Great Kenyon College graduation speech back in 2008 by the very gifted, late novelist David Foster Wallace. 

I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliché about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliché about "the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master".

 Worthwhile read.

-Angela

DAVID FOSTER WALLACE, IN HIS OWN WORDS

IN MEMORIAM | September 19th 2008
The world of letters has lost a giant. We have felt nourished by the mournful graspings of sites dedicated to his memory ("He was my favourite" ~ Zadie Smith), and we grieve for the books we will never see. But perhaps the best tribute is one he wrote himself ...
Special to MORE INTELLIGENT LIFE
This is the commencement address he gave to the graduates of Kenyon College in 2005. It captures his electric mind, and also his humility--the way he elevated and made meaningful, beautiful, many of the lonely thoughts that rattle around in our heads. The way he put better thoughts in our heads, too. (Many thanks to Marginalia.org for making this available.)
(If anybody feels like perspiring [cough], I'd advise you to go ahead, because I'm sure going to. In fact I'm gonna [mumbles while pulling up his gown and taking out a handkerchief from his pocket].) Greetings ["parents"?] and congratulations to Kenyon's graduating class of 2005. There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says "Morning, boys. How's the water?" And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes "What the hell is water?"
This is a standard requirement of US commencement speeches, the deployment of didactic little parable-ish stories. The story ["thing"] turns out to be one of the better, less bullshitty conventions of the genre, but if you're worried that I plan to present myself here as the wise, older fish explaining what water is to you younger fish, please don't be. I am not the wise old fish. The point of the fish story is merely that the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about. Stated as an English sentence, of course, this is just a banal platitude, but the fact is that in the day to day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have a life or death importance, or so I wish to suggest to you on this dry and lovely morning.
Of course the main requirement of speeches like this is that I'm supposed to talk about your liberal arts education's meaning, to try to explain why the degree you are about to receive has actual human value instead of just a material payoff. So let's talk about the single most pervasive cliché in the commencement speech genre, which is that a liberal arts education is not so much about filling you up with knowledge as it is about "teaching you how to think". If you're like me as a student, you've never liked hearing this, and you tend to feel a bit insulted by the claim that you needed anybody to teach you how to think, since the fact that you even got admitted to a college this good seems like proof that you already know how to think. But I'm going to posit to you that the liberal arts cliché turns out not to be insulting at all, because the really significant education in thinking that we're supposed to get in a place like this isn't really about the capacity to think, but rather about the choice of what to think about. If your total freedom of choice regarding what to think about seems too obvious to waste time discussing, I'd ask you to think about fish and water, and to bracket for just a few minutes your scepticism about the value of the totally obvious.
Here's another didactic little story. There are these two guys sitting together in a bar in the remote Alaskan wilderness. One of the guys is religious, the other is an atheist, and the two are arguing about the existence of God with that special intensity that comes after about the fourth beer. And the atheist says: "Look, it's not like I don't have actual reasons for not believing in God. It's not like I haven't ever experimented with the whole God and prayer thing. Just last month I got caught away from the camp in that terrible blizzard, and I was totally lost and I couldn't see a thing, and it was 50 below, and so I tried it: I fell to my knees in the snow and cried out 'Oh, God, if there is a God, I'm lost in this blizzard, and I'm gonna die if you don't help me.'" And now, in the bar, the religious guy looks at the atheist all puzzled. "Well then you must believe now," he says, "After all, here you are, alive." The atheist just rolls his eyes. "No, man, all that was was a couple Eskimos happened to come wandering by and showed me the way back to camp."
It's easy to run this story through kind of a standard liberal arts analysis: the exact same experience can mean two totally different things to two different people, given those people's two different belief templates and two different ways of constructing meaning from experience. Because we prize tolerance and diversity of belief, nowhere in our liberal arts analysis do we want to claim that one guy's interpretation is true and the other guy's is false or bad. Which is fine, except we also never end up talking about just where these individual templates and beliefs come from. Meaning, where they come from INSIDE the two guys. As if a person's most basic orientation toward the world, and the meaning of his experience were somehow just hard-wired, like height or shoe-size; or automatically absorbed from the culture, like language. As if how we construct meaning were not actually a matter of personal, intentional choice. Plus, there's the whole matter of arrogance. The nonreligious guy is so totally certain in his dismissal of the possibility that the passing Eskimos had anything to do with his prayer for help. True, there are plenty of religious people who seem arrogant and certain of their own interpretations, too. They're probably even more repulsive than atheists, at least to most of us. But religious dogmatists' problem is exactly the same as the story's unbeliever: blind certainty, a close-mindedness that amounts to an imprisonment so total that the prisoner doesn't even know he's locked up.
The point here is that I think this is one part of what teaching me how to think is really supposed to mean. To be just a little less arrogant. To have just a little critical awareness about myself and my certainties. Because a huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded. I have learned this the hard way, as I predict you graduates will, too.
Here is just one example of the total wrongness of something I tend to be automatically sure of: everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute centre of the universe; the realest, most vivid and important person in existence. We rarely think about this sort of natural, basic self-centredness because it's so socially repulsive. But it's pretty much the same for all of us. It is our default setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth. Think about it: there is no experience you have had that you are not the absolute centre of. The world as you experience it is there in front of YOU or behind YOU, to the left or right of YOU, on YOUR TV or YOUR monitor. And so on. Other people's thoughts and feelings have to be communicated to you somehow, but your own are so immediate, urgent, real.
Please don't worry that I'm getting ready to lecture you about compassion or other-directedness or all the so-called virtues. This is not a matter of virtue. It's a matter of my choosing to do the work of somehow altering or getting free of my natural, hard-wired default setting which is to be deeply and literally self-centered and to see and interpret everything through this lens of self. People who can adjust their natural default setting this way are often described as being "well-adjusted", which I suggest to you is not an accidental term.
Given the triumphant academic setting here, an obvious question is how much of this work of adjusting our default setting involves actual knowledge or intellect. This question gets very tricky. Probably the most dangerous thing about an academic education--least in my own case--is that it enables my tendency to over-intellectualise stuff, to get lost in abstract argument inside my head, instead of simply paying attention to what is going on right in front of me, paying attention to what is going on inside me.
As I'm sure you guys know by now, it is extremely difficult to stay alert and attentive, instead of getting hypnotised by the constant monologue inside your own head (may be happening right now). Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliché about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliché about "the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master".
This, like many clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth. It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in: the head. They shoot the terrible master. And the truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger.
And I submit that this is what the real, no bullshit value of your liberal arts education is supposed to be about: how to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone day in and day out. That may sound like hyperbole, or abstract nonsense. Let's get concrete. The plain fact is that you graduating seniors do not yet have any clue what "day in day out" really means. There happen to be whole, large parts of adult American life that nobody talks about in commencement speeches. One such part involves boredom, routine and petty frustration. The parents and older folks here will know all too well what I'm talking about.
By way of example, let's say it's an average adult day, and you get up in the morning, go to your challenging, white-collar, college-graduate job, and you work hard for eight or ten hours, and at the end of the day you're tired and somewhat stressed and all you want is to go home and have a good supper and maybe unwind for an hour, and then hit the sack early because, of course, you have to get up the next day and do it all again. But then you remember there's no food at home. You haven't had time to shop this week because of your challenging job, and so now after work you have to get in your car and drive to the supermarket. It's the end of the work day and the traffic is apt to be: very bad. So getting to the store takes way longer than it should, and when you finally get there, the supermarket is very crowded, because of course it's the time of day when all the other people with jobs also try to squeeze in some grocery shopping. And the store is hideously lit and infused with soul-killing muzak or corporate pop and it's pretty much the last place you want to be but you can't just get in and quickly out; you have to wander all over the huge, over-lit store's confusing aisles to find the stuff you want and you have to manoeuvre your junky cart through all these other tired, hurried people with carts (et cetera, et cetera, cutting stuff out because this is a long ceremony) and eventually you get all your supper supplies, except now it turns out there aren't enough check-out lanes open even though it's the end-of-the-day rush. So the checkout line is incredibly long, which is stupid and infuriating. But you can't take your frustration out on the frantic lady working the register, who is overworked at a job whose daily tedium and meaninglessness surpasses the imagination of any of us here at a prestigious college.
But anyway, you finally get to the checkout line's front, and you pay for your food, and you get told to "Have a nice day" in a voice that is the absolute voice of death. Then you have to take your creepy, flimsy, plastic bags of groceries in your cart with the one crazy wheel that pulls maddeningly to the left, all the way out through the crowded, bumpy, littery parking lot, and then you have to drive all the way home through slow, heavy, SUV-intensive, rush-hour traffic, et cetera et cetera.
Everyone here has done this, of course. But it hasn't yet been part of you graduates' actual life routine, day after week after month after year.
But it will be. And many more dreary, annoying, seemingly meaningless routines besides. But that is not the point. The point is that petty, frustrating crap like this is exactly where the work of choosing is gonna come in. Because the traffic jams and crowded aisles and long checkout lines give me time to think, and if I don't make a conscious decision about how to think and what to pay attention to, I'm gonna be pissed and miserable every time I have to shop. Because my natural default setting is the certainty that situations like this are really all about me. About MY hungriness and MY fatigue and MY desire to just get home, and it's going to seem for all the world like everybody else is just in my way. And who are all these people in my way? And look at how repulsive most of them are, and how stupid and cow-like and dead-eyed and nonhuman they seem in the checkout line, or at how annoying and rude it is that people are talking loudly on cell phones in the middle of the line. And look at how deeply and personally unfair this is.
Or, of course, if I'm in a more socially conscious liberal arts form of my default setting, I can spend time in the end-of-the-day traffic being disgusted about all the huge, stupid, lane-blocking SUV's and Hummers and V-12 pickup trucks, burning their wasteful, selfish, 40-gallon tanks of gas, and I can dwell on the fact that the patriotic or religious bumper-stickers always seem to be on the biggest, most disgustingly selfish vehicles, driven by the ugliest [responding here to loud applause] (this is an example of how NOT to think, though) most disgustingly selfish vehicles, driven by the ugliest, most inconsiderate and aggressive drivers. And I can think about how our children's children will despise us for wasting all the future's fuel, and probably screwing up the climate, and how spoiled and stupid and selfish and disgusting we all are, and how modern consumer society just sucks, and so forth and so on.
You get the idea.
If I choose to think this way in a store and on the freeway, fine. Lots of us do. Except thinking this way tends to be so easy and automatic that it doesn't have to be a choice. It is my natural default setting. It's the automatic way that I experience the boring, frustrating, crowded parts of adult life when I'm operating on the automatic, unconscious belief that I am the centre of the world, and that my immediate needs and feelings are what should determine the world's priorities.
The thing is that, of course, there are totally different ways to think about these kinds of situations. In this traffic, all these vehicles stopped and idling in my way, it's not impossible that some of these people in SUV's have been in horrible auto accidents in the past, and now find driving so terrifying that their therapist has all but ordered them to get a huge, heavy SUV so they can feel safe enough to drive. Or that the Hummer that just cut me off is maybe being driven by a father whose little child is hurt or sick in the seat next to him, and he's trying to get this kid to the hospital, and he's in a bigger, more legitimate hurry than I am: it is actually I who am in HIS way.
Or I can choose to force myself to consider the likelihood that everyone else in the supermarket's checkout line is just as bored and frustrated as I am, and that some of these people probably have harder, more tedious and painful lives than I do.
Again, please don't think that I'm giving you moral advice, or that I'm saying you are supposed to think this way, or that anyone expects you to just automatically do it. Because it's hard. It takes will and effort, and if you are like me, some days you won't be able to do it, or you just flat out won't want to.
But most days, if you're aware enough to give yourself a choice, you can choose to look differently at this fat, dead-eyed, over-made-up lady who just screamed at her kid in the checkout line. Maybe she's not usually like this. Maybe she's been up three straight nights holding the hand of a husband who is dying of bone cancer. Or maybe this very lady is the low-wage clerk at the motor vehicle department, who just yesterday helped your spouse resolve a horrific, infuriating, red-tape problem through some small act of bureaucratic kindness. Of course, none of this is likely, but it's also not impossible. It just depends what you want to consider. If you're automatically sure that you know what reality is, and you are operating on your default setting, then you, like me, probably won't consider possibilities that aren't annoying and miserable. But if you really learn how to pay attention, then you will know there are other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down.
Not that that mystical stuff is necessarily true. The only thing that's capital-T True is that you get to decide how you're gonna try to see it.
This, I submit, is the freedom of a real education, of learning how to be well-adjusted. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't. You get to decide what to worship.
Because here's something else that's weird but true: in the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship--be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles--is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.
Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they're evil or sinful, it's that they're unconscious. They are default settings.
They're the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that's what you're doing.
And the so-called real world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the so-called real world of men and money and power hums merrily along in a pool of fear and anger and frustration and craving and worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom all to be lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the centre of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talk about much in the great outside world of wanting and achieving.... The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.
That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.
I know that this stuff probably doesn't sound fun and breezy or grandly inspirational the way a commencement speech is supposed to sound. What it is, as far as I can see, is the capital-T Truth, with a whole lot of rhetorical niceties stripped away. You are, of course, free to think of it whatever you wish. But please don't just dismiss it as just some finger-wagging Dr Laura sermon. None of this stuff is really about morality or religion or dogma or big fancy questions of life after death.
The capital-T Truth is about life BEFORE death.
It is about the real value of a real education, which has almost nothing to do with knowledge, and everything to do with simple awareness; awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, all the time, that we have to keep reminding ourselves over and over:
"This is water."
"This is water."
It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive in the adult world day in and day out. Which means yet another grand cliché turns out to be true: your education really IS the job of a lifetime. And it commences: now.
I wish you way more than luck.
Picture credit: Steve Rhodes/flickr

