Sept. 8, 2005, 3:08PM
Carlos Antonio Rios / Chronicle
Teen-age hurricane evacuees get on a bus to Jones High School today at Reliant Center.
A chance for youth to return to routine
Evacuee parents enroll hundreds in HISD, where students will begin classes today
By JENNIFER RADCLIFFE
Copyright 2005 Houston Chronicle
HURRICANE KATRINA
NOAA
Hurricane Katrina swirls toward the Gulf Coast.
• Complete Chronicle coverage
Katrina news via RSS
------------------------------------------------------------------------
HELP FOR REFUGEES:
• Housing offers • Shelter links
• Food • Look for people
• Web sites devoted to reuniting Katrina families
• Red Cross people search
• Search temp jobs in area
• Evacuee discounts
------------------------------------------------------------------------
HOW YOU CAN HELP:
• LATEST HOUSTON UPDATES
• Where to send donations
• How to help locally
• Houston Mayor's Volunteer Initiatives Program
• Harris County Citizen Corps
• Red Cross volunteer training
------------------------------------------------------------------------
BLOGS:
• Voices of Katrina: Stories from the aftermath
• DomeBlog from the Reliant Astrodome
• In Exile: An evacuee blogs for New Orleans
• Eric Berger's SciGuy
------------------------------------------------------------------------
WEBCAST:
• Live coverage from WDSU-TV in New Orleans
------------------------------------------------------------------------
VIDEO:
• Floodwaters have high bacteria levels 9/8
• Thursday Katrina update 9/8
• Little storm survivors head back to school 9/8
• NO SWAT team goes after sniper 9/7
• Katrina evacuees in Florida seek help 9/7
• Soldiers help coax holdouts 9/7
• Nations await answer to Katrina aid offers 9/7
• Bush, Congress return to Katrina agenda 9/7
• Wednesday Katrina update 9/7
------------------------------------------------------------------------
PHOTO GALLERIES:
Associated Press:
• Latest images
Houston Chronicle:
• Dome City report
• Houston relief effort
• Gulf Coast recovery
• Evacuees settle in Houston
• Evacuations continue in New Orleans
• Mississippi picking up the pieces
• Temporary shelter in Houston
• Evacuees arrive at Astrodome
• Louisiana residents cope
• National Guard relief arrives
Chronicle News Services:
• Gulf Coast aftermath
------------------------------------------------------------------------
INTERACTIVE:
• Victims of Katrina
• New Orleans devastation
• Zoomable satellite image of New Orleans / 8/31
• Hurricane Katrina: Devastation follows storm's path
------------------------------------------------------------------------
IN NEW ORLEANS:
• Nola.com's breaking news blog and Hurricane Center
------------------------------------------------------------------------
GRAPHICS:
• Graphic: Post-Hurricane Biohazards 09/08
• Graphic: Katrina's Economic Impact 09/08
• Graphic: Disasters lead to rise in suicides 09/06
• Graphic: The world comes to U.S. aid 09/06
• Graphic: Timeline of Katrina's aftermath 09/06
• Graphic: Comparing New Orleans, Houston Evacuations
• Satellite Images: New Orleans Before and After Katrina
• Graphic: When levees are breached
• Graphic: Fixing the Levee
• Graphic: Katrina's Aftermath
• Map: Katrina's Path
• Graphic: New Orleans and Storm Surge
Note: Some graphics are oversized and require scrolling
------------------------------------------------------------------------
SPECIAL REPORT:
• The Big One: Is Houston ready?
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Video, graphics courtesy Associated Press and KHOU; free Real Player, Flash plug-in and Acrobat Reader may be required.)
Dozens of children lined up outside Reliant Center this morning to board school buses heading for Douglass Elementary and Jones High schools.
They were among the 445 students from the main shelters who registered for school in the Houston Independent School District during Wednesday's big enrollment push.
"Is that our bus yet? I want to go to school now," said Reginald Williams, 7.
Even as the children lined up to board buses, however, hundreds of Hurricane Katrina evacuees, including many school-aged children, lined up to register for debit cards, prompting some to question the priorities of parents who put their children in the line for money instead of the line for school.
"The children are more important," said Winston Harrison, who was taking his young son Winston Jr. to school.
The first day of school comes as a welcome change for many of the parents and children who have spent nearly two weeks fleeing Hurricane Katrina's wake and sleeping in area shelters.
Parents said they don't want their children to fall behind academically.
"All they're doing here is running from one end of the hall to another. Enough is enough," said Reliant Center resident Cynthia Hampton, 56, who signed up nine grandchildren for school Wednesday. "They need new surroundings."
Evacuee enrollment in the state's largest school district is expected to increase this week, as HISD's enrollment push continues through Friday at the Reliant Park complex and the George R. Brown Convention Center.
Children colored pictures as their parents filled out yellow, green and pink forms. Dozens of volunteers, registrars, counselors and health experts were on hand to guide them through the process.
Wednesday's enrollment session brings HISD's count for evacuated students to more than 1,885. District leaders said they have 14,000 available seats.
"We're taking in the equivalent of another school district," HISD trustee Kevin Hoffman said.
Most of the younger students will be sent to Douglass and Ryan elementary schools, which are being reopened today for the Katrina survivors.
Other elementary students could be placed at Dodson, McDade, Frost and Anson Jones, if needed. Middle school students could attend Fleming, Fondren, Black and Holland, while high schoolers may be placed at Jones, Kashmere, Barbara Jordan, Sterling and Scarborough.
District leaders are hoping state and federal governments will help offset the $60 million it could cost to educate as many as 10,000 evacuated students for the entire year. The actual enrollment and cost could be less. Right now, district employees said they are just happy to help.
"Words can't describe how I feel in being able to help our neighbors get back into a normal routine," Hoffman said.
U.S. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings said school districts such as Houston can expect some financial aid, but she offered few specifics. "We're trying to figure out ... how best to do that," she said. "We're working on it."
Returning to class is an important step in helping the children put their lives back together, volunteers said.
"The thing is just to put some normalcy in their life," said Cathe Phipps, a Texas Baptist Men volunteer from Dallas. "I have seen children who are very excited about going back to school. They're ready."
Suburban districts in Harris County have taken in roughly 6,900 evacuated students, including 1,148 in Cypress-Fairbanks, 811 in Alief, 404 in Klein and 900 in Katy. Educators said they are trying to make sure the children have the clothes, supplies and emotional support they need. Many students escaped the storm with just the clothes they were wearing.
They've since survived even more trauma.
"We didn't come with anything because we were stuck in an attic," explained Terryanna Durel, a 9-year-old who registered Wednesday. "We got in a boat and went to the Superdome. I didn't like it there. They were raping and killing people. I'm just glad I came out safe."
Terryanna said she misses her friends, bike, television and favorite clothes. But the girl, who hopes to be a nurse, is excited about going to school in Houston.
"New Orleans is a small town. This is like a city right here," she said.
Of course, her view of Houston has been limited to the Reliant Center complex.
"Do they have houses in Houston?" she asked. "Big ones?"
Her little sister quickly added: "Do they have stores?"
Adrian Peters, 17, said it may be hard to keep his mind off what he's been through in the past week and a half.
"I'm going to think about all this for a long time," said Peters, who made his way to the Superdome through deep water.
"I'm ready to start going to school. I'm tired."
Reliant resident Raymond Warner, 17, said he's anxious to see the campus, students and teachers today at Jones High School.
He hopes to try out as a wide receiver on the school's football team.
"It's new. I've never been to Houston before," said Warner, a senior. "Hopefully they'll treat me the same way as everyone else."
After being separated from her three children for a week, 22-year-old Rebecca Soloman said it'll be a little tough to send her 4-year-old daughter, Kariell, off to prekindergarten.
"We didn't know where they were," said Soloman, whose children were rescued by the Coast Guard. "I promise I will never let them split us up again."
Other families found the registration process frustrating.
"I got down here at 7:45 a.m. Now, I have to wait on a phone call," said Veronica Bowman, who moved out of the Astrodome on Tuesday and was having trouble enrolling her three sons. She wasn't sure how she is supposed to transport her children to Longfellow Elementary, the closest school to their new apartment.
"They're just sitting around doing nothing. They need to be in school," she said.
jennifer.radcliffe@chron.com
This article is: http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/metropolitan/3344350
Thursday, September 08, 2005
Law to deal second blow to victims of hurricane
I knew when the bankruptcy law passed, that it would collide with the real needs associated with folks who really need options—such a the Katrina victims, AND that it was really serving the interests of the credit card companies. What no one could have predicted though was a collision of this magnitude. -Angela
Sept. 8, 2005, 8:30PM
By LOREN STEFFY
Copyright 2005 Houston Chronicle
A bad law just keeps getting worse.
The devastating aftermath of Hurricane Katrina is exposing more shortcomings in the federal bankruptcy law that's scheduled to take effect Oct. 17.
The so-called Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act is the love letter that Congress wrote to the credit card industry this spring. It's been widely decried by corporate and personal bankruptcy attorneys alike for making the process more convoluted, expensive and difficult for consumers, companies and even creditors.
Now it may bog down the Katrina recovery effort as well.
"The victims of Hurricane Katrina may face a cruel second blow when they take steps to try to put their lives back together," says Brad Botes, a bankruptcy attorney with the firm Bond & Botes, which has offices in the southeastern U.S., including some of the regions affected by the storm.
With jobs lost, lives uprooted and homes and businesses destroyed, bankruptcies are certain to rise in the coming months.
"The things that force people to file bankruptcy are usually some sort of catastrophic event," says Susan Matthews, a bankruptcy attorney with the Houston office of Adams and Reese. "Having their home wiped out and losing their job would force people to seek bankruptcy protection."
Mostly it's crises
Katrina reminds us that crises, not irresponsibility, are the primary cause of personal bankruptcies.
The new law, though, assumes that most debtors are simply dishonest, that they're looking for a way to shirk their obligations. So beginning next month, in order to file a standard Chapter 7 bankruptcy, debtors will have to show not only that they are broke, but that they've been broke for at least six months. Losing everything in a hurricane apparently won't be enough.
The law also requires additional paperwork such as copies of tax returns, pay stubs, bank statements and other financial records that, thanks to Katrina, may simply no longer exist.
Congress also enacted a provision requiring debtors to undergo credit counseling. In most cases, though, people forced into bankruptcy by a natural disaster don't need counseling, they need relief.
Debtors may be able to get some of these requirements waived, but they would have to petition the court, on an individual basis, which
takes additional time and money.
Waiving provisions
The Consumer Federation of America and the National Association of Consumer Bankruptcy Attorneys on Wednesday called on Congress to delay or waive the more onerous provisions of the new law for victims of natural disasters.
Four U.S. House members, including Houston's Sheila Jackson Lee, said Thursday they plan to introduce legislation that would do just that when Congress reconvenes next week.
"What we need to do here is avoid kicking hurricane victims when they're already down," says Botes, who is an NACBA director.
Even without the changes in the law, evacuees such as those in the Astrodome and other shelters around Texas may have difficulty filing bankruptcy. Residents of Louisiana, for example, can't file a case in Texas. Federal law stipulates that debtors must file in the judicial district where they reside.
(The State Bar of Texas is setting up mobile clinics for evacuees in need of legal advice.)
A second chance
It's an unfortunate consequence of disasters that people succumb to financial hardships they often couldn't imagine. Even if lenders cooperate in delaying payment demands temporarily, some borrowers, having lost both home and employment, may find themselves unable to catch up.
In America, we believe in the second chance. We believe in the idea of picking ourselves up from failure and trying again. It's the basis for our bankruptcy laws, which are unique in the world.
Nowhere is that concept more essential than in those areas digging out from Katrina's devastation.
"It's the only safety net these people have right now, and it needs to be there," Botes says. Along the Gulf Coast, the next few months will be a time of rebuilding, of starting over. It's a time for second chances, not just for the storm victims, but for members of Congress, too.
They have a chance to fix some of the mistakes they legislated in the spring.
Loren Steffy is the Chronicle's business columnist.
http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/business/3345871
Sept. 8, 2005, 8:30PM
By LOREN STEFFY
Copyright 2005 Houston Chronicle
A bad law just keeps getting worse.
The devastating aftermath of Hurricane Katrina is exposing more shortcomings in the federal bankruptcy law that's scheduled to take effect Oct. 17.
The so-called Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act is the love letter that Congress wrote to the credit card industry this spring. It's been widely decried by corporate and personal bankruptcy attorneys alike for making the process more convoluted, expensive and difficult for consumers, companies and even creditors.
Now it may bog down the Katrina recovery effort as well.
"The victims of Hurricane Katrina may face a cruel second blow when they take steps to try to put their lives back together," says Brad Botes, a bankruptcy attorney with the firm Bond & Botes, which has offices in the southeastern U.S., including some of the regions affected by the storm.
With jobs lost, lives uprooted and homes and businesses destroyed, bankruptcies are certain to rise in the coming months.
"The things that force people to file bankruptcy are usually some sort of catastrophic event," says Susan Matthews, a bankruptcy attorney with the Houston office of Adams and Reese. "Having their home wiped out and losing their job would force people to seek bankruptcy protection."
Mostly it's crises
Katrina reminds us that crises, not irresponsibility, are the primary cause of personal bankruptcies.
The new law, though, assumes that most debtors are simply dishonest, that they're looking for a way to shirk their obligations. So beginning next month, in order to file a standard Chapter 7 bankruptcy, debtors will have to show not only that they are broke, but that they've been broke for at least six months. Losing everything in a hurricane apparently won't be enough.
The law also requires additional paperwork such as copies of tax returns, pay stubs, bank statements and other financial records that, thanks to Katrina, may simply no longer exist.
Congress also enacted a provision requiring debtors to undergo credit counseling. In most cases, though, people forced into bankruptcy by a natural disaster don't need counseling, they need relief.
Debtors may be able to get some of these requirements waived, but they would have to petition the court, on an individual basis, which
takes additional time and money.
Waiving provisions
The Consumer Federation of America and the National Association of Consumer Bankruptcy Attorneys on Wednesday called on Congress to delay or waive the more onerous provisions of the new law for victims of natural disasters.
