen, what they still see in their minds every day. The children imagine horrors befalling their uncles, their fathers, their sisters, those who can’t come join them on the other side, Franco says.
He met with state officials to coordinate social services for the new students, and he hired a special teacher to help immerse them in their new language and academic culture. The district has also hired its own security, a constable who patrols the small campus. “I have a very compassionate staff,” Franco says, “and they pretty much do whatever it takes to help these children.”
The students are among dozens who call Fort Hancock their new home — at least part of the time. When the sun sets, a steady stream of cars make their way across the two-lane international bridge that joins El Porvenir and Fort Hancock, says Hudspeth County Deputy Sheriff Keith Hughes. One of the many ramshackle mobile homes that line Fort Hancock’s unpaved streets becomes a haven for as many as 16 people each night. “It’s hard to find a vacant house, and there are a lot of Mexican plates,” Hughes says.
It’s hard to know which of the nightly residents are victims and which are running from their own involvement in the drug trade. The uncertainty has made Fort Hancock’s residents a vigilant bunch. Though the violence has not crossed, Hughes gets calls all the time from people worried about suspicious vehicles and activities.
Hughes is one of 17 Hudspeth County deputies — up from 12 five years ago — who are working 16-hour days seven days a week to patrol the massive border county. Sheriff Arvin West has received grants from Gov. Rick Perry totalling nearly $3.6 million to hire more deputies and pay them for overtime patrols, and he’s used those dollars to beef up security as the violence in El Porvenir gets ever closer. In May, a shootout erupted right on the river. One person died on the Mexican side; four others were injured. The wounded made it across the river and had to be transported, with a sheriff’s escort, to the hospital in El Paso. West has moved all the men and money he can to Fort Hancock, he says. He has told the cotton farmers whose fields line the Rio Grande to arm themselves — not that they needed the prodding. “This used to be Mayberry,” says West, his own pistol perched in a holster around his paunchy waist.
The U.S. Border Patrol has surged here, too. Hundreds more agents in green uniforms man highway checkpoints and patrol back roads. Doug Mosier, spokesman for the Border Patrol’s El Paso Sector, which encompasses most of Hudspeth County, would not disclose the total number of agents in the area, but West estimates about 400 agents patrol here, twice as many as a few years ago. The increased presence has made a difference, Mosier says. Drug busts have slowed to a trickle, and agents are apprehending only about five illegal crossers a day.
Unlike the feared police presence in El Porvenir, the infusion of law enforcement comforts most of the residents of Fort Hancock. But some of the officers go too far, says Bill Addington, whose family owns farmland in Sierra Blanca, another tiny Hudspeth County border town. “Everywhere we go, we’re stopped,” he says. County Commissioner Jim Ed Miller says agents have repeatedly torn up his farm property by driving through it. And though he’s lived here for decades, farming cotton and alfalfa in the now majority-Hispanic town, agents regularly pull him over and ask if he’s a citizen. “I was stopped for making a ‘suspicious turn,’” he says. “Seven units put the habeas grabbus on me.”
No room in the cemetery
Estrada and Rosales slide off the back of the pickup to resume weed-pulling and flower-tending duties at the cemetery. Estrada, only half-joking, tells Rosales in Spanish that they need to start getting the place ready for all the new residents. “They just spray bullets; they don’t care who’s around,” Estrada says of the cartels.
The two have lived in this area for decades. Estrada says he used to do his shopping just across the bridge in Mexico, where goods were cheaper and more plentiful. Now he travels to El Paso. Rosales used to live in El Porvenir. His son still lives there, and Rosales fears for his safety. Recently, when his son came to Fort Hancock for a visit, he returned to Mexico to find his home had been set on fire, though federal police doused the blaze before it engulfed the whole house. Rosales says his son can’t seek asylum in the United States, because he has a family, a job and a home he can’t sell in El Porvenir. “I’m scared for him, but what can I do?” he asks in Spanish. “Nobody’s going to buy that house.”
In a way, Estrada hopes the violence in Mexico continues, because he worries that the cartel leaders will bring their fight north. Already, he says, they have buried too many people from El Porvenir. “It’s hard over there, but poor people can’t come over here,” he says. Since the Morales Lerma funeral, Estrada and Rosales say the number of uniformed officers in the region has spiked. And the board that oversees the cemetery has for the most part stopped burials from Mexico. The two say they feel safer.
The cemetery board now enforces a longstanding rule that only people who lived in town, or had a relative there, could be buried in the Fort Hancock Cemetery, says Mary Miller, a member of the board. “It’s real sad, because I have friends over there who … encourage people from here not to come over there, because they’re shooting people at funerals,” Miller says.
No one’s real sure how many people are buried among the tall, skinny pine trees and sparse brush of the cemetery. In the 1950s or 1960s, Miller says, a flood exhumed many of the bodies, and they floated away. What they do know, she says, is that the cemetery is too small to accommodate the death toll across the border. “The way they’re killing ‘em in Juárez and El Porvenir,” she explains, “there wouldn’t be any room left.”
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