The Teacher Dropout Crisis

by Aly Seidel /NPR.org

July 18, 2014 5:03 PM ET

A new report suggest there's a dropout crisis among the nation's teachers.

iStockphoto.com

 

Worried about your teenager dropping out of school? You might also want to worry about his teacher.
"Roughly half a million U.S. teachers either ," reads a new report from the , an advocacy group. And this kind of turnover comes at a steep cost, not only to students but to districts: up to $2.2 billion a year.

There were more than 3 million full-time teachers in 2013, , meaning nearly 15 percent of the workforce is moving or leaving every year. And, the study says, at-risk students suffer the most.
Nearly 20 percent of teachers at high-poverty schools leave every year, a rate 50 percent higher than at more affluent schools. That's one of every five teachers, gone by next September.

As for that $2.2 billion price tag, it's money largely spent on human resources, says Jason Amos, Vice President of Communications for the Alliance. That includes recruiting and processing new hires, along with money spent on induction, training and development.

The report points to a variety of reasons for the turnover, including low salaries and a lack of support for many teachers. Which helps to explain why those most likely to quit are also the least experienced: 40 to 50 percent of new teachers leave within their first five years on the job.

Are Charter Schools Todays Version of Sub Prime Mortgages?

As with all research that foregrounds actual tracking either in schools or between them—as is the case here in Chicago—is that rather than improving schools, they just sort or track kids better and in ways that are predictably stratified by race and class.  Moreover, this hierarchy that gets created by this sorting  is not lost on the children themselves.  

So much for "choice" systems and our so-called "meritocratic society" when choice is actually constrained by our states' cost-cutting agendas, poverty, segregation, low-community investment, and thusly, capacity to implement the kinds of changes to policy and practice that our communities want and need.

This should be of concern to us in Texas in the wake of House Bill 5 that essentially also tracks kids in schools by design.  Tracking is not new, but is in fact very historic, meaning that state policy has gotten layered over an already pernicious problem in education.


-Angela


JULY 17, 2014

The Big Sort: How Chicago’s school choice system is tracking kids into different high schools based on achievement

By Linda Lutton

The Big Sort: How Chicago’s school choice system is tracking kids into different high schools based on achievement

By Linda Lutton

This story also appeared at:

This spring, at grammar schools all across Chicago, thousands of eighth graders donned caps and gowns and walked across auditorium stages to receive their elementary school diplomas. This fall, the graduates from each of those schools will scatter—to more than 130 different Chicago public high schools, and counting.
But who goes where?
Over the past decade, Chicago has opened dozens of new high schools, and will open more this fall. The school district is trying to expand the number of “quality school options” and offer students a choice of where to go to school. And in many ways, Chicago high schools seem to be improving. Graduation rates are inching up. The city now boasts five of the top ten high schools in the state.
But a new WBEZ analysis shows an unintended consequence of the choice system: students of different ability levels are being sorted into separate high schools.
WBEZ analyzed incoming test scores for freshmen from the fall of 2012, the most recent year data is available. That year, the district mandated that every high school give students an “EXPLORE” exam about a month into the school year.
The 26,340 scores range from painfully low to perfect.
But WBEZ found few schools in the city enroll the full span of students. Instead, low-scoring students and high-scoring students in particular are attending completely different high schools. Other schools enroll a glut of average kids.
Think of it as academic tracking—not within schools, but between them.