Four U.S. House members, including Houston's Sheila Jackson Lee, said Thursday they plan to introduce legislation that would do just that when Congress reconvenes next week.
"What we need to do here is avoid kicking hurricane victims when they're already down," says Botes, who is an NACBA director.
Even without the changes in the law, evacuees such as those in the Astrodome and other shelters around Texas may have difficulty filing bankruptcy. Residents of Louisiana, for example, can't file a case in Texas. Federal law stipulates that debtors must file in the judicial district where they reside.
(The State Bar of Texas is setting up mobile clinics for evacuees in need of legal advice.)
A second chance
It's an unfortunate consequence of disasters that people succumb to financial hardships they often couldn't imagine. Even if lenders cooperate in delaying payment demands temporarily, some borrowers, having lost both home and employment, may find themselves unable to catch up.
In America, we believe in the second chance. We believe in the idea of picking ourselves up from failure and trying again. It's the basis for our bankruptcy laws, which are unique in the world.
Nowhere is that concept more essential than in those areas digging out from Katrina's devastation.
"It's the only safety net these people have right now, and it needs to be there," Botes says. Along the Gulf Coast, the next few months will be a time of rebuilding, of starting over. It's a time for second chances, not just for the storm victims, but for members of Congress, too.
They have a chance to fix some of the mistakes they legislated in the spring.
Loren Steffy is the Chronicle's business columnist.
http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/business/3345871
Assessing displaced students is priority
Thu, Sep. 08, 2005
Assessing displaced students is priority
By Diane Smith
Star-Telegram Staff Writer
Teacher availability, class size and student assessments are the top concerns for North Texas educators as children from the Gulf Coast enter area schools.
"We are going to do whatever is necessary to assist them," said Stephen Waddell, superintendent of the Birdville school district, which had 35 new students as of Wednesday morning.
Getting a sense of the long-term effect on schools isn't easy. Students may be on the move soon after enrolling, leaving shelters for more-permanent homes.
Assessing new students -- to find out where they fit within Texas' curriculum standards -- is also a priority. And educators must determine which students have special needs.
"There are just a whole host of questions," said Francine Holland, deputy executive director of instructional services at the Region XI Education Service Center in Fort Worth.
The center helped area superintendents cope with these issues during a meeting Wednesday. Information is also available on the center's Web site.
About 70 superintendents attended the meeting.
Superintendents received packets that included a provisional enrollment form, a list of shelters and requirements that have been relaxed for students displaced by Hurricane Katrina.
Just days after fleeing Louisiana, many evacuees became Texas' newest students. They've entered suburban, urban and rural schools. While some districts are accommodating dozens of youngsters, others have enrolled only one or two.
Robert Damron, superintendent of Cleburne schools, said school finance reform remains a top concern for districts grappling with tight budgets and should be on the front burner even as new students enroll.
Cleburne schools, which serve 6,500 students, have added 25 Louisiana students.
"We're going to treat them like our kids, but our Legislature needs to treat our kids better," Damron said.
Susan Simpson, superintendent of White Settlement schools, said the district has 12 new students who are staying with families. Simpson said the district can address their needs directly.
"We can literally do one-on-one and work with families," she said.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
ONLINE:www.esc11.net
Diane Smith, (817) 390-7675 dianesmith@star-telegram.com
http://www.dfw.com/mld/dfw/news/state/12589391.htm
Assessing displaced students is priority
By Diane Smith
Star-Telegram Staff Writer
Teacher availability, class size and student assessments are the top concerns for North Texas educators as children from the Gulf Coast enter area schools.
"We are going to do whatever is necessary to assist them," said Stephen Waddell, superintendent of the Birdville school district, which had 35 new students as of Wednesday morning.
Getting a sense of the long-term effect on schools isn't easy. Students may be on the move soon after enrolling, leaving shelters for more-permanent homes.
Assessing new students -- to find out where they fit within Texas' curriculum standards -- is also a priority. And educators must determine which students have special needs.
"There are just a whole host of questions," said Francine Holland, deputy executive director of instructional services at the Region XI Education Service Center in Fort Worth.
The center helped area superintendents cope with these issues during a meeting Wednesday. Information is also available on the center's Web site.
About 70 superintendents attended the meeting.
Superintendents received packets that included a provisional enrollment form, a list of shelters and requirements that have been relaxed for students displaced by Hurricane Katrina.
Just days after fleeing Louisiana, many evacuees became Texas' newest students. They've entered suburban, urban and rural schools. While some districts are accommodating dozens of youngsters, others have enrolled only one or two.
Robert Damron, superintendent of Cleburne schools, said school finance reform remains a top concern for districts grappling with tight budgets and should be on the front burner even as new students enroll.
Cleburne schools, which serve 6,500 students, have added 25 Louisiana students.
"We're going to treat them like our kids, but our Legislature needs to treat our kids better," Damron said.
Susan Simpson, superintendent of White Settlement schools, said the district has 12 new students who are staying with families. Simpson said the district can address their needs directly.
"We can literally do one-on-one and work with families," she said.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
ONLINE:www.esc11.net
Diane Smith, (817) 390-7675 dianesmith@star-telegram.com
http://www.dfw.com/mld/dfw/news/state/12589391.htm
America's Best Colleges and the Top Ten Percent
This is a quick and powerful read. -Angela
September 1, 2005
By David Montejano*
This week the US News & World Report (Aug. 29, 2005) released its annual ranking of the country's best colleges. A review of the rankings reveals that the very best colleges have student bodies overwhelmingly comprised of students who graduated in the top ten percent of their high school class. It should come as no surprise that nearly ninety percent (and upwards) of the entering freshmen at the best private universities graduated in the top ten percent of their high school class. But this holds true for the best public universities as well.
Top ten percenters basically made up the entire entering class at the University of California-Berkeley (99%) and the University of California-Los Angeles (97%). In fact, Berkeley and UCLA, with a 25% and 23% admit rate, rejected many top ten percent applicants.
In Texas, where legislators recently considered modifying HB 588 (the “top ten percent” admissions law) because of fears that its flagship universities would be “overrun” by top ten percenters, the national rankings should provide some perspective. The University of Texas-Austin, with only two-thirds (66%) of its freshmen graduating in the top ten percent and with a 51% admit rate, has a fairly relaxed profile compared to much higher ranked universities. Texas A & M University-College Station has even more breathing room: only half (49%) of its entering class were top ten percenters and three-quarters (72%) of all applicants were admitted.
Special Report: America's Best Colleges*
Rank School Freshmen in top 10% of HS class ('04) Acceptance
(admit) rate ('04)
1 Harvard 96% 11%
5 Stanford 87% 13%
17 Rice 86% 22%
20 UC-Berkeley 99% 25%
25 UCLA 97% 23%
27 UNC-Chapel Hill 74% 36%
30 USC 84% 27%
52 UT-Austin 66% 51%
60 TAMU-College Sta. 49% 72%
*U.S. NEWS & WORLD REPORT (Aug. 29, 2005)
The national rankings make two points very clear:
(1) that the freshmen of the very best universities are overwhelmingly made up of top ten percent students; and (2) that acceptance (admit rates) by the very best universities is extremely competitive.
One final point might be added: universities with top ten percent student bodies can play football. Look at USC, UCLA, and --well, maybe-- Cal (Berkeley).
________________________________________________________________________
*Professor David Montejano is Chair of the Center for Latino Policy Research at the University of California, Berkeley.
September 1, 2005
By David Montejano*
This week the US News & World Report (Aug. 29, 2005) released its annual ranking of the country's best colleges. A review of the rankings reveals that the very best colleges have student bodies overwhelmingly comprised of students who graduated in the top ten percent of their high school class. It should come as no surprise that nearly ninety percent (and upwards) of the entering freshmen at the best private universities graduated in the top ten percent of their high school class. But this holds true for the best public universities as well.
Top ten percenters basically made up the entire entering class at the University of California-Berkeley (99%) and the University of California-Los Angeles (97%). In fact, Berkeley and UCLA, with a 25% and 23% admit rate, rejected many top ten percent applicants.
In Texas, where legislators recently considered modifying HB 588 (the “top ten percent” admissions law) because of fears that its flagship universities would be “overrun” by top ten percenters, the national rankings should provide some perspective. The University of Texas-Austin, with only two-thirds (66%) of its freshmen graduating in the top ten percent and with a 51% admit rate, has a fairly relaxed profile compared to much higher ranked universities. Texas A & M University-College Station has even more breathing room: only half (49%) of its entering class were top ten percenters and three-quarters (72%) of all applicants were admitted.
Special Report: America's Best Colleges*
Rank School Freshmen in top 10% of HS class ('04) Acceptance
(admit) rate ('04)
1 Harvard 96% 11%
5 Stanford 87% 13%
17 Rice 86% 22%
20 UC-Berkeley 99% 25%
25 UCLA 97% 23%
27 UNC-Chapel Hill 74% 36%
30 USC 84% 27%
52 UT-Austin 66% 51%
60 TAMU-College Sta. 49% 72%
*U.S. NEWS & WORLD REPORT (Aug. 29, 2005)
The national rankings make two points very clear:
(1) that the freshmen of the very best universities are overwhelmingly made up of top ten percent students; and (2) that acceptance (admit rates) by the very best universities is extremely competitive.
One final point might be added: universities with top ten percent student bodies can play football. Look at USC, UCLA, and --well, maybe-- Cal (Berkeley).
________________________________________________________________________
*Professor David Montejano is Chair of the Center for Latino Policy Research at the University of California, Berkeley.
Wednesday, September 07, 2005
Across Nation, Storm Victims Crowd Schools
September 7, 2005
By SAM DILLON
School districts from Maine to Washington State were enrolling thousands of students from New Orleans and other devastated Gulf Coast districts yesterday in what experts said could become the largest student resettlement in the nation's history.
Schools welcoming the displaced students must not only provide classrooms, teachers and textbooks, but under the terms of President Bush's education law must also almost immediately begin to raise their scholastic achievement unless some provisions of that law are waived.
Historians said that those twin challenges surpassed anything that public education had experienced since its creation after the Civil War, including disasters that devastated whole school districts, like the San Francisco earthquake and the Chicago fire.
"In terms of school systems absorbing kids whose lives and homes have been shattered, what we're going to watch over the next weeks is unprecedented in American education," said Jeffrey Mirel, a professor of history and education at the University of Michigan.
The vast resettlement was already under way last week, with schools in Baton Rouge, La., Houston and other cities near the Gulf Coast enrolling some students. Yesterday, officials in cities including San Antonio; Phoenix; Olympia, Wash.; Freeport, Me.; Memphis; Washington; Las Vegas; Salt Lake City; Chicago; Detroit; and Philadelphia reported enrolling students or preparing for their arrival.
The total number of displaced students is not yet known, but it appears to be well above 200,000. In Louisiana, 135,000 public school students and 52,000 private school students have been displaced from Orleans, Jefferson, St. Bernard and Plaquemines Parishes.
President Bush, speaking with reporters at the White House yesterday, thanked the nation's educators "for reaching out and doing their duty," and he said that Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings was working on a plan to help states absorb the educational costs but gave no hint of what kind of assistance might be provided. The Department of Education set up a Web site to coordinate private donations to schools enrolling displaced students.
"They said we could brace for about 500 kids," said Sue Steele, coordinator of homeless student programs for the public schools in Wichita, where buses carrying 1,800 storm victims were expected to arrive yesterday, part of some 7,000 headed for Kansas.
Many students were concentrated in districts along an arc from the Florida Panhandle west through Georgia, Tennessee, Arkansas and Texas.
The Santa Rosa County School District in the Florida Panhandle has enrolled 137 students, said Carol Calfee, a district official.
"And we still have folks coming in," she said. "They're walking through the door and some of them just have nothing, so it's really hard." The local United Way has said it will try to buy school supplies for every displaced student, she said.
The crisis poses new challenges for Ms. Spellings, including financial. The Department of Education's budget this year for homeless student programs is about $61 million, which she said was insufficient.
Ms. Spellings, who has spent her first months in office fighting a backlash by local educators and state lawmakers against the federal law known as No Child Left Behind, is also hearing calls from advocacy groups that she take emergency measures that could be controversial.
The National Education Association, the nation's largest teachers union, asked her on Friday to waive the accountability provisions of the law for schools in the hurricane's path as well as in Texas and other states receiving large numbers of students, a move Ms. Spellings said she was reluctant to take.
Private companies that operate online courses or charter schools are urging her to use emergency powers to authorize them to enroll displaced students at the Houston Astrodome and other shelters across the nation.
Ms. Spellings has invited 40 education groups, including the P.T.A. and teachers unions, to meet at the Department of Education today to discuss disaster recovery efforts. Reg Weaver, president of the N.E.A., which has challenged No Child Left Behind in federal court, said he immediately accepted the invitation.
But in a separate letter, he also asked Ms. Spellings to use her powers to waive provisions of the law, which requires school districts to raise student scores on standardized tests each year by a percentage set by each state, a goal known as making adequate yearly progress.
"Until these children, their teachers, districts and families gain their footing under these extremely difficult circumstances, I encourage you to implement the provisions in N.C.L.B. that deal with the impact of natural disasters on testing and adequate yearly progress," Mr. Weaver's letter said.
Ms. Spellings is consulting with state school superintendents as she considers whether to waive the law's accountability provisions in some cases, said her spokeswoman, Susan Aspey. One consideration is how many displaced students that individual schools or districts enroll; those with higher concentrations may be more likely to receive waivers, Ms. Aspey said.
"There is no one-size-fits-all approach," she said.
Even before the storm, hundreds of schools that had failed to meet the federal law's proficiency requirements for several years, most of which educate the urban poor or non-English speaking immigrants, were facing sanctions that include school closings and the firing of staff. Thousands of others were expected to be placed on academic probation or labeled as low-performing.
Theodore R. Sizer, a visiting professor of history at Harvard, said that unless the law's accountability provisions were waived during the emergency, they would add tensions to the resettlement crisis.