Marshall High School English teacher James Dorrell sees pros and cons to a school filled with low achievers. He says a re-staffing and infusion of funds in 2010 has made Marshall a much better school, but it still struggles. (Photo: Linda Lutton/WBEZ)

The findings raise some of the same long-running questions educators have debated about the academic and social implications of in-school tracking. But they also raise questions about whether the city’s school choice system is actually creating better schools, or whether it’s simply sorting certain students out and leaving the weakest learners in separate, struggling schools.
WBEZ’s analysis shows:

• Serious brain drain. The city’s selective “test-in” high schools—among the best in the state—capture nearly all the top students in the school system. There were 104 kids who scored a perfect 25 on the EXPLORE exam. One hundred of them—96 percent–enrolled in just six of the city’s 130 high schools (Northside, Whitney Young, Payton, Lane, Lincoln Park, and Jones). In fact, 80 percent of perfect scorers went to just three schools. Among the city’s top 2 percent of test takers (those scoring a 23, 24, or 25 on their exam), 87 percent are at those same six schools. Chicago has proposed creating an 11th selective enrollment high school, Barack Obama College Prep, to be located in the same area as the schools already attracting the city’s top performers.
• Clustering of low-performing students. Fifteen percent of the city’s high schools are populated with vastly disproportionate numbers of low-performing students. More than 80 percent of incoming students at these schools score below the district average. The schools enroll 10 percent of all Chicago high school students.
• Black students are most likely to be affected by sorting. WBEZ’s analysis shows African American students are doubly segregated, first by race, then by achievement. Of the 40 most academically narrow schools in Chicago, 34 are predominantly black. Even though just 40 percent of students in the public schools are African American, Chicago has black high schools for low achievers, black high schools for average kids, black test-in high schools for high achievers.
• Within neighborhoods, more sorting. Schools within a particular community may appear to be attracting the same students demographically, but WBEZ finds significant sorting by achievement. Especially in neighborhoods on the South and West sides, the comprehensive neighborhood high school has become a repository for low performers; nearby charters or other new schools are attracting far greater percentages of above-average kids.
• The dozens of new high schools Chicago has opened since 2004 fall on both sides of the “sorting” spectrum. New schools with the widest range of incoming test performers include Ogden International IB on the Near North Side; Goode, a Southwest Side magnet school with preference for neighborhood students; and Chicago High School for the Arts, which admits students based on arts auditions. New schools showing the least amount of academic diversity include Daniel Hale Williams (where incoming students score at about the district average), as well as low-scoring DuSable Leadership Academy Charter (in the same building as Williams, ordered in 2013 to begin phasing out), Ace Tech Charter, and Austin Business and Entrepreneurial High School.

The idea behind school choice is to let families pick the type of school they want for their kids—that’s something more affluent Americans can do by moving or by paying for private school. Choice is also seen as a way to improve all schools by injecting more market-based competition into the school system.
But the sorting of students by achievement into separate high schools seems to be an unintended consequence.

“It certainly wasn’t a goal,” says Paul Hill, the founder of the Center on Reinventing Public Education at the University of Washington, and the architect of the “portfolio” school choice model Chicago and some other big cities are following. Hill says he and others were concerned about sorting based on race or class, but dramatic sorting by achievement level was not foreseen.
Chicago schools CEO Barbara Byrd-Bennett, who has been on the job for a year and a half, says she is aware that students are clustering in different high schools, and concerned about it.
“There’s no research to support [sorting],” said Byrd-Bennett, who said she, Mayor Rahm Emanuel and the school board “come from a very different belief system,” one that opposes sorting students by achievement level. “What we believe is you’ve got to elevate, raise the level and the quality of instruction at all of our schools, including our neighborhood (schools),” said Byrd-Bennett. However, she rejected the notion that sorting is an outcome of school choice or Chicago’s rapid expansion in the number of high schools.
“This has got to be a district of choice. If I choose to go to my neighborhood school, it’s because it ought to be a great school as well,” said Byrd-Bennett.
New York City and New Orleans see a similar dynamic
Despite most New Orleans schools being open to students of all academic levels, “high performing students tend to go to high-performing schools, and low-performing students tend to go to low-performing schools,” says Andrew McEachin, a North Carolina State University professor who has studied school choice in the now all-charter city. “So even though it’s a choice-based district, you see that there’s kind of like a tiered system, where people are choosing schools similar to their background and achievement levels.”

Click to try the interactive graphic.

Sorting is also is happening in New York City, according to Sean Corcoran, professor of educational economics at New York University. He found students tend to choose a high school that looks like their middle school in terms of race, poverty and achievement. “So you ended up having a pretty stratified system of high schools, where high achieving kids tended to cluster together and low achieving kids cluster together as well.”
Why does this happen? Researchers say “achievement” may be an indication of the resources students have at home. Higher performing students’ families are better at getting information about school quality, navigating the system, and securing things like transportation to school or test prep for entrance exams.
In Chicago, the city’s top 20 schools on the ACT exam are largely the same as the list of schools with the highest incoming freshman scores. It’s the same story for the bottom 20 schools.
McEachin and others say the consequences of sorting could reverberate to other aspects of the school system. “What is the unintended consequence of this ability grouping on the teacher labor market?” asks McEachin. “Is it going to make it even harder to get good teachers to the lowest-achieving students?”
Sorting by performance isn’t new in Chicago Public Schools, and isn’t unique to choice systems. Some of the city’s toughest high schools have not attracted generally higher performing middle-class students for decades. But with choice and a dramatic expansion in the number of high schools, parents and counselors say sorting is becoming more pronounced.
Students know the hierarchy

After eighth grade graduation, Chicago students scatter to 130 different high schools. Test scores show that high-performing students and low-performing students in particular are clustering into separate schools under the city’s school choice model. (Photo: Linda Lutton/WBEZ)

In Chicago, students can tell you which high schools are for which students. On a sunny afternoon before school let out in June, kids at Lane Tech—one of the city’s selective schools— describe the landscape.
“If you get straight As and you do really good on testing, the school you’ll probably get accepted into is Northside, Walter Payton, Whitney Young,” says freshman Amber Hunt.
What about the B students? “Schools with IB programs sometimes take solid Bs,” says Amber. “Charter schools are kind of like if you’re average, or slightly below average.”
Lots of students give the same answers. Ninth grader Evelyn Almodovar says she knows “C” students who went to private high schools because “they didn’t want to be embarrassed about going to a school that’s known as having worse students.”
And what about the lowest performers, those who struggle the most in grammar school? They go to neighborhood schools, every student tells me. “Low-ranking schools,” says freshman Anais Roman, naming a neighborhood school and low-scoring charter in her area.
Many elementary school counselors identify the same hierarchy as the kids do (one grammar school even posts its graduates’ “high school destinations” in the same basic A-to-F order).
In an indication of just how segmented high schools have become, a counselor said her elementary school sends “average” students to a nearby high school that’s seen as safe, that admits no low performers, and scores at about the district average. But she said she would not recommend the school for her top students—even though they’re eligible to attend. “I don’t think they would offer the academic rigor,” she said of the school.
A number of counselors lamented the sorting.
“We look at the suburbs, and we look at much of the rest of the country—there’s one school to go to based on your address, and that neighborhood high school would have all sorts of different programs available,” says Walsh Elementary counselor Kristy Brooks.
Brooks says she sees positive aspects to Chicago’s high school choice system—kids leave segregated neighborhoods and find new classmates and opportunities, students push themselves to get into top schools. But she says she sees neighborhood schools being left with low-performing students who didn’t have the academic performance or the help to get to another school. “I think in the long run it would be better to have equity in all schools,” says Brooks.
But if all students were in a single comprehensive high school, wouldn’t they be tracked within that school anyway? Does it matter if they’re in separate schools?
“In part it doesn’t matter—it’s disastrous either way,” says Kevin Welner, director of the National Education Policy Center at the University of Colorado at Boulder and an opponent of tracking.
“But in part it matters because once we get to that point of between-school tracking, it’s even harder to try to address,” says Welner. If we’re going to reform the system and make it more equitable, starting with the kids in the same schools is a good first step.”
Top performers benefit from sorting

Marshall High School freshman Akeem Lofton graduated from a nearby grammar school and says he enrolled at Marshall for the school’s budding chess team, which made it to state this year. Akeem says he also applied to Westinghouse, a nearby selective enrollment school, but he wasn’t offered a seat. (Photo: Linda Lutton/WBEZ)

For many students at Lane Tech, this is the first time they’ve attended school with all high achievers.
“It raises the standards a lot,” says freshman Paradise Cosey. Amber Hunt describes being around high-scoring classmates as “good peer pressure. Everybody’s really focused on their grades.”
Another freshman says she feels more “comfortable” at 4,000-student Lane Tech than she did at her elementary school; she says this is the first year since fifth grade that classmates haven’t asked to copy her work.
High-performing students are like gold in a school. Everybody does better around them—including other high-performing students. And it’s not just about test scores. The biggest predictor of whether a school is safe and orderly is students’ academic achievement. Having top performers makes an entire school easier to run.
Paul Hill says some stratification doesn’t bother him. “One thing that this just demonstrates yet again is that human beings just love status hierarchies and we’ll create them any way we can.” Hill says Americans believe in equality, but they also believe in elite schools.
“But when it trickles down to the lowest-performing kids are in the schools with the least of everything, then that’s not tolerable,” says Hill.
The view from Marshall High, a school of “last resort”
At Marshall Metropolitan High School, 86 percent of students come in scoring below the district average. Some can’t read.
Marshall, the attendance-area high school for a big swath of Chicago’s West Side, is among the 15 percent of Chicago high schools enrolling vastly disproportionate numbers of low achievers.
“Well, I didn’t actually choose to come to Marshall,” says rising sophomore Kadeesha Williams. “My mom said because it was in the area.”
Kadeesha had wanted to go to Marine Military Academy down the street. “I wanted to be a Marine, so I wanted to get the type of education they get so I can get ready,” she said. But the family turned her application in late. “We went to take a test. But my mom, she lost the paperwork.”
Kadeesha’s mom says the paperwork was actually lost at the school—they had no record of Kadeesha taking the test, she says.
Kadeesha is liking Marshall. “Marshall’s a good school,” she says. “Because the teachers here, they’re very into you. They’re a lot of help.”

Students lead a discussion in a freshman English class at Lincoln Park High School. (Photo: Linda Lutton/WBEZ)

Other students say they came to Marshall because family went here. Some come to play for Marshall’s storied basketball team or, lately, the school’s budding chess team.
Teacher James Dorrell says for others, “it’s sort of like a school of last resort. They try to enroll in charter schools or selective enrollments, and once they can’t get in, they would come here” — though he sees Marshall as much more than that. About half of Marshall students come from the neighborhood, the other half from outside the attendance boundary.
Dorrell says after a re-staffing and infusion of money in 2010, Marshall is hugely improved. The entire school is set up to help the struggling kids who enroll here. Freshmen have double periods of English and math. Many take reading—a subject other high schools don’t even offer.
But more students still drop out than graduate from Marshall. And test scores have barely moved.
Marshall raises a question at the heart of tracking—and at the heart of Chicago’s system of school choice. Is it better to group low performers together? Better for whom?
“The pros are yes, we can have these interventions,” says Dorrell. “The cons would be–you would want some high achievers because they sort of raise the bar, and other kids could see what it takes to be successful. So I think having kids with higher test scores would benefit all of this group. But I also see the benefit of having these kids…tracked by ability.”
Marshall is open to all students in the neighborhood. But there are no freshman honors courses, no AP classes (the school is trying to change that). There’s little to attract higher achievers.
There are four new high schools within a mile of Marshall. Two are military schools with minimum test score requirements, keeping out low performers. The third is a Noble Street charter school, which requires much more effort to enroll than Marshall. (Parents need to come to an information session on a particular evening in order to obtain an application, for instance. Students must write an essay.) At the two military schools, 48 percent and 64 percent of incoming students score above average. At the Noble Street charter, 41 percent of students enter above average. At Marshall, the figure is nearly three times less — just 14 percent of incoming kids score above average.
WBEZ’s analysis shows that the story of wide disparities in the preparation of incoming students is repeated in neighborhood after neighborhood in Chicago—and raises questions about whether the city’s school choice system is creating better schools, or simply pulling away better performing students, leaving the low achievers segregated into separate, failing schools.
Michael Milkie, the founder and CEO of the Noble Network of Charter Schools, Chicago’s largest high school charter network, sees the entire question of sorting as a “red herring.”
“I think the most important part by far are the adults in the building, their ability to deliver instruction, and the school culture. Those are the things that far outweigh whether you have a concentration of certain learners or a wide variety of learners,” says Milkie. All his schools attract far more high performers than neighborhood schools in the same communities.
Lincoln Park High School: academically diverse, and de-tracking
Lincoln Park High School is an anomaly in Chicago. It enrolls everyone. A 30-year old International Baccalaureate (IB) program attracts elite students. Arts programs draw other kids. The attendance zone guarantees seats to students from both wealthy and poor families.
Principal Michael Boraz likes to say this is the most diverse high school in CPS, and maybe in the country.
“Not just in terms of our racial and ethnic and neighborhood makeup,” says Boraz, “but also academically. We have kids from the 15th percentile rank in their standardized test scores, all the way up to the 99th. So it really is truly a diverse school in just about every sense.”
School is about more than academics, says Boraz. It’s where kids learn to live and work together. And now there’s a big effort inside Lincoln Park to mix kids more.
International Baccalaureate classes once reserved for the elite were opened up to everyone last year. So many kids took the IB math final the school had to set up the test in the gym. Boraz tweeted out a picture of 300 desks.
One morning before school let out, students in a freshman English class at Lincoln Park took turns leading a class discussion on Richard Wright’s Black Boy. The class included low performers and high achievers.
Teacher Mark Whetstone said it was hard to teach a class with such “extreme” diversity, but says he enjoyed it “immensely.”
“And I think more importantly the kids at all levels benefitted from the makeup of that class,” says Whetstone. “I feel like my lower performing students rose to the challenge. They had great examples from their peers around them at all times. And at the same time, for some of my higher performing students, it was good for them to work with someone generally not at their level. To be able to interact, and also to be able to take a lead in the classroom.”
University of Chicago researchers from the Consortium on Chicago School Research are working on a report about the sorting that’s happening among Chicago schools. One of the authors, Elaine Allensworth, says Chicago needs to decide what it wants—a system that sorts students, or a system that mixes them together more.
“The solution is thinking about where we want to be as a society—what kind of system do we want—and how do we make that work for everyone,” says Allensworth.
Allensworth says researchers already know one thing: whatever approach Chicago chooses, schools need to increase supports for the lowest performing students. If kids are mixed, lower achievers need help keeping up so they don’t get frustrated and give up, and so they don’t hold back their high-flying peers. And if Chicago decides to keep sorting students by achievement, then the schools filled with the lowest performers are going to need a lot of extra resources.

Are the Kids Showing Up at the Border Really Refugees?

"I had a body cut up in a plastic bag left on my doorstep as a warning" just may qualify as grounds to flee.

—By Maddie Oatman

| Thu Jul. 17, 2014 6:00 AM EDT

Guatemalan migrant Gladys Chinoy, 14, waits with more than 500 other migrants alongside a freight train in Chiapas, Mexico. Rebecca Blackwell/AP

Ever since unaccompanied child migrants became a national news story six weeks ago, many people have started asking: Is this an immigration crisis, or is it a refugee crisis? In response, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees said last week it hopes to designate many of the Central Americans fleeing regional violence and gang extortion as refugees.
The announcement comes amid mounting evidence of the horrific conditions causing so many people to flee Honduras, El Salvador, and parts of Guatemala: kids escaping rape, gang recruitment, and murder all around them, as Pulitzer Prize-winning author Sonia Nazario detailed in a chilling op-ed in last Sunday's New York Times. With this new designation, the UNHCR hopes to pressure the United States to give more immigrants, including many of the 70,000-plus unaccompanied minors likely to arrive at the US border this year, political asylum.