"Imagine you're the principal of a big high school in city X, and your scores are above the state minimums, so you're doing fine with the law, and suddenly you have 300 displaced kids," Mr. Sizer said. "That not only brings crowding but also means that on the next exams your scores could plummet and the federal law will say you run a terrible school."
The Bush administration must also make decisions about another hotly debated issue in public education: charter schools. The National Council of Education Providers, which represents the nation's largest commercial school management companies, has asked the Department of Education to authorize it to enroll students housed at emergency shelters in Internet-based courses offered by its companies.
The National Council's Web site yesterday highlighted its request to the department to establish a "national virtual charter school" that would "serve evacuees wherever they are."
"Once students have access to computers and connectivity - borrowed, donated or shared - companies are standing by to waive state restrictions and log these students on," the Web site said. The restrictions in question include enrollment caps in state laws that apply to charter schools. The National Council wants the federal government to waive those laws during the emergency.
Jeanne Allen, a paid consultant to the National Council who is also president of the Center for Education Reform, a nonprofit organization, said she delivered a draft "Emergency Public Charter School Act" to members of Congress yesterday.
By SAM DILLON
School districts from Maine to Washington State were enrolling thousands of students from New Orleans and other devastated Gulf Coast districts yesterday in what experts said could become the largest student resettlement in the nation's history.
Schools welcoming the displaced students must not only provide classrooms, teachers and textbooks, but under the terms of President Bush's education law must also almost immediately begin to raise their scholastic achievement unless some provisions of that law are waived.
Historians said that those twin challenges surpassed anything that public education had experienced since its creation after the Civil War, including disasters that devastated whole school districts, like the San Francisco earthquake and the Chicago fire.
"In terms of school systems absorbing kids whose lives and homes have been shattered, what we're going to watch over the next weeks is unprecedented in American education," said Jeffrey Mirel, a professor of history and education at the University of Michigan.
The vast resettlement was already under way last week, with schools in Baton Rouge, La., Houston and other cities near the Gulf Coast enrolling some students. Yesterday, officials in cities including San Antonio; Phoenix; Olympia, Wash.; Freeport, Me.; Memphis; Washington; Las Vegas; Salt Lake City; Chicago; Detroit; and Philadelphia reported enrolling students or preparing for their arrival.
The total number of displaced students is not yet known, but it appears to be well above 200,000. In Louisiana, 135,000 public school students and 52,000 private school students have been displaced from Orleans, Jefferson, St. Bernard and Plaquemines Parishes.
President Bush, speaking with reporters at the White House yesterday, thanked the nation's educators "for reaching out and doing their duty," and he said that Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings was working on a plan to help states absorb the educational costs but gave no hint of what kind of assistance might be provided. The Department of Education set up a Web site to coordinate private donations to schools enrolling displaced students.
"They said we could brace for about 500 kids," said Sue Steele, coordinator of homeless student programs for the public schools in Wichita, where buses carrying 1,800 storm victims were expected to arrive yesterday, part of some 7,000 headed for Kansas.
Many students were concentrated in districts along an arc from the Florida Panhandle west through Georgia, Tennessee, Arkansas and Texas.
The Santa Rosa County School District in the Florida Panhandle has enrolled 137 students, said Carol Calfee, a district official.
"And we still have folks coming in," she said. "They're walking through the door and some of them just have nothing, so it's really hard." The local United Way has said it will try to buy school supplies for every displaced student, she said.
The crisis poses new challenges for Ms. Spellings, including financial. The Department of Education's budget this year for homeless student programs is about $61 million, which she said was insufficient.
Ms. Spellings, who has spent her first months in office fighting a backlash by local educators and state lawmakers against the federal law known as No Child Left Behind, is also hearing calls from advocacy groups that she take emergency measures that could be controversial.
The National Education Association, the nation's largest teachers union, asked her on Friday to waive the accountability provisions of the law for schools in the hurricane's path as well as in Texas and other states receiving large numbers of students, a move Ms. Spellings said she was reluctant to take.
Private companies that operate online courses or charter schools are urging her to use emergency powers to authorize them to enroll displaced students at the Houston Astrodome and other shelters across the nation.
Ms. Spellings has invited 40 education groups, including the P.T.A. and teachers unions, to meet at the Department of Education today to discuss disaster recovery efforts. Reg Weaver, president of the N.E.A., which has challenged No Child Left Behind in federal court, said he immediately accepted the invitation.
But in a separate letter, he also asked Ms. Spellings to use her powers to waive provisions of the law, which requires school districts to raise student scores on standardized tests each year by a percentage set by each state, a goal known as making adequate yearly progress.
"Until these children, their teachers, districts and families gain their footing under these extremely difficult circumstances, I encourage you to implement the provisions in N.C.L.B. that deal with the impact of natural disasters on testing and adequate yearly progress," Mr. Weaver's letter said.
Ms. Spellings is consulting with state school superintendents as she considers whether to waive the law's accountability provisions in some cases, said her spokeswoman, Susan Aspey. One consideration is how many displaced students that individual schools or districts enroll; those with higher concentrations may be more likely to receive waivers, Ms. Aspey said.
"There is no one-size-fits-all approach," she said.
Even before the storm, hundreds of schools that had failed to meet the federal law's proficiency requirements for several years, most of which educate the urban poor or non-English speaking immigrants, were facing sanctions that include school closings and the firing of staff. Thousands of others were expected to be placed on academic probation or labeled as low-performing.
Theodore R. Sizer, a visiting professor of history at Harvard, said that unless the law's accountability provisions were waived during the emergency, they would add tensions to the resettlement crisis.
"Imagine you're the principal of a big high school in city X, and your scores are above the state minimums, so you're doing fine with the law, and suddenly you have 300 displaced kids," Mr. Sizer said. "That not only brings crowding but also means that on the next exams your scores could plummet and the federal law will say you run a terrible school."
The Bush administration must also make decisions about another hotly debated issue in public education: charter schools. The National Council of Education Providers, which represents the nation's largest commercial school management companies, has asked the Department of Education to authorize it to enroll students housed at emergency shelters in Internet-based courses offered by its companies.
The National Council's Web site yesterday highlighted its request to the department to establish a "national virtual charter school" that would "serve evacuees wherever they are."
"Once students have access to computers and connectivity - borrowed, donated or shared - companies are standing by to waive state restrictions and log these students on," the Web site said. The restrictions in question include enrollment caps in state laws that apply to charter schools. The National Council wants the federal government to waive those laws during the emergency.
Jeanne Allen, a paid consultant to the National Council who is also president of the Center for Education Reform, a nonprofit organization, said she delivered a draft "Emergency Public Charter School Act" to members of Congress yesterday.
Failing Students, Rising Profits
This is a piece about the for-profit group, Community Education Partners (CEP) and is worth reading. -Angela
by Annette Fuentes
The Nation
>
>Morris Gandy's son was a problem student throughout elementary school,
>playing hooky and acting up. A few days after he began sixth grade in 2002
>at Gillespie Middle School in Philadelphia, he was suspended. Gandy, a
>single parent, beseeched the principal, "What can you do for a problem
>child?" He got no help.
>
>Then a neighbor told him about Community Education Partners (CEP), an
>alternative school for kids like his son. So Gandy enrolled the boy,
>expecting that teachers there would know how to handle him. Instead, the
>situation went from bad to worse. "The teacher said my son shot him in the
>head with a rubber band," Gandy said. "I said, 'What are you going to do
>about it? This is supposed to be a school for troubled kids.'" His son told
>Gandy that all they did was watch movies. He went truant. "They are
>supposed to be the experts on the kids outside the box. They are supposed
>to get them back inside the box," Gandy said. "They couldn't hold his
>interest."
>
>Morris Gandy is what you'd call a dissatisfied CEP customer. CEP, however,
>continues to prosper. Founded ten years ago in Houston, the company entered
>the private-school market at a time when Texas was a roiling caldron of
>Republican politics and Enron-style corporate dealing--and a laboratory for
>education reform. George W. Bush was governor, the mantra was
>accountability for public schools and the tools were high-stakes testing
>and privatization. What emerged from the mix were the so-called Texas
>Miracle, which boosted student achievement; Rod Paige as President Bush's
>Education Secretary; and ultimately Bush's No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law,
>authored by Texas education player Sandy Kress.
>
>The Texas Miracle has since been debunked as so much manipulation of test
>scores and phony graduation rates. Paige, who rode to the White House on
>its falsehoods, is history. And Bush's NCLB is sagging under the weight of
>impossible test goals and unfunded mandates, with even some Republicans now
>criticizing it. But privatization in public education and the credo of
>accountability through testing still chug along.
>
>CEP is one beneficiary. Despite a tarnished history and no independent
>evidence that its student-customers fare better than in regular public
>schools, CEP uses political clout to carve a niche market serving students
>the public schools don't want, and it makes millions in the process. CEP's
>story is a primer on how the politics of education reform serve business
>interests. Its success represents the triumph of free-market ideology over
>sound pedagogy and the fallacy of the accountability-through-testing
>approach to teaching. "It's fair to say they [CEP] have avoided true
>scrutiny," said Carl Shaw, a former Texas state official who evaluated
>CEP's program. "Their modus operandi is political, not educational and not
>scientific."
>
>The CEP Program: Be Here, Be Tested
>
>CEP contracts with public school districts in Houston, Atlanta,
>Philadelphia, Richmond and Orlando, and in the Pinnellas and Bay districts
>in Florida, to run alternative schools for students in grades six through
>twelve who've been suspended for behavioral problems. Most students sent to
>CEP also are academically failing, and the vast majority are
>African-American and Latino. CEP's contract requires that students spend
>120-180 days in the program--far in excess of the typical ten-day
>suspensions public schools impose on misbehaving students. CEP's rationale
>is that it needs time to transform kids' behavior and academic performance,
>but the company also has an obvious financial incentive for a longer
>placement. CEP's per-student charge varies by district, but it's more than
>the districts spend per pupil on regular students. In Orlando CEP gets
>$8,865 per pupil, double the district's own cost. Philadelphia pays CEP
>about $13,000 per pupil--almost twice the district's $7,000 average cost.
>"We charge more. We're a premium product," said Randle Richardson, the CEO
>of CEP. "Anyone can warehouse a child."
>
>CEP renovates abandoned big-box stores or industrial spaces, creating
>sex-segregated "learning communities." The students can't mingle and are
>walked in groups to bathrooms at specific times. Lunch is provided in their
>classrooms. Students may not bring money to school and are screened as if
>going through airport security, shoes and coats off. Teachers take
>attendance with an electronic fingerprint scanner that transmits the
>information back to CEP headquarters for payment. Some critics have called
>CEP schools "soft jails."
>
>CEP boasts that it employs "certified teachers and degreed individuals with
>experience in behavior management, counseling or social services." But CEP
>faces the same shortage of certified teachers the public schools do, and it
>pays lower salaries. In its early Houston days, says Marsha Sonnenberg, a
>Fort Worth educator who consulted for CEP, "they used some people from
>corrections and some they trained. Some had been from the streets
>themselves and rehabbed. Some were a little more like me." Irving Mitchell,
>principal of CEP's Atlanta school from August 2003 to January 2004, said
>his school had few certified teachers and high turnover, so on an average
>day classes were doubled up. "There was very little instruction, because
>you were dealing with fights and staff shortages," Mitchell said.
>Richardson said CEP pays for teacher-certification training when needed,
>and that such classes are brought onsite for his Philadelphia staff.
>
>"Be Here, Behave and Be Learning," is CEP's motto, but it should include
>"Be Tested," because students spend much of their learning time at
>computers with Plato, a self-paced tutorial that tests and assesses
>achievement. CEP uses Plato data to prove its claims of student
>improvement, but assessment experts give Plato mixed reviews, and some
>who've worked with it say cheating is not difficult.
>
>Political Juice
>
>Richardson founded CEP with his college buddy Phil Baggett, CEP's vice
>chairman. Richardson says his inspiration came from his early years as a
>small-town lawyer taking $50 juvenile delinquency cases from the family
>court judge. Then Richardson ran the Tennessee Farmers Home Administration,
>making loans to low-income homeowners. John Danielson, who would become
>Under Secretary of Education to Paige, was also a founder. Initial
>investors included Bill McInnes, formerly of the Hospital Corporation of
>America, and Tom Beasley, founder of the Corrections Corporation of
>America, the private prison company. CEP's early investors put up $65
>million; the company is now backed by Stephens Inc., a Little Rock,
>Arkansas, investment bank, and the Texas Growth Fund, a private equity firm
>created by the Texas legislature with public employee pension funds.
>Richardson says CEP's annual revenues are $70 million.
>
>Richardson bristles at questions about Beasley's role, sensitive to critics
>who've likened CEP schools to juvenile jails. "We had discussions early on
>that we are not going to be correctional," Richardson said. "Tom
>understood. He said, 'I'm an investor. You guys are here to run the
>company.'" But like Beasley, Richardson saw a ripe business opportunity in
>privatizing a public service--one that, like prisons, deals with society's
>messy failures. CEP's first contract was to operate a juvenile detention
>alternative-education program for Harris County, Texas.
>
>Giving CEP entree into the Texas education scene was George Scott, then
>president of the Tax Research Association, a nonprofit education-reform
>group in Houston, and now a senior writer for the online newspaper
>Education News. Scott, who was close to Paige when Paige was Houston
>schools superintendent, helped CEP score its first public school contract,
>with the Houston district. Scott said he told Paige, "Rod, this is it. This
>is privatized accountability at its best." Scott later became a CEP critic,
>though, charging that the company evaded real accountability for a program
>that was educationally flawed and a waste of taxpayer money. "I look back
>on my role with CEP, my dedication and commitment to accountability, and it
>is the greatest professional disgrace in my career," Scott said. "As long
>as the district and the vendor have influence over accountability measures,
>it is corrupt."
>
>Richardson says his background is in government, but it's his Republican
>Party credentials that pay off. Like Tom Beasley before him, Richardson was
>Tennessee's GOP chair--from 1992 to 1995--helping to lead Republicans "out
>of the wilderness and into control of statewide offices," according to one
>news account. Richardson soft-pedals his political ties, calling himself a
>"Howard Baker Republican" and insisting CEP is above the partisan fray. But
>CEP has thrived on the accumulated political juice Richardson and his
>cohorts have squeezed, mostly Republican-flavored, since its founding.
>
>In Texas CEP executives cultivated powerful friends, hiring Houston school
>board member Larry Marshall as a $6,000-a-month consultant and landing an
>endorsement from George Bush Sr. at the opening of CEP's first Houston
>school. "They were putting together the juiciest political team," Scott
>said. "They had powerful people at their beck and call." Political pull
>helped CEP waltz into Florida. Richardson and Baggett contributed to
>Charlie Crist's successful 2000 run for state education commissioner and to
>Governor Jeb Bush's 2002 campaign. In 2001 CEP's Florida lobbyist Juhan
>Mixon helped write a provision in a state appropriations bill that
>earmarked $4.8 million for "Alternative Schools/Public Private
>Partnerships." It was "to serve a minimum of 500 or more disruptive and low
>performing students"--a description tailored to CEP. Mixon also lobbies for
>several Florida school districts, including Bay, which hired CEP.
>
>In Philadelphia CEP found privatization high on the agendas of
>then-Governor Tom Ridge, a Republican, and state politicians. The state
>took control of the bankrupt Philadelphia school district in 2001, and
>state legislators made privatizing schools one of the conditions for the
>bailout. CEP's chief political ally has been Republican State House Speaker
>John Perzel, whose beefy visage graces the company's website along with his
>testimonial. Richardson, Baggett and CEP execs have contributed more than
>$11,000 to Perzel's campaigns. CEP's five-year, $28-million-a-year contract
>with Philadelphia schools was renewed in May 2004 with no debate.
>
>Accountability in Action
>
>CEP is a product of the high-stakes testing and accountability approach to
>education reform, which aims to run public schools like businesses whose
>products are students. Yet holding CEP accountable has been a quixotic
>undertaking because of the fluidity of the student population, the
>malleability of statistics and the company's political savvy. The few
>totally independent evaluations of CEP's effectiveness have rated it
>poorly. Several evaluations were paid for by CEP, like one in 1999 by Bush
>Sr. Education Department appointee Diane Ravitch, whose glowing endorsement
>of CEP's Houston program appears on CEP's website. Others were based on
>testing data completely controlled by CEP.
>
>In Texas CEP's first brush with evaluation was a lesson in the pitfalls of
>accountability and the importance of data control. In 1997 Texas state
>education commissioner Mike Moses hired Carl Shaw, former chair of the
>Texas Education Agency's (TEA) assessment committee and head of Houston's
>testing for fourteen years, to assess CEP's first contract, the juvenile
>detention program. Shaw found limited student progress after six months in
>CEP, and after a year, actual regression. "I could find no evidence that
>there was a strong-enough academic program in place to produce change," he
>said. "One report I wrote for [the Houston Independent School District]
>said few CEP students would be smart enough for prison education. It's
>shocking, and here's a company touted as a leader." Shaw said CEP head
>Richardson was angry at his findings and his refusal to compromise his
>work. "The first reaction I had from Richardson was, 'I am more powerful
>than you,'" Shaw said.
>
>CEP executives turned to Scott, the taxpayers' group president, for backup.
>"They wanted support that his test had gone awry," Scott said. "I told them
>I was 100 percent into Dr. Shaw's approach." Scott says discussions he and
>CEP had been having about a consultancy and shares of founders stock broke
>down because Scott refused to repudiate Shaw. Richardson says CEP raised
>concerns about Shaw's tests having "both positive and negative
>aberrations," and that they couldn't be validated by the TEA. Richardson
>noted that his relationship with Scott soured after the problems with
>Shaw's testing emerged.
>
>Next up was Dr. Tom Kellow, an evaluation specialist for Houston's schools.
>In 1999 Superintendent Paige asked Kellow to evaluate CEP--but he was
>forbidden to visit the school and could only use data CEP provided. Kellow
>learned that CEP's contract stated that it could only be held accountable
>based on its own in-house testing, not the statewide Texas Assessment of
>Academic Skills (TAAS). "What I found is what Carl Shaw found," Kellow
>said. "The longer [students] stayed, the worse their performance." Although
>under NCLB all schools must meet Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) standards
>for specific percentages of students testing at grade level in math and
>reading, the TEA exempts CEP. For both 2003 and 2004, the AYP status of
>CEP's two Houston schools is listed as "Not Evaluated." CEP's school
>profiles on the Houston schools website also reveal that the company evades
>the accountability that public schools face: No TAAS scores are listed and
>no information is provided for either state or district accountability
>measures.
>
>Houston continues to contract with CEP despite those early assessments, but
>Dallas's public school district was more discriminating. Dallas hired CEP
>in 1999, with a five-year, $10 million yearly contract. But after three
>years the district bowed out; its own evaluation of CEP in 2002 recommended
>ending the contract, stating that "the model of education provided by [CEP]
>was untenable from a pedagogical standpoint. The reliance on non-certified
>teachers for the bulk of the student-teacher interaction was useful for the
>company to save money, but was not a design in the best interest of the
>students.... Students who attended Community Education Partners did not do
>very well academically." CEP had refused to provide its budget data, the
>report noted, making it impossible to know just how it was spending the
>district's money.
>
>Dallas's report and a series of critical articles about CEP in the Houston
>Press, an alternative newsweekly, helped New Orleans public schools decide
>against a contract with CEP, according to former school board president
>Cheryl Mills. But Atlanta public schools ignored the negative press and
>evaluations, contracting with CEP four years ago. CEP's Atlanta school was
>the target of community organizing in early 2005 after the Atlanta Voice, a
>black newspaper, ran a series exposing serious inadequacies at the CEP
>school. The articles were based on the accounts of former CEP principal
>Mitchell and of a former teacher. "It became a dump for human waste,"
>Mitchell said. "Accountability is with the Atlanta school board for
>disenfranchising these kids. There was a contract and expectations, and I
>feel they were not met. The statistics show they weren't met."
>
>Atlanta schools deputy superintendent Kathy Augustine called Mitchell
>"disgruntled." She said she was unaware that students could not take books
>home, that there was no homework or that there was a teacher shortage. "I
>think we're improving," Augustine said. "It's a developing relationship.
>Finding leadership is key to that." She said she had no evidence that CEP
>was not living up to its contract. Told that CEP's school had failed to
>meet AYP standards for reading and math in the 2003-04 school year,
>Augustine said, "The AYP piece is different for nontraditional schools
>because children are very fluid." She noted that the school board had voted
>to extend CEP's contract through 2009.
>
>In Philadelphia even supposedly independent evaluations of CEP were
>dependent on company-controlled data. In March Philadelphia released an
>evaluation of CEP's two schools conducted by researchers at Temple
>University. The report surveyed seventy students and seventy parents who
>offered positive reports on CEP's program--a fraction of more than 4,300
>students CEP has served. In evaluating student academic growth, the report
>relied entirely on CEP's own Plato data, which claim astounding gains of
>three to four "grade levels" in reading and math for students who spend 180
>days at CEP--but there's no indication of how many students actually stay
>that long. The school district itself partakes of the statistical spin.
>Paul Socolar, editor of Philadelphia Public School Notebook, an independent
>newspaper, noted that in 2004 the district issued a CEP fact sheet that
>excluded CEP scores on the statewide standardized test for eighth graders,
>which had gone down; in January of this year the district excluded results
>for CEP eleventh graders, which had gone down. "It's a total manipulation
>of data," Socolar said. And as for meeting the AYP standards, CEP's Philly
>schools don't.
>
>CEP's Richardson says the proof of his company's success is that districts
>keep renewing their contracts. The question is how success is defined.
>Public schools have strong incentives to remove the lowest-performing
>students from their classrooms and make them CEP's problem, especially
>since the passage of No Child Left Behind. "CEP was a way to get around
>NCLB," said Mitchell. "If you move these kids from the regular school
>program, you automatically decrease the dropout rate and get a gain on your
>test scores. So you contract those kids out; they're in a separate
>environment, but they aren't counted in the total." For Socolar, CEP is a
>political solution to the public system's failures: "From the beginning,
>the concern that jumped out about CEP is whether putting these students in
>the hands of private companies is a way of putting them out of sight and
>out of mind," he said. While the public schools are hammered by the
>accountability-through-testing mandates of NCLB, CEP skirts the same
>accountability and proves the uselessness of high-stakes testing as an
>education strategy. Judging CEP by its test data only seems to make sense
>because the company and school districts that hire it buy into that
>accountability measure. Test scores, in truth, can never be an end in
>themselves--or proof that children are learning. That's why NCLB is phony
>education reform.
>
>At the end of an interview Richardson asked in almost plaintive tones, "Are
>we the enemy?" Well, yes and no. CEP may be doing a poor job, but it's only
>a symptom of the crumbling national commitment to public education,
>including the public schools' failure to educate huge percentages of mostly
>black and Latino students. Vouchers and other privatizing efforts in
>education have still not gained the momentum that conservatives had hoped
>for. But companies like CEP in the expanding private education industry
>help chip away at the public school infrastructure by targeting a
>market--the "bad students"--that has few advocates. CEP promotes
>privatization in a more quiet, effective way than Chris Whittle's troubled
>Edison schools have. And Richardson's future ambitions reveal an astute
>understanding of the changing nature and needs of today's student
>population: He'd like to run schools for overage students--17- or
>18-year-olds who work or raise families and need flexible programming, the
>students who "don't fit in the box," he says.
>
>As the box holding traditional students shrinks, one challenge facing
>public school educators is how best to serve all students--from high
>achievers to the most disruptive kids like Morris Gandy's son. If the
>public sector abdicates its responsibility to educate all children,
>businessmen like Randle Richardson are ready to step in. >
>
>This article can be found on the web at:
>
>http://www.thenation.com/doc/20050919/fuentes
>
>Visit The Nation http://www.thenation.com/
by Annette Fuentes
The Nation
>
>Morris Gandy's son was a problem student throughout elementary school,
>playing hooky and acting up. A few days after he began sixth grade in 2002
>at Gillespie Middle School in Philadelphia, he was suspended. Gandy, a
>single parent, beseeched the principal, "What can you do for a problem
>child?" He got no help.
>
>Then a neighbor told him about Community Education Partners (CEP), an
>alternative school for kids like his son. So Gandy enrolled the boy,
>expecting that teachers there would know how to handle him. Instead, the
>situation went from bad to worse. "The teacher said my son shot him in the
>head with a rubber band," Gandy said. "I said, 'What are you going to do
>about it? This is supposed to be a school for troubled kids.'" His son told
>Gandy that all they did was watch movies. He went truant. "They are
>supposed to be the experts on the kids outside the box. They are supposed
>to get them back inside the box," Gandy said. "They couldn't hold his
>interest."
>
>Morris Gandy is what you'd call a dissatisfied CEP customer. CEP, however,
>continues to prosper. Founded ten years ago in Houston, the company entered
>the private-school market at a time when Texas was a roiling caldron of
>Republican politics and Enron-style corporate dealing--and a laboratory for
>education reform. George W. Bush was governor, the mantra was
>accountability for public schools and the tools were high-stakes testing
>and privatization. What emerged from the mix were the so-called Texas
>Miracle, which boosted student achievement; Rod Paige as President Bush's
>Education Secretary; and ultimately Bush's No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law,
>authored by Texas education player Sandy Kress.
>
>The Texas Miracle has since been debunked as so much manipulation of test
>scores and phony graduation rates. Paige, who rode to the White House on
>its falsehoods, is history. And Bush's NCLB is sagging under the weight of
>impossible test goals and unfunded mandates, with even some Republicans now
>criticizing it. But privatization in public education and the credo of
>accountability through testing still chug along.
>
>CEP is one beneficiary. Despite a tarnished history and no independent
>evidence that its student-customers fare better than in regular public
>schools, CEP uses political clout to carve a niche market serving students
>the public schools don't want, and it makes millions in the process. CEP's
>story is a primer on how the politics of education reform serve business
>interests. Its success represents the triumph of free-market ideology over
>sound pedagogy and the fallacy of the accountability-through-testing
>approach to teaching. "It's fair to say they [CEP] have avoided true
>scrutiny," said Carl Shaw, a former Texas state official who evaluated
>CEP's program. "Their modus operandi is political, not educational and not
>scientific."
>
>The CEP Program: Be Here, Be Tested
>
>CEP contracts with public school districts in Houston, Atlanta,
>Philadelphia, Richmond and Orlando, and in the Pinnellas and Bay districts
>in Florida, to run alternative schools for students in grades six through
>twelve who've been suspended for behavioral problems. Most students sent to
>CEP also are academically failing, and the vast majority are
>African-American and Latino. CEP's contract requires that students spend
>120-180 days in the program--far in excess of the typical ten-day
>suspensions public schools impose on misbehaving students. CEP's rationale
>is that it needs time to transform kids' behavior and academic performance,
>but the company also has an obvious financial incentive for a longer
>placement. CEP's per-student charge varies by district, but it's more than
>the districts spend per pupil on regular students. In Orlando CEP gets
>$8,865 per pupil, double the district's own cost. Philadelphia pays CEP
>about $13,000 per pupil--almost twice the district's $7,000 average cost.
>"We charge more. We're a premium product," said Randle Richardson, the CEO
>of CEP. "Anyone can warehouse a child."
>
>CEP renovates abandoned big-box stores or industrial spaces, creating
>sex-segregated "learning communities." The students can't mingle and are
>walked in groups to bathrooms at specific times. Lunch is provided in their
>classrooms. Students may not bring money to school and are screened as if
>going through airport security, shoes and coats off. Teachers take
>attendance with an electronic fingerprint scanner that transmits the
>information back to CEP headquarters for payment. Some critics have called
>CEP schools "soft jails."