• 70,000 Kids Will Show Up Alone at Our Border This Year. What Happens to Them?
• What's Next for the Children We Deport?
• Map: These Are the Places Central American Child Migrants Are Fleeing
• Why Our Immigration Courts Can't Handle the Child Migrant Crisis
• GOP Congressman Who Warned About Unvaccinated Migrants Opposed Vaccination

See MoJo's full coverage of the surge of unaccompanied child migrants from Central America.

But if the UNHCR were to make such a move, it still would have no legal significance for the United States. So is it really that important? Yes and no, says Michelle Brané, director of migrant rights at the Women's Refugee Commission. Brané and I talked about what a "refugee" designation could mean, and other ways the US can help ease the pain for immigrants—particularly those who've experienced targeted violence. Here are nine key takeaways from our conversation:
1. Casting this as a "refugee situation" isn't necessarily the important part.
"This population contains within it many children and mothers and parents bringing their children who qualify for refugee protection or for protection under international law. Whether you formally call it a 'refugee situation'—that to me is less relevant than acknowledging that this is a population that is being driven out of their country. And their government is not willing or able to protect them."

"Fifty-eight percent of the kids said, 'I received a death threat'."

2. It's not just general violence and unrest that's causing people to flee Central America and Mexico.
"It's true that general conditions of war or of danger are not sufficient to qualify for asylum. But the UN agency of refugees, in interviewing 400 of these children, for over an hour each, they found that 58 percent expressed a targeted fear. Not just, 'I was scared because my neighborhood was dangerous.' Fifty-eight percent of the kids said, 'I received a death threat.' Or, 'I had a body cut up in a plastic bag left on my doorstep as a warning.' One hundred percent come from a dangerous place. That we know. But 58 percent were targeted. That's the piece that people are not getting."
3. Using gang violence as grounds for international protection is not a novel idea.
"The UN committee for refugees has recognized for many years now that gang violence absolutely qualifies, depending on the circumstances, as persecution and as qualifying for status under the refugee commission. And the US has granted many claims. People talk about this being difficult to do. It is difficult, especially if you don't have an attorney. But children with attorneys requesting asylum are winning those cases. It's absolutely a grounds that has been accepted in the US. It's not something revolutionary."
4. Yes, this is a crisis—but we shouldn't throw our hands up.
"The numbers are small if you compare them to refugee situations worldwide. Like look at Syria. There's over a million Syrian refugees in Turkey. There's over 2 million Syrian refugees in Jordan. Those countries are tiny compared to the US, and the numbers are much bigger. It's absolutely our responsibility as the United States to manage this and handle it in a way that does not roll back protections. We have been the ones to stand up there and say to Turkey:' You've got to take these refugees'. For us to say, because of this small number, 'Oh, maybe we'll reconsider,' is crazy. It's absolutely manageable."
5. Very few migrants are faking persecution in order to get to stay in the United States.
"The US has excellent asylum screening procedures. The problem is, you need to beef up the system in order to accommodate these numbers. But that's something we need to do anyway. I know there's been a lot of allegations and concern that it's a system that can easily be gamed, and you can fake it—but it actually it's quite a rigorous process. There's several screening hurdles you have to get over, and then you have to go in front of a judge, and then there's security clearance."
6. And many of them migrate for multiple reasons.
"When people say they have family here, yes, that's true. But that's not what made them come entirely. Why are they coming now? A smuggler offered them passage to the US. Is the smuggler the reason you left? Part of it. But really, the reason you were looking for a way to come, again, goes back to the violence. Poverty, also. The majority of the kids coming also are experiencing poverty in their home country. Is that the main reason? Maybe, maybe not. It's combined.
"One interesting Vanderbilt study found that people who'd been victim of a crime were more likely to migrate than those who had not. It also found that people who feel their government is not responsive to their needs were much more likely to migrate than someone who's government didn't protect them. When you combine those two factors—both been a victim of a crime and felt their government couldn't protect them—they're exponentially more likely to migrate. It's always a combination of factors."
7. Requiring international protection, or refugee designation, for more migrants is the right start—but the US can't solve this crisis alone.
"Mexico also has to acknowledge that many of these children need protection. Mexico also has very good asylum laws on the books. What they don't have is the resources and the infrastructure to support implementing those policies. Frankly, I think one of the things the US should be doing, and could do if they talk about this in the context of a refugee crisis, is to provide support regionally, not just to Mexico but also to Belize, to Costa Rica, to Panama, all of the countries that are also seeing influxes of these children. Provide them with the support to implement their protection policies consistent with international law. And not all of these kids have to come to the US, right? The burden can sort of be shared in the region."
8. We don't have to wait to act until migrants get to our borders—we could process them before they leave their country.
"We've done that before: with the Vietnamese in the past, with Haitians, and with Cubans. The first thing that needs to happen is you have to set up what the criteria are going to be; who qualifies to be sort of preprocessed. You could limit it to kids with strong family connection to the US, who have been targeted and pass some sort of criteria. It can be done administratively. You do not need legislation to do that. And in doing it you basically cut out the smugglers. If you process the kids internally, they can get on a plane for $300 and fly over here—they don't have to pay $3,000 to a criminal organization. It really undercuts the smugglers and trafficking operation in a huge way.

"If you process the kids [in their own country], they can get on a plane for $300 and fly over here—they don't have to pay $3,000 to a criminal organization."

"If children see there's a legal way that's safer to come—without taking this horrible journey—maybe they'll wait a little bit. And at the same time, you're building up the child welfare system and funding safehouses and anti-corruption campaigns. Maybe they'll see things get a little bit better; I can wait, I don't have to leave today. You slow the flow at that end. Not just by deporting people summarily, without a hearing. If you do that, and that's all you do, they're going to turn right around and come back."
9. Even if Obama's request for emergency supplemental funding to deal with this crisis isn't perfect, it's better than nothing.
"While we may not agree with all the details of where some of the money is going to—it's sort of heavy on enforcement, in my view—there's no question that they desperately need this money in order to be able manage the situation and get a handle on it. Frankly, it needs to go through. Blocking it will make the situation worse. They won't have any place to hold these kids while they process them, they won't have money to process them and deport them, and they won't have money to put them on planes and send them back. So it's crazy that there's discussion about blocking it."

70,000 Kids Will Show Up Alone at Our Border This Year. What Happens to Them?

Officials have been stunned by a "surge" of unaccompanied children crossing into the United States.

—By Ian Gordon

| July/August 2014 Issue

Joseph Rodriguez

 

In a doorless desert safe house in northwestern Mexico, the drug traffickers sized up the boy—17 years old, 1,700 miles from home, gay, alone—and asked if he was too scared to strap on a load of marijuana and walk across the border into Arizona.
The kid—I'll call him Adrián—paused to consider his options. He didn't have any. Okay, he told them. He'd do it.

• What's Next for the Children We Deport?
• Map: These Are the Places Central American Child Migrants Are Fleeing
• Why Our Immigration Courts Can't Handle the Child Migrant Crisis
• GOP Congressman Who Warned About Unvaccinated Migrants Opposed Vaccination

See MoJo's full coverage of the surge of unaccompanied child migrants from Central America.

He'd grown up mostly on the streets in Guatemala City, his abusive father a crack addict and his mother everywhere but around, leaving him with a thin, green-eyed prostitute friend who would sometimes have sex with johns right there next to him. He'd seen robberies, stabbings, shootings; he'd never once set foot in a classroom. Eventually he started making a little money selling clothes and makeup in the city's colonial district. It wasn't much, but even so the Barrio 18 street gang took notice and started asking for a cut. When Adrián didn't budge, they pockmarked his tiny stall with bullets. It was time to leave.
Just like that, Adrián became part of an explosion of child migrants traveling alone to sneak into the United States, a group government officials and advocates have begun referring to, with alarm, as "the surge." The number of undocumented children—mostly teens, but some as young as five—apprehended crossing the border without parents or guardians has more than doubled in the past two years, while the number of adults caught at the border increased just 18 percent. On June 2, President Obama described it as an "urgent humanitarian situation," asking Congress for an additional $1.4 billion to deal with the influx and creating a multiagency taskforce, led by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, to coordinate the federal response.
The surge was already in full swing by the time Adrián started on his path north, in December 2012. He took a bus to the Mexico-Guatemala border, crossed the Suchiate River by inner tube into the state of Chiapas, and stole a bike to pedal to the city of Tapachula. He walked 150 miles north, making sure to skirt La Arrocera, a broad swath of scrubland known for migrant kidnappings and assaults. He slept on the doorstep of a church after finding the migrant shelter burned to the ground.
Then, in the town of Arriaga, he hopped aboard La Bestia, the infamous freight train that many migrants ride to the US border despite the often-repeated horror stories: the surging wheels that slice through people who slip trying to jump on moving boxcars, or fall off while sleeping; the thieves who go car to car with machetes or .38s; the night raids from Mexican law enforcement as well as kidnappers sent by Los Zetas.
Adrián rode La Bestia to Guadalajara, where he spent a sleepless Christmas night on a sidewalk. He got back on and rode for days until reaching Monterrey, where he was forced off the train when someone attacked him with a machete because he was gay. He fled barefoot on the trackside gravel and walked an hour to a village, where, his feet bleeding, he pleaded for a pair of shoes.
He begged for money. He sold newspapers. He even sold his body for $50. He headed north to the border at Nuevo Laredo; when he couldn't get across, he moved backward, 450 miles south to San Luis Potosí­, 200 miles west to Guadalajara once more, before heading another 1,000 miles north to the Sonora Desert, finally ending up in that decrepit safe house near the border.
So when it was time to make his final push across the line, and the traffickers asked if he was too scared to continue, Adrián said no. Fear, after all, was driving him forward.