>
>CEP boasts that it employs "certified teachers and degreed individuals with
>experience in behavior management, counseling or social services." But CEP
>faces the same shortage of certified teachers the public schools do, and it
>pays lower salaries. In its early Houston days, says Marsha Sonnenberg, a
>Fort Worth educator who consulted for CEP, "they used some people from
>corrections and some they trained. Some had been from the streets
>themselves and rehabbed. Some were a little more like me." Irving Mitchell,
>principal of CEP's Atlanta school from August 2003 to January 2004, said
>his school had few certified teachers and high turnover, so on an average
>day classes were doubled up. "There was very little instruction, because
>you were dealing with fights and staff shortages," Mitchell said.
>Richardson said CEP pays for teacher-certification training when needed,
>and that such classes are brought onsite for his Philadelphia staff.
>
>"Be Here, Behave and Be Learning," is CEP's motto, but it should include
>"Be Tested," because students spend much of their learning time at
>computers with Plato, a self-paced tutorial that tests and assesses
>achievement. CEP uses Plato data to prove its claims of student
>improvement, but assessment experts give Plato mixed reviews, and some
>who've worked with it say cheating is not difficult.
>
>Political Juice
>
>Richardson founded CEP with his college buddy Phil Baggett, CEP's vice
>chairman. Richardson says his inspiration came from his early years as a
>small-town lawyer taking $50 juvenile delinquency cases from the family
>court judge. Then Richardson ran the Tennessee Farmers Home Administration,
>making loans to low-income homeowners. John Danielson, who would become
>Under Secretary of Education to Paige, was also a founder. Initial
>investors included Bill McInnes, formerly of the Hospital Corporation of
>America, and Tom Beasley, founder of the Corrections Corporation of
>America, the private prison company. CEP's early investors put up $65
>million; the company is now backed by Stephens Inc., a Little Rock,
>Arkansas, investment bank, and the Texas Growth Fund, a private equity firm
>created by the Texas legislature with public employee pension funds.
>Richardson says CEP's annual revenues are $70 million.
>
>Richardson bristles at questions about Beasley's role, sensitive to critics
>who've likened CEP schools to juvenile jails. "We had discussions early on
>that we are not going to be correctional," Richardson said. "Tom
>understood. He said, 'I'm an investor. You guys are here to run the
>company.'" But like Beasley, Richardson saw a ripe business opportunity in
>privatizing a public service--one that, like prisons, deals with society's
>messy failures. CEP's first contract was to operate a juvenile detention
>alternative-education program for Harris County, Texas.
>
>Giving CEP entree into the Texas education scene was George Scott, then
>president of the Tax Research Association, a nonprofit education-reform
>group in Houston, and now a senior writer for the online newspaper
>Education News. Scott, who was close to Paige when Paige was Houston
>schools superintendent, helped CEP score its first public school contract,
>with the Houston district. Scott said he told Paige, "Rod, this is it. This
>is privatized accountability at its best." Scott later became a CEP critic,
>though, charging that the company evaded real accountability for a program
>that was educationally flawed and a waste of taxpayer money. "I look back
>on my role with CEP, my dedication and commitment to accountability, and it
>is the greatest professional disgrace in my career," Scott said. "As long
>as the district and the vendor have influence over accountability measures,
>it is corrupt."
>
>Richardson says his background is in government, but it's his Republican
>Party credentials that pay off. Like Tom Beasley before him, Richardson was
>Tennessee's GOP chair--from 1992 to 1995--helping to lead Republicans "out
>of the wilderness and into control of statewide offices," according to one
>news account. Richardson soft-pedals his political ties, calling himself a
>"Howard Baker Republican" and insisting CEP is above the partisan fray. But
>CEP has thrived on the accumulated political juice Richardson and his
>cohorts have squeezed, mostly Republican-flavored, since its founding.
>
>In Texas CEP executives cultivated powerful friends, hiring Houston school
>board member Larry Marshall as a $6,000-a-month consultant and landing an
>endorsement from George Bush Sr. at the opening of CEP's first Houston
>school. "They were putting together the juiciest political team," Scott
>said. "They had powerful people at their beck and call." Political pull
>helped CEP waltz into Florida. Richardson and Baggett contributed to
>Charlie Crist's successful 2000 run for state education commissioner and to
>Governor Jeb Bush's 2002 campaign. In 2001 CEP's Florida lobbyist Juhan
>Mixon helped write a provision in a state appropriations bill that
>earmarked $4.8 million for "Alternative Schools/Public Private
>Partnerships." It was "to serve a minimum of 500 or more disruptive and low
>performing students"--a description tailored to CEP. Mixon also lobbies for
>several Florida school districts, including Bay, which hired CEP.
>
>In Philadelphia CEP found privatization high on the agendas of
>then-Governor Tom Ridge, a Republican, and state politicians. The state
>took control of the bankrupt Philadelphia school district in 2001, and
>state legislators made privatizing schools one of the conditions for the
>bailout. CEP's chief political ally has been Republican State House Speaker
>John Perzel, whose beefy visage graces the company's website along with his
>testimonial. Richardson, Baggett and CEP execs have contributed more than
>$11,000 to Perzel's campaigns. CEP's five-year, $28-million-a-year contract
>with Philadelphia schools was renewed in May 2004 with no debate.
>
>Accountability in Action
>
>CEP is a product of the high-stakes testing and accountability approach to
>education reform, which aims to run public schools like businesses whose
>products are students. Yet holding CEP accountable has been a quixotic
>undertaking because of the fluidity of the student population, the
>malleability of statistics and the company's political savvy. The few
>totally independent evaluations of CEP's effectiveness have rated it
>poorly. Several evaluations were paid for by CEP, like one in 1999 by Bush
>Sr. Education Department appointee Diane Ravitch, whose glowing endorsement
>of CEP's Houston program appears on CEP's website. Others were based on
>testing data completely controlled by CEP.
>
>In Texas CEP's first brush with evaluation was a lesson in the pitfalls of
>accountability and the importance of data control. In 1997 Texas state
>education commissioner Mike Moses hired Carl Shaw, former chair of the
>Texas Education Agency's (TEA) assessment committee and head of Houston's
>testing for fourteen years, to assess CEP's first contract, the juvenile
>detention program. Shaw found limited student progress after six months in
>CEP, and after a year, actual regression. "I could find no evidence that
>there was a strong-enough academic program in place to produce change," he
>said. "One report I wrote for [the Houston Independent School District]
>said few CEP students would be smart enough for prison education. It's
>shocking, and here's a company touted as a leader." Shaw said CEP head
>Richardson was angry at his findings and his refusal to compromise his
>work. "The first reaction I had from Richardson was, 'I am more powerful
>than you,'" Shaw said.
>
>CEP executives turned to Scott, the taxpayers' group president, for backup.
>"They wanted support that his test had gone awry," Scott said. "I told them
>I was 100 percent into Dr. Shaw's approach." Scott says discussions he and
>CEP had been having about a consultancy and shares of founders stock broke
>down because Scott refused to repudiate Shaw. Richardson says CEP raised
>concerns about Shaw's tests having "both positive and negative
>aberrations," and that they couldn't be validated by the TEA. Richardson
>noted that his relationship with Scott soured after the problems with
>Shaw's testing emerged.
>
>Next up was Dr. Tom Kellow, an evaluation specialist for Houston's schools.
>In 1999 Superintendent Paige asked Kellow to evaluate CEP--but he was
>forbidden to visit the school and could only use data CEP provided. Kellow
>learned that CEP's contract stated that it could only be held accountable
>based on its own in-house testing, not the statewide Texas Assessment of
>Academic Skills (TAAS). "What I found is what Carl Shaw found," Kellow
>said. "The longer [students] stayed, the worse their performance." Although
>under NCLB all schools must meet Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) standards
>for specific percentages of students testing at grade level in math and
>reading, the TEA exempts CEP. For both 2003 and 2004, the AYP status of
>CEP's two Houston schools is listed as "Not Evaluated." CEP's school
>profiles on the Houston schools website also reveal that the company evades
>the accountability that public schools face: No TAAS scores are listed and
>no information is provided for either state or district accountability
>measures.
>
>Houston continues to contract with CEP despite those early assessments, but
>Dallas's public school district was more discriminating. Dallas hired CEP
>in 1999, with a five-year, $10 million yearly contract. But after three
>years the district bowed out; its own evaluation of CEP in 2002 recommended
>ending the contract, stating that "the model of education provided by [CEP]
>was untenable from a pedagogical standpoint. The reliance on non-certified
>teachers for the bulk of the student-teacher interaction was useful for the
>company to save money, but was not a design in the best interest of the
>students.... Students who attended Community Education Partners did not do
>very well academically." CEP had refused to provide its budget data, the
>report noted, making it impossible to know just how it was spending the
>district's money.
>
>Dallas's report and a series of critical articles about CEP in the Houston
>Press, an alternative newsweekly, helped New Orleans public schools decide
>against a contract with CEP, according to former school board president
>Cheryl Mills. But Atlanta public schools ignored the negative press and
>evaluations, contracting with CEP four years ago. CEP's Atlanta school was
>the target of community organizing in early 2005 after the Atlanta Voice, a
>black newspaper, ran a series exposing serious inadequacies at the CEP
>school. The articles were based on the accounts of former CEP principal
>Mitchell and of a former teacher. "It became a dump for human waste,"
>Mitchell said. "Accountability is with the Atlanta school board for
>disenfranchising these kids. There was a contract and expectations, and I
>feel they were not met. The statistics show they weren't met."
>
>Atlanta schools deputy superintendent Kathy Augustine called Mitchell
>"disgruntled." She said she was unaware that students could not take books
>home, that there was no homework or that there was a teacher shortage. "I
>think we're improving," Augustine said. "It's a developing relationship.
>Finding leadership is key to that." She said she had no evidence that CEP
>was not living up to its contract. Told that CEP's school had failed to
>meet AYP standards for reading and math in the 2003-04 school year,
>Augustine said, "The AYP piece is different for nontraditional schools
>because children are very fluid." She noted that the school board had voted
>to extend CEP's contract through 2009.
>
>In Philadelphia even supposedly independent evaluations of CEP were
>dependent on company-controlled data. In March Philadelphia released an
>evaluation of CEP's two schools conducted by researchers at Temple
>University. The report surveyed seventy students and seventy parents who
>offered positive reports on CEP's program--a fraction of more than 4,300
>students CEP has served. In evaluating student academic growth, the report
>relied entirely on CEP's own Plato data, which claim astounding gains of
>three to four "grade levels" in reading and math for students who spend 180
>days at CEP--but there's no indication of how many students actually stay
>that long. The school district itself partakes of the statistical spin.
>Paul Socolar, editor of Philadelphia Public School Notebook, an independent
>newspaper, noted that in 2004 the district issued a CEP fact sheet that
>excluded CEP scores on the statewide standardized test for eighth graders,
>which had gone down; in January of this year the district excluded results
>for CEP eleventh graders, which had gone down. "It's a total manipulation
>of data," Socolar said. And as for meeting the AYP standards, CEP's Philly
>schools don't.
>
>CEP's Richardson says the proof of his company's success is that districts
>keep renewing their contracts. The question is how success is defined.
>Public schools have strong incentives to remove the lowest-performing
>students from their classrooms and make them CEP's problem, especially
>since the passage of No Child Left Behind. "CEP was a way to get around
>NCLB," said Mitchell. "If you move these kids from the regular school
>program, you automatically decrease the dropout rate and get a gain on your
>test scores. So you contract those kids out; they're in a separate
>environment, but they aren't counted in the total." For Socolar, CEP is a
>political solution to the public system's failures: "From the beginning,
>the concern that jumped out about CEP is whether putting these students in
>the hands of private companies is a way of putting them out of sight and
>out of mind," he said. While the public schools are hammered by the
>accountability-through-testing mandates of NCLB, CEP skirts the same
>accountability and proves the uselessness of high-stakes testing as an
>education strategy. Judging CEP by its test data only seems to make sense
>because the company and school districts that hire it buy into that
>accountability measure. Test scores, in truth, can never be an end in
>themselves--or proof that children are learning. That's why NCLB is phony
>education reform.
>
>At the end of an interview Richardson asked in almost plaintive tones, "Are
>we the enemy?" Well, yes and no. CEP may be doing a poor job, but it's only
>a symptom of the crumbling national commitment to public education,
>including the public schools' failure to educate huge percentages of mostly
>black and Latino students. Vouchers and other privatizing efforts in
>education have still not gained the momentum that conservatives had hoped
>for. But companies like CEP in the expanding private education industry
>help chip away at the public school infrastructure by targeting a
>market--the "bad students"--that has few advocates. CEP promotes
>privatization in a more quiet, effective way than Chris Whittle's troubled
>Edison schools have. And Richardson's future ambitions reveal an astute
>understanding of the changing nature and needs of today's student
>population: He'd like to run schools for overage students--17- or
>18-year-olds who work or raise families and need flexible programming, the
>students who "don't fit in the box," he says.
>
>As the box holding traditional students shrinks, one challenge facing
>public school educators is how best to serve all students--from high
>achievers to the most disruptive kids like Morris Gandy's son. If the
>public sector abdicates its responsibility to educate all children,
>businessmen like Randle Richardson are ready to step in. >
>
>This article can be found on the web at:
>
>http://www.thenation.com/doc/20050919/fuentes
>
>Visit The Nation http://www.thenation.com/
Tuesday, September 06, 2005
Across Nation, Storm Victims Crowd Schools
Be sure to read the NYTimes piece by Sam Dillon below. Incidentally, I had a conversation with my graduate students last night about the usage of the term, “refugees,” to describe Katrina’s victims. We agreed that it “others” them, treating them like foreigners. The Austin Am-Statesman used the term, “evacuees” in yesterday’s headlines. This is perhaps a more positive or at least neutral term. Just a suggestion.
I also learned today that there were about 145,000 Latino/as, most of them immigrants, who were also displaced. They are an even more marginal group among the marginalized. I know that the Red Cross is looking for Spanish-speaking volunteers.
Respectfully,
Angela
By SAM DILLON
School districts from Maine to Washington State were enrolling thousands of
students from New Orleans and other devastated Gulf Coast districts
yesterday in what experts said could become the largest student
resettlement in the nation's history.