When the Border Patrol caught Adrián a week later in the Arizona desert—he'd ditched the pot at a drop point along the way—he became one of the 38,833 unaccompanied minors apprehended by the Border Patrol in fiscal year 2013. That was a 59 percent jump from the year before, and a 142 percent increase from fiscal 2011; no one knows how many more kids avoided Border Patrol detection, or never got that far. This year, officials have told advocates they anticipate the numbers to double again, to as many as 74,000 unaccompanied children. That's equivalent to every single student in Dallas' 81 public middle and high schools getting up and walking across the border in a single year.

Although some have traveled from as far away as Sri Lanka and Tanzania, the bulk are minors from Mexico and from Central America's so-called Northern Triangle—Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador, which together account for 74 percent of the surge. Long plagued by instability and unrest, these countries have grown especially dangerous in recent years: Honduras imploded following a military coup in 2009 and now has the world's highest murder rate. El Salvador has the second-highest, despite the 2012 gang truce between Mara Salvatrucha and Barrio 18. Guatemala, new territory for the Zetas cartel, has the fifth-highest murder rate; meanwhile, the cost of tortillas has doubled as corn prices have skyrocketed due to increased American ethanol production (Guatemala imports half of its corn) and the conversion of farmland to sugarcane and oil palm for biofuel.
Many of the kids are coming to help a family in crushing poverty. Some are trying to join a parent who left years ago, before the recession and increased border enforcement slowed down adult immigration. Still others are leaving because of violence from family members and gangs. According to a report from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, 58 percent of the 400 youth the agency interviewed "had suffered, been threatened, or feared serious harm" that might merit international protection. "This is becoming less like an immigration issue and much more like a refugee issue," says Wendy Young, executive director of Kids in Need of Defense (KIND), a DC-based nonprofit that helps unaccompanied immigrant kids find pro bono legal services. "Because this really is a forced migration. This is not kids choosing voluntarily to leave."

This year, a record number of unaccompanied minors are expected to be caught at the border—74,000, as many as all the kids in Dallas' middle and high schools.

US authorities have struggled with how to handle the tens of thousands of kids who end up caught by the Border Patrol. Those coming from Mexico are taken straight back across. The rest are referred to the Department of Health and Human Services' Office of Refugee Resettlement (rather than being put in immigration detention with adults) and placed in temporary shelters while their deportation proceedings get under way.
Journalists aren't allowed into these shelters "for safety reasons," an ORR spokeswoman told me—due to concerns about trafficking victims, the agency goes to great lengths to conceal the exact locations of its facilities. It also forbids the groups that run them, including Catholic Charities and Southwest Key, from commenting on the issue. It took me a Freedom of Information Act request to obtain basic statistics, like the number of facilities (80) and the average time kids stay in the shelters (45 days in 2013, down from 72 in 2011).
Susan Terrio, a Georgetown University anthropologist, visited 19 shelters over four years before the government cut off her access. She found an almost hermetically sealed system: "The kids were never left unattended. They went to school inside, they played sports inside, and they only got out for supervised outings in the community or for medical and mental-health appointments." Maria Woltjen, director of the Young Center for Immigrant Children's Rights, says that as a result, unaccompanied children are essentially invisible: "Nobody in Chicago knows there are 400 kids detained in our midst. You walk by, and you think it's just an old nursing home, and it's actually all these immigrant kids who are detained inside."
In fiscal 2011, ORR had 53 shelters that housed 6,560 kids. By 2013, there were 80 shelters with nearly 25,000 unaccompanied children. The surge was so unexpected that when it first began, the feds temporarily put hundreds of kids in emergency dormitories at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio. According to a report from the Women's Refugee Commission, "the facility looked and felt like an emergency hurricane shelter." As recently as May, shelters in South Texas were so crowded that ORR was sending hundreds of kids to Lackland, which has room for 1,000.
The majority of shelters are in border states, often hours from big cities, which means it's even harder for kids to find legal representation and stave off being sent back to the dangerous situations they fled. When KIND first started its pro bono work, Young says, it estimated that three-quarters of all unaccompanied kids received no legal representation. KIND was able to get that number to 50 percent, she says, but given the influx, "I fear now that we've slipped backwards quite dramatically."
Nonprofits like KIND say the government should appoint lawyers for unaccompanied children, noting that many actually qualify for legal status via asylum, special immigrant juvenile status (for abandoned, abused, or neglected kids), or visas set aside for victims of crimes or trafficking. But proposals in that vein, by lawmakers including Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.), have gone nowhere.
In mid-December, I visited the immigration court in Harlingen, Texas, a squat beige building that sits in the shadow of crisscrossing highway overpasses a few miles from the Rio Grande. The area is home to the nation's highest concentration of children in immigrant shelters, and the Harlingen court is where those kids appear before an immigration judge. Inside Judge Howard Achtsam's courtroom, the Homeland Security attorney sat at a table piled high with files. One of the four children who appeared before Achtsam that day represented himself; another appeared with his attorney from ProBAR, the American Bar Association's pro bono legal project in the Lower Rio Grande Valley. Attorneys were representing two clients who weren't there, thanks in part to ORR's new emphasis on quickly reunifying kids with family members, often in faraway cities, as they await deportation proceedings. (Some 90 percent of children placed in shelters end up with US-based family.) While that is generally a good thing, said ProBAR director Kimi Jackson—certainly better than the months-long shelter stays that were common as recently as last year—it means that attorneys are less likely to be able to meet and interview kids. It also means that the government has less time to vet the people claiming to be the kids' relatives.
What happens to the children, I asked Jackson, once they go off ProBAR's radar? "I don't have data," she told me, shaking her head. "I don't know that anyone does."

Toting a walkie-talkie and chatting as she goes, Julie Kessler parts a sea of teenagers with gelled hairdos, cheap cologne, and skinny jeans. She's got an eye out for colors—red for Norteños, blue for Sureños, both banned—and for making out. "There's too much kissing for my taste," she tells me with a smirk, right before she pulls aside a boy for his red T-shirt. She hands him a gray one, emblazoned with the San Francisco County Sheriff's Department logo, that hangs loose on his skinny frame. "Off you go!" she says.
Kessler is the principal of San Francisco International High School, a public school for newcomers in the city's Mission District: 100 percent of its students are recent immigrants and English-language learners. Spanish- and Chinese-speaking students dominate, though 14 other languages are represented. "Most schools are like, 'I don't know what to do with this population! Their needs are so different from the rest of my class!'" Kessler says. Here, "they are the rest of the class." She estimates that about a fifth of her students immigrated alone.
This is where I first met Adrián. Back when he was apprehended in Tucson, he sat for a spell in a heavily air-conditioned Border Patrol holding cell known as a hielera ("ice box"). Then he stayed at a nearby ORR shelter for a few months before they asked him where he wanted to go next. With no family in the States, he chose San Francisco, and that's how he ended up at a youth shelter in the city. His social worker later connected him to a pro bono attorney. (He told me he won legal status earlier this year, though he was unsure exactly how.)
Integrating a student like Adrián—with zero schooling and years of trauma—is no small task for Kessler and her staff, nor is it an uncommon one. "The vast majority of our kids are suffering from PTSD of one form or another," she says. "For some of them, that's about, 'I'm fleeing a civil war.' But for more of them, it is on a personal level, of 'I was living on the streets of Honduras, and finally realized that wasn't going to work.'" And then there are the challenges of the kids' new American homes, often with relatives who are essentially strangers, in neighborhoods rife with the same problems—gang violence, drugs—they once tried to escape.

In Los Angeles, the school district's mental-health director, Pia Escudero, reviewed records for students entering a newcomer school there; she found that 94 percent of those given mental-health screenings reported at least three traumatic events, and 65 percent had clinical symptoms "in the range of PTSD and depression." They experience hyperarousal and hyperalertness, and everyday urban sounds—say, a helicopter passing overhead—can trigger flashbacks.
San Francisco International offers counseling and mental-health services, and to many of the kids, the school is a refuge: Nearly 80 percent said they felt safe at school, 10 percent better than the districtwide numbers. The first time I visited, the school went on lockdown when a student brought a pellet gun to campus. But he wasn't in a gang, Kessler told me after five San Francisco cops showed up to secure the scene; he was just fronting.
It was here that I met Audelina Aguilar, who at 14 made the journey from Guatemala to the US border by herself, warding off a would-be rapist in Mexico and walking past corpses in southern Texas before making it to the Bay Area, where her brother lived. She cleaned houses full time for two years, then got so sick she had to go to the emergency room, where the nurses asked why she was not in school. Now a legal permanent resident and a senior who's been accepted to several colleges, she's also the head of a growing household, caring for two younger brothers who were caught crossing the border and sent to San Francisco while their immigration hearings play out. Aguilar has seven more siblings and her parents back in the western Guatemalan highlands.
And then there's Adrián, who told me the guys at the shelter stole his stuff and constantly harassed him; Kessler noted that it was a daily battle for him to get to school. One day, as we walked through the near-empty cafeteria, another boy catcalled Adrián, who shot him a sideways glance.
"I'm not here to make friends," he told me. He was wearing a gray T-shirt, black jeans, and a gauzy scarf full of tie-dyed peace symbols that sort of covered up two large bruises on his neck. He said he was hoping to graduate and move on, maybe go to cosmetology school.
In January, when I emailed Kessler to set up a final interview with Adrián, she told me that the shelter had decided to move him to San Jose. She hasn't heard from him since.

Two weeks later, my phone rang. "I'm here in San Francisco," Adrián said. "Do you want to meet now?" I trudged through the February rain to a McDonald's on Market Street. Adrián was wearing '80s rocker ripped jeans and kelly-green nail polish and ordering two cheeseburgers and fries. I helped him carry his beat-up bike downstairs, and we settled into a booth to talk.
He decided to leave for San Jose, he told me, to get away from the drama at the shelter. It was boring in the South Bay, and he missed school, even though he found it a bit tedious—but soon he'd be turning 19, and at that point he could live on his own with the government's blessing.
And the bruises I'd seen on his throat? I mean, I had to ask. "Niño," he said, his voice caramel sweet and condescending, "those weren't bruises. They were hickeys."
We swapped contact info one last time, and as I headed back to the office, I remembered something he'd once told me about why he'd left Guatemala. "I wasn't really looking for the American dream," he'd said, readjusting his scarf for the hundredth time. "I just wanted to get far away."
This story has been updated. It was made possible by a fellowship from the French-American Foundation—United States.

Excellent reporting by Sonia Nazario. Quotes from within:

"The drugs that pass through Honduras each year are worth more than the country’s entire gross domestic product. Narcos have bought off police officers, politicians and judges. In recent years, four out of five homicides were never investigated. No one is immune to the carnage. Several Honduran mayors have been killed. The sons of both the former head of the police department and the head of the national university were murdered, the latter, an investigation showed, by the police."....TO permanently stem this flow of children, we must address the complex root causes of violence in Honduras, as well as the demand for illegal drugs in the United States that is fueling that violence.
In the meantime, however, we must recognize this as a refugee crisis, as the United Nations just recommended. These children are facing threats similar to the forceful conscription of child soldiers by warlords in Sudan or during the civil war in Bosnia. Being forced to sell drugs by narcos is no different from being forced into military service.

Many Americans, myself included, believe in deporting unlawful immigrants, but see a different imperative with refugees.

The United States should immediately create emergency refugee centers inside our borders, tent cities — operated by the United Nations and other relief groups like the International Rescue Committee — where immigrant children could be held for 60 to 90 days instead of being released. The government would post immigration judges at these centers and adjudicate children’s cases there."

This is not at all "Obama's Katrina." It is his "Mariel boatlift," an exodus of people, children and adults—who like their earlier Cuban counterparts—cannot go home. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mariel_Boatlift    Sending these 52,000 children who have been in the U.S. since October is, I'm convinced, a death sentence. 

-Angela

The Children of the Drug Wars

A Refugee Crisis, Not an Immigration Crisis

By SONIA NAZARIO
 JULY 11, 2014

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Credit Edel Rodriguez

CRISTIAN OMAR REYES, an 11-year-old sixth grader in the neighborhood of Nueva Suyapa, on the outskirts of Tegucigalpa, tells me he has to get out of Honduras soon — “no matter what.”

In March, his father was robbed and murdered by gangs while working as a security guard protecting a pastry truck. His mother used the life insurance payout to hire a smuggler to take her to Florida. She promised to send for him quickly, but she has not.

Three people he knows were murdered this year. Four others were gunned down on a nearby corner in the span of two weeks at the beginning of this year. A girl his age resisted being robbed of $5. She was clubbed over the head and dragged off by two men who cut a hole in her throat, stuffed her panties in it, and left her body in a ravine across the street from Cristian’s house.

“I’m going this year,” he tells me.

I last went to Nueva Suyapa in 2003, to write about another boy, Luis Enrique Motiño Pineda, who had grown up there and left to find his mother in the United States. Children from Central America have been making that journey, often without their parents, for two decades. But lately something has changed, and the predictable flow has turned into an exodus. Three years ago, about 6,800 children were detained by United States immigration authorities and placed in federal custody; this year, as many as 90,000 children are expected to be picked up. Around a quarter come from Honduras — more than from anywhere else.

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Cristian Omar Reyes, 11, wants to get out of Honduras “no matter what.” Credit Sonia Nazario

Children still leave Honduras to reunite with a parent, or for better educational and economic opportunities. But, as I learned when I returned to Nueva Suyapa last month, a vast majority of child migrants are fleeing not poverty, but violence. As a result, what the United States is seeing on its borders now is not an immigration crisis. It is a refugee crisis.

Gangs arrived in force in Honduras in the 1990s, as 18th Street and Mara Salvatrucha members were deported in large numbers from Los Angeles to Central America, joining homegrown groups like Los Puchos. But the dominance in the past few years of foreign drug cartels in Honduras, especially ones from Mexico, has increased the reach and viciousness of the violence. As the United States and Colombia spent billions of dollars to disrupt the movement of drugs up the Caribbean corridor, traffickers rerouted inland through Honduras, and 79 percent of cocaine-smuggling flights bound for the United States now pass through there.

Narco groups and gangs are vying for control over this turf, neighborhood by neighborhood, to gain more foot soldiers for drug sales and distribution, expand their customer base, and make money through extortion in a country left with an especially weak, corrupt government following a 2009 coup.

Enrique’s 33-year-old sister, Belky, who still lives in Nueva Suyapa, says children began leaving en masse for the United States three years ago. That was around the time that the narcos started putting serious pressure on kids to work for them. At Cristian’s school, older students working with the cartels push drugs on the younger ones — some as young as 6. If they agree, children are recruited to serve as lookouts, make deliveries in backpacks, rob people and extort businesses. They are given food, shoes and money in return. Later, they might work as traffickers or hit men.

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Teachers at Cristian’s school described a 12-year-old who demanded that the school release three students one day to help him distribute crack cocaine; he brandished a pistol and threatened to kill a teacher when she tried to question him.

At Nueva Suyapa’s only public high school, narcos “recruit inside the school,” says Yadira Sauceda, a counselor there. Until he was killed a few weeks ago, a 23-year-old “student” controlled the school. Each day, he was checked by security at the door, then had someone sneak his gun to him over the school wall. Five students, mostly 12- and 13-year-olds, tearfully told Ms. Sauceda that the man had ordered them to use and distribute drugs or he would kill their parents. By March, one month into the new school year, 67 of 450 students had left the school.