Schools welcoming the displaced students must not only provide classrooms,
teachers and textbooks, but under the terms of President Bush's education
law must also almost immediately begin to raise their scholastic
achievement unless some provisions of that law are waived.
Historians said that those twin challenges surpassed anything that public
education had experienced since its creation after the Civil War, including
disasters that devastated whole school districts, like the San Francisco
earthquake and the Chicago fire.
"In terms of school systems absorbing kids whose lives and homes have been
shattered, what we're going to watch over the next weeks is unprecedented
in American education," said Jeffrey Mirel, a professor of history and
education at the University of Michigan.
The vast resettlement was already under way last week, with schools in
Baton Rouge, La., Houston and other cities near the Gulf Coast enrolling
some students. Yesterday, officials in cities including San Antonio;
Phoenix; Olympia, Wash.; Freeport, Me.; Memphis; Washington; Las Vegas;
Salt Lake City; Chicago; Detroit; and Philadelphia reported enrolling
students or preparing for their arrival.
The total number of displaced students is not yet known, but it appears to
be well above 200,000. In Louisiana, 135,000 public school students and
52,000 private school students have been displaced from Orleans, Jefferson,
St. Bernard and Plaquemines Parishes.
President Bush, speaking with reporters at the White House yesterday,
thanked the nation's educators "for reaching out and doing their duty," and
he said that Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings was working on a
plan to help states absorb the educational costs but gave no hint of what
kind of assistance might be provided. The Department of Education set up a
Web site to coordinate private donations to schools enrolling displaced
students.
"They said we could brace for about 500 kids," said Sue Steele, coordinator
of homeless student programs for the public schools in Wichita, where buses
carrying 1,800 storm victims were expected to arrive yesterday, part of
some 7,000 headed for Kansas.
Many students were concentrated in districts along an arc from the Florida
Panhandle west through Georgia, Tennessee, Arkansas and Texas.
The Santa Rosa County School District in the Florida Panhandle has enrolled
137 students, said Carol Calfee, a district official.
"And we still have folks coming in," she said. "They're walking through the
door and some of them just have nothing, so it's really hard." The local
United Way has said it will try to buy school supplies for every displaced
student, she said.
The crisis poses new challenges for Ms. Spellings, including financial. The
Department of Education's budget this year for homeless student programs is
about $61 million, which she said was insufficient.
Ms. Spellings, who has spent her first months in office fighting a backlash
by local educators and state lawmakers against the federal law known as No
Child Left Behind, is also hearing calls from advocacy groups that she take
emergency measures that could be controversial.
The National Education Association, the nation's largest teachers union,
asked her on Friday to waive the accountability provisions of the law for
schools in the hurricane's path as well as in Texas and other states
receiving large numbers of students, a move Ms. Spellings said she was
reluctant to take.
Private companies that operate online courses or charter schools are urging
her to use emergency powers to authorize them to enroll displaced students
at the Houston Astrodome and other shelters across the nation.
Ms. Spellings has invited 40 education groups, including the P.T.A. and
teachers unions, to meet at the Department of Education today to discuss
disaster recovery efforts. Reg Weaver, president of the N.E.A., which has
challenged No Child Left Behind in federal court, said he immediately
accepted the invitation.
But in a separate letter, he also asked Ms. Spellings to use her powers to
waive provisions of the law, which requires school districts to raise
student scores on standardized tests each year by a percentage set by each
state, a goal known as making adequate yearly progress.
"Until these children, their teachers, districts and families gain their
footing under these extremely difficult circumstances, I encourage you to
implement the provisions in N.C.L.B. that deal with the impact of natural
disasters on testing and adequate yearly progress," Mr. Weaver's letter
said.
Ms. Spellings is consulting with state school superintendents as she
considers whether to waive the law's accountability provisions in some
cases, said her spokeswoman, Susan Aspey. One consideration is how many
displaced students that individual schools or districts enroll; those with
higher concentrations may be more likely to receive waivers, Ms. Aspey
said.
"There is no one-size-fits-all approach," she said.
Even before the storm, hundreds of schools that had failed to meet the
federal law's proficiency requirements for several years, most of which
educate the urban poor or non-English speaking immigrants, were facing
sanctions that include school closings and the firing of staff. Thousands
of others were expected to be placed on academic probation or labeled as
low-performing.
Theodore R. Sizer, a visiting professor of history at Harvard, said that
unless the law's accountability provisions were waived during the
emergency, they would add tensions to the resettlement crisis.
"Imagine you're the principal of a big high school in city X, and your
scores are above the state minimums, so you're doing fine with the law, and
suddenly you have 300 displaced kids," Mr. Sizer said. "That not only
brings crowding but also means that on the next exams your scores could
plummet and the federal law will say you run a terrible school."
The Bush administration must also make decisions about another hotly
debated issue in public education: charter schools. The National Council of
Education Providers, which represents the nation's largest commercial
school management companies, has asked the Department of Education to
authorize it to enroll students housed at emergency shelters in
Internet-based courses offered by its companies.
The National Council's Web site yesterday highlighted its request to the
department to establish a "national virtual charter school" that would
"serve evacuees wherever they are."
"Once students have access to computers and connectivity - borrowed,
donated or shared - companies are standing by to waive state restrictions
and log these students on," the Web site said. The restrictions in question
include enrollment caps in state laws that apply to charter schools. The
National Council wants the federal government to waive those laws during
the emergency.
Jeanne Allen, a paid consultant to the National Council who is also
president of the Center for Education Reform, a nonprofit organization,
said she delivered a draft "Emergency Public Charter School Act" to members
of Congress yesterday.
·
Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company
September 7, 2005
School Routine Provides Welcome Change From Chaos
By JOHN M. BRODER
HOUSTON, Sept. 6 - Before the sun came up on Tuesday morning, Elejaine
Gobert had her five children scrubbed and dressed in white shirts just like
those they wore for school back in Mississippi, before Hurricane Katrina
ripped up their lives.
The school-day routine was a welcome relief after a chaotic escape from the
storm and a week in the Red Cross shelter behind St. Peter Claver Catholic
Church in the northeast corner of Houston. There was little for the
children to do during the day at the shelter, and Ms. Gobert was insistent
that their schooling continue, despite their having lost everything in the
storm.
"That's the most important thing," said Ms. Gobert, who said she was a
nurse. "They don't need to be here all day depressed at the shelter. Back
at home, they love school."
Just after 7 a.m., a bus from the North Forest Independent School District
pulled into the church lot to pick up Ms. Gobert's five youngsters and the
three children of Webb and Theresa Pierce, who fled to Houston from
Marrero, La., just ahead of the hurricane.
As an orange sun rose, off they rode to a new school, new teachers and new
classmates in a scene that played out thousands of times in Texas alone on
Tuesday morning, as the storm-tossed clung to the one constant raft in
their lives.
Texas school officials said they could not provide a complete count of
children of the storm now enrolled statewide; their latest estimate, at the
end of last week, was 6,100.
That number is expected to soar this week, as school officials enter the
large shelters at the Astrodome and two large convention centers in Houston
to begin registering school-age children. Terry Abbott, spokesman for the
Houston Independent School District, which will absorb the largest number
of storm evacuees, said the district expected to sign up at least 5,000
children from those shelters. In addition, he said, several thousand
students now staying in hotels, outlying shelters or in private homes will
enter the Houston school district in coming days.
The Houston district, the state's largest, can accommodate as many as
13,000 new students, Mr. Abbott said. The district has already decided to
reopen two elementary schools that were closed last spring because of
declining enrollment and plans to hire hundreds of teachers. Among the new
hires, Mr. Abbott said, are dozens from Louisiana, and scores who were in
the applicant pool in Houston last spring.
The influx of students will be another big challenge for Houston, which
trumpets its school district as one of the most successful in the nation,
with a high rate of achievement under President Bush's education law, the
No Child Left Behind Act. But last year, the system was found to have
vastly underreported its dropout rate and manipulated its 10th-grade test
scores.
The State of Texas has suspended its required ratio of one teacher for
every 22 students and waived immunization requirements for displaced
students, a spokeswoman for the Texas Education Agency said. The state will
also reimburse all costs, including those for free breakfasts and lunches,
for districts that take in more than 50 new students. In Dallas, school
buses picked up about 150 children from downtown shelters on Tuesday and
delivered them to schools in the city.
As the buses pulled up, many children eagerly clambered on board.
"Some of them jumped for joy," said Ivette Cruz Weis, a spokeswoman for the
Dallas Independent School District. "They were so ready" after a week
sitting around the shelters, she added.
At A. G. Hilliard Elementary School in northeast Houston, four of Ms.
Gobert's children and the three Pierce youngsters were assigned to classes
based on what grade they said they had been in back home. The eldest of the
group, John Gobert, 15, was assigned to a magnet high school because he is
a ballet dancer.
The leader of Hilliard's second-grade teaching team, Erica Chandler, took
Nashia Gobert, 7, by the hand and showed her to a locker. Nashia slipped
off her empty Nickelodeon backpack (obviously a donated item, because it
had the name Leslee Ivy in bold letters on it) and lined up for breakfast,
a carton of Golden Grahams and a half-pint of 2 percent milk.
"These kids are amazing," Ms. Chandler said after she had placed Nashia in
a classroom. "I thought they'd be a little upset, a little distraught. But
they talk about what they went through just like adults."
Ms. Chandler said she took several of her other storm-displaced students to
a Jack in the Box restaurant over the weekend and broke down crying at the
stories they told. One girl, Gabriel Santiago, had deep bruises on her side
from sleeping jammed against a pole at the Superdome in New Orleans, where
her family was huddled on the concrete floor. Ms. Chandler said the girl
said to her, "I told my mom, why are you complaining? We're still alive."
"They show no signs of what they went through," Ms. Chandler said. "They're
not despondent and they're not acting out in any way."
Sharon Wyckoff described herself as the "principal, cook and custodian" at
Hilliard Elementary, which has more than 500 pupils. The school has taken
in 22 evacuees. One thing she wanted to do, she said, was to find them red
shirts and blue pants, the school uniform, so they feel a part of the
community.
School guidance counselors say that the shock of relocation and sudden
placement in an unfamiliar school are bound to affect many of the children.
The president of the Texas Counseling Association, Sadie Woodard, said
youngsters were as susceptible to post-traumatic stress symptoms as adults.
She said she expected to see anger and aggressive acts, depression,
difficulty concentrating and other signs of trauma as thousands of new
students poured into Texas schools in coming weeks.
"This is going to present a number of different counseling problems," said
Ms. Woodard, who is also the assistant superintendent for guidance
counseling at the 85,000-student Cypress Fairbanks Independent School
District in northwest Houston.
"They've been displaced from their homes, living in shelters; they have to
adjust to that," she said. "They are going to a school where they don't
know anyone. In many cases they waded through deep water and saw dead
bodies and lost their homes and everything they had. It's going to cause
all kinds of emotional responses."
Ms. Woodard said that 400 evacuated children were now enrolled in her
district and that she expected a couple hundred more. Each has met with a
counselor and has been encouraged to recount his or her experiences in the
disaster. The older children are being assigned a fellow student to help
show them the ropes.
"When they came here, they were tired, hungry, frustrated and in shock,"
she said. "Once they get through that phase, there will be other problems
to address."
She added, "These kiddos are going to need support for a very long time."
I also learned today that there were about 145,000 Latino/as, most of them immigrants, who were also displaced. They are an even more marginal group among the marginalized. I know that the Red Cross is looking for Spanish-speaking volunteers.
Respectfully,
Angela
By SAM DILLON
School districts from Maine to Washington State were enrolling thousands of
students from New Orleans and other devastated Gulf Coast districts
yesterday in what experts said could become the largest student
resettlement in the nation's history.
Schools welcoming the displaced students must not only provide classrooms,
teachers and textbooks, but under the terms of President Bush's education
law must also almost immediately begin to raise their scholastic
achievement unless some provisions of that law are waived.
Historians said that those twin challenges surpassed anything that public
education had experienced since its creation after the Civil War, including
disasters that devastated whole school districts, like the San Francisco
earthquake and the Chicago fire.
"In terms of school systems absorbing kids whose lives and homes have been
shattered, what we're going to watch over the next weeks is unprecedented
in American education," said Jeffrey Mirel, a professor of history and
education at the University of Michigan.
The vast resettlement was already under way last week, with schools in
Baton Rouge, La., Houston and other cities near the Gulf Coast enrolling
some students. Yesterday, officials in cities including San Antonio;
Phoenix; Olympia, Wash.; Freeport, Me.; Memphis; Washington; Las Vegas;
Salt Lake City; Chicago; Detroit; and Philadelphia reported enrolling
students or preparing for their arrival.
The total number of displaced students is not yet known, but it appears to
be well above 200,000. In Louisiana, 135,000 public school students and
52,000 private school students have been displaced from Orleans, Jefferson,
St. Bernard and Plaquemines Parishes.
President Bush, speaking with reporters at the White House yesterday,
thanked the nation's educators "for reaching out and doing their duty," and
he said that Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings was working on a
plan to help states absorb the educational costs but gave no hint of what
kind of assistance might be provided. The Department of Education set up a
Web site to coordinate private donations to schools enrolling displaced
students.
"They said we could brace for about 500 kids," said Sue Steele, coordinator
of homeless student programs for the public schools in Wichita, where buses
carrying 1,800 storm victims were expected to arrive yesterday, part of
some 7,000 headed for Kansas.
Many students were concentrated in districts along an arc from the Florida
Panhandle west through Georgia, Tennessee, Arkansas and Texas.
The Santa Rosa County School District in the Florida Panhandle has enrolled
137 students, said Carol Calfee, a district official.
"And we still have folks coming in," she said. "They're walking through the
door and some of them just have nothing, so it's really hard." The local
United Way has said it will try to buy school supplies for every displaced
student, she said.
The crisis poses new challenges for Ms. Spellings, including financial. The
Department of Education's budget this year for homeless student programs is
about $61 million, which she said was insufficient.
Ms. Spellings, who has spent her first months in office fighting a backlash
by local educators and state lawmakers against the federal law known as No
Child Left Behind, is also hearing calls from advocacy groups that she take
emergency measures that could be controversial.