Teachers must pay a “war tax” to teach in certain neighborhoods, and students must pay to attend.

Carlos Baquedano Sánchez, a slender 14-year-old with hair sticking straight up, explained how hard it was to stay away from the cartels. He lives in a shack made of corrugated tin in a neighborhood in Nueva Suyapa called El Infiernito — Little Hell — and usually doesn’t have anything to eat one out of every three days. He started working in a dump when he was 7, picking out iron or copper to recycle, for $1 or $2 a day. But bigger boys often beat him to steal his haul, and he quit a year ago when an older man nearly killed him for a coveted car-engine piston. Now he sells scrap wood.

But all of this was nothing, he says, compared to the relentless pressure to join narco gangs and the constant danger they have brought to his life. When he was 9, he barely escaped from two narcos who were trying to rape him, while terrified neighbors looked on. When he was 10, he was pressured to try marijuana and crack. “You’ll feel better. Like you are in the clouds,” a teenager working with a gang told him. But he resisted.

He has known eight people who were murdered and seen three killed right in front of him. He saw a man shot three years ago and still remembers the plums the man was holding rolling down the street, coated in blood. Recently he witnessed two teenage hit men shooting a pair of brothers for refusing to hand over the keys and title to their motorcycle. Carlos hit the dirt and prayed. The killers calmly walked down the street. Carlos shrugs. “Now seeing someone dead is nothing.”

He longs to be an engineer or mechanic, but he quit school after sixth grade, too poor and too afraid to attend. “A lot of kids know what can happen in school. So they leave.”

He wants to go to the United States, even though he knows how dangerous the journey can be; a man in his neighborhood lost both legs after falling off the top of a Mexican freight train, and a family friend drowned in the Rio Grande. “I want to avoid drugs and death. The government can’t pull up its pants and help people,” he says angrily. “My country has lost its way.”

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Girls face particular dangers — one reason around 40 percent of children who arrived in the United States this year were girls, compared with 27 percent in the past. Recently three girls were raped and killed in Nueva Suyapa, one only 8 years old. Two 15-year-olds were abducted and raped. The kidnappers told them that if they didn’t get in the car they would kill their entire families. Some parents no longer let their girls go to school for fear of their being kidnapped, says Luis López, an educator with Asociación Compartir, a nonprofit in Nueva Suyapa.

Milagro Noemi Martínez, a petite 19-year-old with clear green eyes, has been told repeatedly by narcos that she would be theirs — or end up dead. Last summer, she made her first attempt to reach the United States. “Here there is only evil,” she says. “It’s better to leave than have them kill me here.” She headed north with her 21-year-old sister, a friend who had also been threatened, and $170 among them. But she was stopped and deported from Mexico. Now back in Nueva Suyapa, she stays locked inside her mother’s house. “I hope God protects me. I am afraid to step outside.” Last year, she says, six minors, as young as 15, were killed in her neighborhood. Some were hacked apart. She plans to try the journey again soon. Asking for help from the police or the government is not an option in what some consider a failed state. The drugs that pass through Honduras each year are worth more than the country’s entire gross domestic product. Narcos have bought off police officers, politicians and judges. In recent years, four out of five homicides were never investigated. No one is immune to the carnage. Several Honduran mayors have been killed. The sons of both the former head of the police department and the head of the national university were murdered, the latter, an investigation showed, by the police.

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Carlos Baquedano Sánchez and his mother, Lovena Lidibeth Baquedano Sánchez, in their home in Nueva Suyapa, Honduras. Carlos is determined to leave. Credit Sonia Nazario

“You never call the cops. The cops themselves will retaliate and kill you,” says Henry Carías Aguilar, a pastor in Nueva Suyapa. A majority of small businesses in Nueva Suyapa have shuttered because of extortion demands, while churches have doubled in number in the past decade, as people pray for salvation from what they see as the plague predicted in the Bible. Taxis and homes have signs on them asking God for mercy.

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees recently interviewed 404 children who had arrived in the United States from Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala and Mexico; 58 percent said their primary reason for leaving was violence. (A similar survey in 2006, of Central American children coming into Mexico, found that only 13 percent were fleeing violence.) They aren’t just going to the United States: Less conflicted countries in Central America had a 712 percent increase in asylum claims between 2008 and 2013.

“If a house is burning, people will jump out the window,” says Michelle Brané, director of the migrant rights and justice program at the Women’s Refugee Commission.

TO permanently stem this flow of children, we must address the complex root causes of violence in Honduras, as well as the demand for illegal drugs in the United States that is fueling that violence.

In the meantime, however, we must recognize this as a refugee crisis, as the United Nations just recommended. These children are facing threats similar to the forceful conscription of child soldiers by warlords in Sudan or during the civil war in Bosnia. Being forced to sell drugs by narcos is no different from being forced into military service.

Many Americans, myself included, believe in deporting unlawful immigrants, but see a different imperative with refugees.

The United States should immediately create emergency refugee centers inside our borders, tent cities — operated by the United Nations and other relief groups like the International Rescue Committee — where immigrant children could be held for 60 to 90 days instead of being released. The government would post immigration judges at these centers and adjudicate children’s cases there.

To ensure this isn’t a sham process, asylum officers and judges must be trained in child-sensitive interviewing techniques to help elicit information from fearful, traumatized youngsters. All children must also be represented by a volunteer or government-funded lawyer. Kids in Need of Defense, a nonprofit that recruits pro bono lawyers to represent immigrant children and whose board I serve on, estimates that 40 percent to 60 percent of these children potentially qualify to stay under current immigration laws — and do, if they have a lawyer by their side. The vast majority do not. The only way to ensure we are not hurtling children back to circumstances that could cost them their lives is by providing them with real due process.

Judges, who currently deny seven in 10 applications for asylum by people who are in deportation proceedings, must better understand the conditions these children are facing. They should be more open to considering relief for those fleeing gang recruitment or threats by criminal organizations when they come from countries like Honduras that are clearly unwilling or unable to protect them.

If many children don’t meet strict asylum criteria but face significant dangers if they return, the United States should consider allowing them to stay using humanitarian parole procedures we have employed in the past, for Cambodians and Haitians. It may be possible to transfer children and resettle them in other safe countries willing to share the burden. We should also make it easier for children to apply as refugees when they are still in Central America, as we have done for people in Iraq, Cuba, countries in the former Soviet Union, Vietnam and Haiti. Those who showed a well-founded fear of persecution wouldn’t have to make the perilous journey north alone.

Of course, many migrant children come for economic reasons, and not because they fear for their lives. In those cases, they should quickly be deported if they have at least one parent in their country of origin. By deporting them directly from the refugee centers, the United States would discourage future non-refugees by showing that immigrants cannot be caught and released, and then avoid deportation by ignoring court orders to attend immigration hearings.
 

Instead of advocating such a humane, practical approach, the Obama administration wants to intercept and return children en route. On Tuesday the president asked for $3.7 billion in emergency funding. Some money would be spent on new detention facilities and more immigration judges, but the main goal seems to be to strengthen border control and speed up deportations. He also asked Congress to grant powers that could eliminate legal protections for children from Central America in order to expedite removals, a change that Republicans in Congress have also advocated.

This would allow life-or-death decisions to be made within hours by Homeland Security officials, even though studies have shown that border patrol agents fail to adequately screen Mexican children to see if they are being sexually exploited by traffickers or fear persecution, as the agents are supposed to do. Why would they start asking Central American children key questions needed to prove refugee status?

The United States expects other countries to take in hundreds of thousands of refugees on humanitarian grounds. Countries neighboring Syria have absorbed nearly 3 million people. Jordan has accepted in two days what the United States has received in an entire month during the height of this immigration flow — more than 9,000 children in May. The United States should also increase to pre-9/11 levels the number of refugees we accept to 90,000 from the current 70,000 per year and, unlike in recent years, actually admit that many.

By sending these children away, “you are handing them a death sentence,” says José Arnulfo Ochoa Ochoa, an expert in Honduras with World Vision International, a Christian humanitarian aid group. This abrogates international conventions we have signed and undermines our credibility as a humane country. It would be a disgrace if this wealthy nation turned its back on the 52,000 children who have arrived since October, many of them legitimate refugees.

This is not how a great nation treats children. 

Sonia Nazario is the author of “Enrique’s Journey: The Story of a Boy’s Dangerous Odyssey to Reunite With His Mother.”