The National Education Association, the nation's largest teachers union,
asked her on Friday to waive the accountability provisions of the law for
schools in the hurricane's path as well as in Texas and other states
receiving large numbers of students, a move Ms. Spellings said she was
reluctant to take.
Private companies that operate online courses or charter schools are urging
her to use emergency powers to authorize them to enroll displaced students
at the Houston Astrodome and other shelters across the nation.
Ms. Spellings has invited 40 education groups, including the P.T.A. and
teachers unions, to meet at the Department of Education today to discuss
disaster recovery efforts. Reg Weaver, president of the N.E.A., which has
challenged No Child Left Behind in federal court, said he immediately
accepted the invitation.
But in a separate letter, he also asked Ms. Spellings to use her powers to
waive provisions of the law, which requires school districts to raise
student scores on standardized tests each year by a percentage set by each
state, a goal known as making adequate yearly progress.
"Until these children, their teachers, districts and families gain their
footing under these extremely difficult circumstances, I encourage you to
implement the provisions in N.C.L.B. that deal with the impact of natural
disasters on testing and adequate yearly progress," Mr. Weaver's letter
said.
Ms. Spellings is consulting with state school superintendents as she
considers whether to waive the law's accountability provisions in some
cases, said her spokeswoman, Susan Aspey. One consideration is how many
displaced students that individual schools or districts enroll; those with
higher concentrations may be more likely to receive waivers, Ms. Aspey
said.
"There is no one-size-fits-all approach," she said.
Even before the storm, hundreds of schools that had failed to meet the
federal law's proficiency requirements for several years, most of which
educate the urban poor or non-English speaking immigrants, were facing
sanctions that include school closings and the firing of staff. Thousands
of others were expected to be placed on academic probation or labeled as
low-performing.
Theodore R. Sizer, a visiting professor of history at Harvard, said that
unless the law's accountability provisions were waived during the
emergency, they would add tensions to the resettlement crisis.
"Imagine you're the principal of a big high school in city X, and your
scores are above the state minimums, so you're doing fine with the law, and
suddenly you have 300 displaced kids," Mr. Sizer said. "That not only
brings crowding but also means that on the next exams your scores could
plummet and the federal law will say you run a terrible school."
The Bush administration must also make decisions about another hotly
debated issue in public education: charter schools. The National Council of
Education Providers, which represents the nation's largest commercial
school management companies, has asked the Department of Education to
authorize it to enroll students housed at emergency shelters in
Internet-based courses offered by its companies.
The National Council's Web site yesterday highlighted its request to the
department to establish a "national virtual charter school" that would
"serve evacuees wherever they are."
"Once students have access to computers and connectivity - borrowed,
donated or shared - companies are standing by to waive state restrictions
and log these students on," the Web site said. The restrictions in question
include enrollment caps in state laws that apply to charter schools. The
National Council wants the federal government to waive those laws during
the emergency.
Jeanne Allen, a paid consultant to the National Council who is also
president of the Center for Education Reform, a nonprofit organization,
said she delivered a draft "Emergency Public Charter School Act" to members
of Congress yesterday.
·
Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company
September 7, 2005
School Routine Provides Welcome Change From Chaos
By JOHN M. BRODER
HOUSTON, Sept. 6 - Before the sun came up on Tuesday morning, Elejaine
Gobert had her five children scrubbed and dressed in white shirts just like
those they wore for school back in Mississippi, before Hurricane Katrina
ripped up their lives.
The school-day routine was a welcome relief after a chaotic escape from the
storm and a week in the Red Cross shelter behind St. Peter Claver Catholic
Church in the northeast corner of Houston. There was little for the
children to do during the day at the shelter, and Ms. Gobert was insistent
that their schooling continue, despite their having lost everything in the
storm.
"That's the most important thing," said Ms. Gobert, who said she was a
nurse. "They don't need to be here all day depressed at the shelter. Back
at home, they love school."
Just after 7 a.m., a bus from the North Forest Independent School District
pulled into the church lot to pick up Ms. Gobert's five youngsters and the
three children of Webb and Theresa Pierce, who fled to Houston from
Marrero, La., just ahead of the hurricane.
As an orange sun rose, off they rode to a new school, new teachers and new
classmates in a scene that played out thousands of times in Texas alone on
Tuesday morning, as the storm-tossed clung to the one constant raft in
their lives.
Texas school officials said they could not provide a complete count of
children of the storm now enrolled statewide; their latest estimate, at the
end of last week, was 6,100.
That number is expected to soar this week, as school officials enter the
large shelters at the Astrodome and two large convention centers in Houston
to begin registering school-age children. Terry Abbott, spokesman for the
Houston Independent School District, which will absorb the largest number
of storm evacuees, said the district expected to sign up at least 5,000
children from those shelters. In addition, he said, several thousand
students now staying in hotels, outlying shelters or in private homes will
enter the Houston school district in coming days.
The Houston district, the state's largest, can accommodate as many as
13,000 new students, Mr. Abbott said. The district has already decided to
reopen two elementary schools that were closed last spring because of
declining enrollment and plans to hire hundreds of teachers. Among the new
hires, Mr. Abbott said, are dozens from Louisiana, and scores who were in
the applicant pool in Houston last spring.
The influx of students will be another big challenge for Houston, which
trumpets its school district as one of the most successful in the nation,
with a high rate of achievement under President Bush's education law, the
No Child Left Behind Act. But last year, the system was found to have
vastly underreported its dropout rate and manipulated its 10th-grade test
scores.
The State of Texas has suspended its required ratio of one teacher for
every 22 students and waived immunization requirements for displaced
students, a spokeswoman for the Texas Education Agency said. The state will
also reimburse all costs, including those for free breakfasts and lunches,
for districts that take in more than 50 new students. In Dallas, school
buses picked up about 150 children from downtown shelters on Tuesday and
delivered them to schools in the city.
As the buses pulled up, many children eagerly clambered on board.
"Some of them jumped for joy," said Ivette Cruz Weis, a spokeswoman for the
Dallas Independent School District. "They were so ready" after a week
sitting around the shelters, she added.
At A. G. Hilliard Elementary School in northeast Houston, four of Ms.
Gobert's children and the three Pierce youngsters were assigned to classes
based on what grade they said they had been in back home. The eldest of the
group, John Gobert, 15, was assigned to a magnet high school because he is
a ballet dancer.
The leader of Hilliard's second-grade teaching team, Erica Chandler, took
Nashia Gobert, 7, by the hand and showed her to a locker. Nashia slipped
off her empty Nickelodeon backpack (obviously a donated item, because it
had the name Leslee Ivy in bold letters on it) and lined up for breakfast,
a carton of Golden Grahams and a half-pint of 2 percent milk.
"These kids are amazing," Ms. Chandler said after she had placed Nashia in
a classroom. "I thought they'd be a little upset, a little distraught. But
they talk about what they went through just like adults."
Ms. Chandler said she took several of her other storm-displaced students to
a Jack in the Box restaurant over the weekend and broke down crying at the
stories they told. One girl, Gabriel Santiago, had deep bruises on her side
from sleeping jammed against a pole at the Superdome in New Orleans, where
her family was huddled on the concrete floor. Ms. Chandler said the girl
said to her, "I told my mom, why are you complaining? We're still alive."
"They show no signs of what they went through," Ms. Chandler said. "They're
not despondent and they're not acting out in any way."
Sharon Wyckoff described herself as the "principal, cook and custodian" at
Hilliard Elementary, which has more than 500 pupils. The school has taken
in 22 evacuees. One thing she wanted to do, she said, was to find them red
shirts and blue pants, the school uniform, so they feel a part of the
community.
School guidance counselors say that the shock of relocation and sudden
placement in an unfamiliar school are bound to affect many of the children.
The president of the Texas Counseling Association, Sadie Woodard, said
youngsters were as susceptible to post-traumatic stress symptoms as adults.
She said she expected to see anger and aggressive acts, depression,
difficulty concentrating and other signs of trauma as thousands of new
students poured into Texas schools in coming weeks.
"This is going to present a number of different counseling problems," said
Ms. Woodard, who is also the assistant superintendent for guidance
counseling at the 85,000-student Cypress Fairbanks Independent School
District in northwest Houston.
"They've been displaced from their homes, living in shelters; they have to
adjust to that," she said. "They are going to a school where they don't
know anyone. In many cases they waded through deep water and saw dead
bodies and lost their homes and everything they had. It's going to cause
all kinds of emotional responses."
Ms. Woodard said that 400 evacuated children were now enrolled in her
district and that she expected a couple hundred more. Each has met with a
counselor and has been encouraged to recount his or her experiences in the
disaster. The older children are being assigned a fellow student to help
show them the ropes.
"When they came here, they were tired, hungry, frustrated and in shock,"
she said. "Once they get through that phase, there will be other problems
to address."
She added, "These kiddos are going to need support for a very long time."
Thursday, September 01, 2005
HOW YOU CAN HELP HURRICANE VICTIMS
***please circulate widely***
Friends and Colleagues,
By now, we’ve all gotten wind of the epic proportions of the disastrous effects of hurricane Katrina. In Texas, there is a special burden on us to be good neighbors to victims. Many are already giving. For those of you who are looking for ways to help, this urgent message comes to me from friend and colleague, Houston City Council Member Adrian Garcia. At this moment, thousands of victims are flooding in from the New Orleans Superdome to the Houston Astrodome and they’re in desperate need of supplies. Compliments of the Austin Am-Statesman, numerous other ways to help also appear below. -Angela
------ Forwarded Message
From: Adrian Garcia
Date: 1 Sep 2005 00:08:43 -0000
To: Angela Valenzuela
Subject: Hurricane Katrina Victims
Angela, as you might imagine, we here in Houston, Texas have been busy making preparations to deal with the sudden influx of refugees fleeing the ravages of Hurricane Katrina in Louisiana.
The Red Cross is handling the logistics of opening and operating shelters. Information for those seeking assistance can be had through the Red Cross phone bank number 1-(866) GET-INFO.
The United Way has agreed to be the point agency for accepting donations from generous Houstonians. They can be reached by dialing 211. That is, the Red Cross is handling shelters, and the United Way is handling all donations.
Thank you for helping our friends and family of the New Orleans community!
Sincerely,
Adrian Garcia, Council Member City of Houston
Council Member
City of Houston - Adrian
PO Box 1562
Houston, Tx 77251
work 713-247-2003
mobile 832-814-2421
fax 713-247-1252
?
How to help
Wednesday, August 31, 2005
Although a variety of government and private agencies are en route to assist victims of Hurricane Katrina, federal officials said people wanting to help should not head to the affected area unless directed by an agency. Instead, Michael Brown, head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, urged people to make cash contributions to these groups:
•American Red Cross, www.redcross.org or (800) HELP NOW (435-7669); (800) 257-7575 in Spanish.
•Operation Blessing, (800) 436-6348.
•America's Second Harvest, www.secondharvest.org or (800) 771-2303.
•Adventist Community Services, (800) 381-7171.
•Catholic Charities, www.catholiccharitiesusa.org, (703) 549-1390.
•Christian Reformed World Relief Committee, (800) 848-5818.
•Church World Service, www.churchworldservice.org, (800) 297-1516.
•Convoy of Hope, (417) 823-8998.
•Episcopal Relief and Development, http://erd.servicenetwork.com/Donate/Donate.asp, (800) 334-7626, ext. 5129.
•Lutheran Disaster Response, (800) 638-3522.
•Presbyterian Disaster Assistance, (800) 872-3283.
•Salvation Army, www.salvationarmyusa.org, (800) SAL-ARMY (725-2769).
•Southern Baptist Convention — Disaster Relief, (800) 462-8657, Ext. 6440.
•United Methodist Committee on Relief, (800) 554-8583.
—The Associated Press
Local charities
•Capital Area Food Bank of Texas, www.austinfoodbank.org,
282-2111.
•Mobile Loaves & Fishes, www.mobileloavesandfishes.org, 328-7299.
Friends and Colleagues,
By now, we’ve all gotten wind of the epic proportions of the disastrous effects of hurricane Katrina. In Texas, there is a special burden on us to be good neighbors to victims. Many are already giving. For those of you who are looking for ways to help, this urgent message comes to me from friend and colleague, Houston City Council Member Adrian Garcia. At this moment, thousands of victims are flooding in from the New Orleans Superdome to the Houston Astrodome and they’re in desperate need of supplies. Compliments of the Austin Am-Statesman, numerous other ways to help also appear below. -Angela
------ Forwarded Message
From: Adrian Garcia
Date: 1 Sep 2005 00:08:43 -0000
To: Angela Valenzuela
Subject: Hurricane Katrina Victims
Angela, as you might imagine, we here in Houston, Texas have been busy making preparations to deal with the sudden influx of refugees fleeing the ravages of Hurricane Katrina in Louisiana.
The Red Cross is handling the logistics of opening and operating shelters. Information for those seeking assistance can be had through the Red Cross phone bank number 1-(866) GET-INFO.
The United Way has agreed to be the point agency for accepting donations from generous Houstonians. They can be reached by dialing 211. That is, the Red Cross is handling shelters, and the United Way is handling all donations.
Thank you for helping our friends and family of the New Orleans community!
Sincerely,
Adrian Garcia, Council Member City of Houston
Council Member
City of Houston - Adrian
PO Box 1562
Houston, Tx 77251
work 713-247-2003
mobile 832-814-2421
fax 713-247-1252
?
How to help
Wednesday, August 31, 2005
Although a variety of government and private agencies are en route to assist victims of Hurricane Katrina, federal officials said people wanting to help should not head to the affected area unless directed by an agency. Instead, Michael Brown, head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, urged people to make cash contributions to these groups:
•American Red Cross, www.redcross.org or (800) HELP NOW (435-7669); (800) 257-7575 in Spanish.
•Operation Blessing, (800) 436-6348.
•America's Second Harvest, www.secondharvest.org or (800) 771-2303.
•Adventist Community Services, (800) 381-7171.
•Catholic Charities, www.catholiccharitiesusa.org, (703) 549-1390.
•Christian Reformed World Relief Committee, (800) 848-5818.
•Church World Service, www.churchworldservice.org, (800) 297-1516.
•Convoy of Hope, (417) 823-8998.
•Episcopal Relief and Development, http://erd.servicenetwork.com/Donate/Donate.asp, (800) 334-7626, ext. 5129.
•Lutheran Disaster Response, (800) 638-3522.
•Presbyterian Disaster Assistance, (800) 872-3283.
•Salvation Army, www.salvationarmyusa.org, (800) SAL-ARMY (725-2769).
•Southern Baptist Convention — Disaster Relief, (800) 462-8657, Ext. 6440.
•United Methodist Committee on Relief, (800) 554-8583.
—The Associated Press
Local charities
•Capital Area Food Bank of Texas, www.austinfoodbank.org,
282-2111.
•Mobile Loaves & Fishes, www.mobileloavesandfishes.org, 328-7299.
Federal government wasn't ready for Katrina, disaster experts say
I don't usually post stuff like this, but this is scandalous and folks need to know where our government's priorities are. This is very upsetting. Check out my other post on how you can help.
-Angela
Experts say government scrimped on storm spending and shifted attention to fighting terrorism
By Seth Borenstein
KNIGHT RIDDER NEWS SERVICE
Thursday, September 1, 2005
WASHINGTON -- The federal government has bungled the job of quickly helping the multitudes of hungry, thirsty and desperate victims of Hurricane Katrina, former top federal, state and local disaster chiefs said Wednesday.
The experts, including a former Bush administration disaster response manager, said the government wasn't prepared, scrimped on storm spending and shifted its attention from dealing with natural disasters to fighting terrorism.
The disaster preparedness agency at the center of the relief effort is the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which was enveloped by the new Department of Homeland Security with a new mission aimed at responding to the attacks of al Qaeda.
"What you're seeing is revealing weaknesses in the state, local and federal levels," said Eric Tolbert, who until February was FEMA's disaster response chief. "All three levels have been weakened. They've been weakened by diversion into terrorism."
But Bush administration officials said they're proud of their efforts. Their first response emphasized rooftop rescues over providing food and water for already safe victims.
"We are extremely pleased with the response of every element of the federal government (and) all of our federal partners have made to this terrible tragedy," Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff said Wednesday.
The agency has more than 1,700 truckloads of water, meals, tents, generators and other supplies ready to go in, Chertoff said. Federal health officials have started setting up at least 40 medical shelters. The Coast Guard reports rescuing more than 1,200 people.
But coastal residents, especially in Biloxi, Miss., said they aren't seeing the promised help.
"We need water. We need ice," Biloxi Fire Department Battalion Chief Joe Boney said. "I've been told it's coming, but we've got people in shelters who haven't had a drink since the storm."
The slow response to Katrina and poor federal leadership is a replay of the mishandling of Hurricane Andrew in 1992, said former FEMA Chief of Staff Jane Bullock, a 22-year veteran of the agency.
Bullock blamed inexperienced federal leadership. She noted that Chertoff and FEMA Director Michael Brown had no disaster experience.
Budget cuts haven't made disaster preparedness any easier.
Last year, FEMA spent $250,000 to conduct an eight-day drill for a mock killer storm hitting New Orleans.
This year, the group was to design a plan to fix such unresolved problems as evacuating sick and injured people from the Superdome and housing tens of thousands of stranded citizens.
Funding for that planning was cut, said Tolbert, the former FEMA disaster response director.
"I don't know if it would have saved more lives," said Tolbert, who was the disaster chief for the state of North Carolina. "It would have made the response faster. You might say it would have saved lives."
FEMA wasn't alone in cutting hurricane spending in New Orleans and the surrounding area.
Federal flood control spending for southeastern Louisiana has been chopped from $69 million in 2001 to $36.5 million in 2005, according to budget documents. Protection for the Lake Pontchartrain vicinity in the Army Corps of Engineers' budget dropped from $14.25 million in 2002 to $5.7 million this year. Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., requested $27 million this year.
In 2004, the Corps essentially stopped major work on the now-breached levee system that had protected New Orleans from flooding. It was the first such stoppage in 37 years, the Times-Picayune newspaper reported.
"It appears that the money has been moved in the president's budget to handle homeland security and the war in Iraq, and I suppose that's the price we pay," Jefferson Parish emergency management chief Walter Maestri told the newspaper.
The Army Corps' New Orleans office, facing a $71 million cut, also eliminated funds to pay for a study on how to protect the Crescent City from a Category 5 storm, New Orleans City Business reported in June.
Further complicating the relief effort in Louisiana is scandal within the state agency. Recently, three top officials of Louisiana's emergency management office were indicted in an investigation into the misuse of relief money from last year's Hurricane Ivan.
Find this article at:
http://www.statesman.com/news/content/auto/epaper/editions/thursday/news_34618a0670620253007e.html
-Angela
Experts say government scrimped on storm spending and shifted attention to fighting terrorism
By Seth Borenstein
KNIGHT RIDDER NEWS SERVICE
Thursday, September 1, 2005
WASHINGTON -- The federal government has bungled the job of quickly helping the multitudes of hungry, thirsty and desperate victims of Hurricane Katrina, former top federal, state and local disaster chiefs said Wednesday.
The experts, including a former Bush administration disaster response manager, said the government wasn't prepared, scrimped on storm spending and shifted its attention from dealing with natural disasters to fighting terrorism.
The disaster preparedness agency at the center of the relief effort is the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which was enveloped by the new Department of Homeland Security with a new mission aimed at responding to the attacks of al Qaeda.
"What you're seeing is revealing weaknesses in the state, local and federal levels," said Eric Tolbert, who until February was FEMA's disaster response chief. "All three levels have been weakened. They've been weakened by diversion into terrorism."
But Bush administration officials said they're proud of their efforts. Their first response emphasized rooftop rescues over providing food and water for already safe victims.
"We are extremely pleased with the response of every element of the federal government (and) all of our federal partners have made to this terrible tragedy," Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff said Wednesday.
The agency has more than 1,700 truckloads of water, meals, tents, generators and other supplies ready to go in, Chertoff said. Federal health officials have started setting up at least 40 medical shelters. The Coast Guard reports rescuing more than 1,200 people.
But coastal residents, especially in Biloxi, Miss., said they aren't seeing the promised help.
"We need water. We need ice," Biloxi Fire Department Battalion Chief Joe Boney said. "I've been told it's coming, but we've got people in shelters who haven't had a drink since the storm."
The slow response to Katrina and poor federal leadership is a replay of the mishandling of Hurricane Andrew in 1992, said former FEMA Chief of Staff Jane Bullock, a 22-year veteran of the agency.
Bullock blamed inexperienced federal leadership. She noted that Chertoff and FEMA Director Michael Brown had no disaster experience.
Budget cuts haven't made disaster preparedness any easier.
Last year, FEMA spent $250,000 to conduct an eight-day drill for a mock killer storm hitting New Orleans.
This year, the group was to design a plan to fix such unresolved problems as evacuating sick and injured people from the Superdome and housing tens of thousands of stranded citizens.
Funding for that planning was cut, said Tolbert, the former FEMA disaster response director.
"I don't know if it would have saved more lives," said Tolbert, who was the disaster chief for the state of North Carolina. "It would have made the response faster. You might say it would have saved lives."
FEMA wasn't alone in cutting hurricane spending in New Orleans and the surrounding area.
Federal flood control spending for southeastern Louisiana has been chopped from $69 million in 2001 to $36.5 million in 2005, according to budget documents. Protection for the Lake Pontchartrain vicinity in the Army Corps of Engineers' budget dropped from $14.25 million in 2002 to $5.7 million this year. Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., requested $27 million this year.
In 2004, the Corps essentially stopped major work on the now-breached levee system that had protected New Orleans from flooding. It was the first such stoppage in 37 years, the Times-Picayune newspaper reported.
"It appears that the money has been moved in the president's budget to handle homeland security and the war in Iraq, and I suppose that's the price we pay," Jefferson Parish emergency management chief Walter Maestri told the newspaper.
The Army Corps' New Orleans office, facing a $71 million cut, also eliminated funds to pay for a study on how to protect the Crescent City from a Category 5 storm, New Orleans City Business reported in June.
Further complicating the relief effort in Louisiana is scandal within the state agency. Recently, three top officials of Louisiana's emergency management office were indicted in an investigation into the misuse of relief money from last year's Hurricane Ivan.
Find this article at:
http://www.statesman.com/news/content/auto/epaper/editions/thursday/news_34618a0670620253007e.html
Civil Rights Groups Split Over NCLB
This news story title seems over-stated in light of the Joint Organizational Statement on NCLB (see statement below) that LULAC, NAACP, NABE and numerous other groups endorsed. I disagree with Bill Taylor’s analogy to forced integration in order to presumably establish a rationale for why civil rights orgs should support NCLB. Forced integration indeed made the restaurants, schools, and hotels accountable, as intended. However, NCLB is misdirected because accountability is not to the public, but rather in the opposite direction—to the state.
Forced integration, moreover, was not forced on those patronizing the schools and businesses but rather on those who owned and operated them. In contrast, the politically weakest individuals in the system (children and their teachers) are held responsible for the outcomes when these correlate to funding and the flow of finance over which neither has any control—alongside a host of other issues beyond schools related to housing, health care, crime, and poverty that most school reform models ignore.
This current high-stakes model is akin to making consumers responsible for the quality of a product over which they had no role in making. This approach doesn’t even make good business sense—unless, of course, the real purpose here is to discredit public schools to pave the way to vouchers and privatization. Yet such critical analyses are rare with the press opting, in my opinion, to either sensationalize differences or treat in a reductive manner legitimate differences in perspective that exist between civil rights groups when such is inevitable with legislation that is as over-arching as NCLB. -Angela
Published: August 31, 2005
Civil Rights Groups Split Over NCLB
Accountability Provisions Stirring Heated Debate
By Karla Scoon Reid /Edweek.org
Leading national civil rights groups and advocates are increasingly divided over whether the No Child Left Behind Act will improve the academic achievement of poor and minority students, a rift that is generating conversation and concern among a circle of people accustomed to working together.
The differences of opinion range from qualified support to harsh criticism, leaving some longtime civil rights activists on opposing sides for the first time. “Unity is always best,” said John H. Jackson, the national director of education for the NAACP, which has joined forces with those seeking major changes to the nearly 4-year-old federal law. “But a little of what everyone is saying is correct. Each side is presenting a voice that needs to be heard.”
The divisions are deep enough that last year, two civil rights groups joined forces with a prominent business organization to form the Achievement Alliance, a coalition that counters attacks on the law.
Few civil rights advocates disagree with the law’s overarching goal: bringing all U.S. students’ state test scores in reading and mathematics to the proficient level by 2013-14. Because that goal requires closing gaps between African-American and Hispanic students and their white peers, most support the law’s mandate to break down performance data for racial, ethnic, economic, and other subgroups to hold schools and districts accountable for their progress.
But the law’s sanctions for failing to make adequate yearly progress toward its goals have some in the civil rights community claiming it penalizes and stigmatizes struggling districts and schools without giving them the resources needed to improve.
Others believe the law is the best tool available to pressure schools and districts to ensure that all students receive a high-quality education. The NCLB law, the centerpiece of President Bush’s agenda for schools, passed Congress in 2001 with large bipartisan majorities.
The debate came into sharp focus this summer, when the Civil Rights Project at Harvard University released a report examining district-level accountability under the federal law in six states. It concluded that districts facing sanctions, such as student transfers, serve large numbers of poor and minority students.
The report, which characterized the law as having a “racially disproportionate impact,” also contended that federally approved changes to some states’ accountability standards are letting predominantly white suburban districts off the hook.
Accountability at Issue
Gary Orfield, the director of the Civil Rights Project, said some civil rights leaders who were “very involved” in writing the law believe in demanding a level of academic achievement from schools and districts and setting deadlines to get the job done. But that approach is not founded in any research or understanding of effective ways of improving education, he argued.
Assessing the No Child Left Behind Act
Raul Gonzalez
Legislative Director, National Council of La Raza
"For the most part, civil rights groups all have the same goal in mind. Given the breadth of NCLB, it shouldn't be a surprise that there are some differences of opinion."
Gary Orfield
Director, Civil Rights Project, Harvard University
Civil rights leaders are "absolutely committed to racial justice. It's a matter of understanding how to get there."
Reg Weaver
President, National Education Association
"There's a growing chorus of dissatisfaction with the implementation of NCLB that can't be swept under the rug."
The “adequate yearly progress” requirements and sanctions in the law were “misconceived in serious ways by people who had the best of intentions,” Mr. Orfield said. He added that the measures have resulted in “unanticipated, deep consequences” that are undermining efforts to improve schools.
The Achievement Alliance immediately issued a news release to counter the Civil Rights Project’s conclusions.
“The fact that students in larger, more diverse districts are being paid attention to and given extra help is a welcome change in an education system that routinely shortchanges such students,” the statement said. “This additional support should not be characterized as punishment.”
The Achievement Alliance is made up of the Citizens’ Commission on Civil Rights, a national watchdog group; the National Council of La Raza, a leading Hispanic advocacy group; the Education Trust, a research and advocacy group that promotes high achievement for poor and minority students; the Business Roundtable, an association of chief executives of major corporations; and the National Center for Educational Accountability, an Austin, Texas-based nonprofit organization that promotes the use of data to improve learning. The other groups are located in Washington.
“Kids were getting punished before this,” said William L. Taylor, the chairman of the Citizens’ Commission, who helped write the education law. “Even if they’re not held back in school, they are coming out of school without having learned what’s necessary to be effective participants in society.”
Mr. Taylor, a veteran desegregation lawyer and longtime activist, characterized the split within the civil rights community as harmful to achieving the law’s goals.
“It’s a war on the whole idea of reform. Gary [Orfield] wasn’t opposed to sanctions when it came to dealing with segregated schools,” he said. “When public officials are not carrying out their duties, you sanction them.”
Observers say that civil rights advocates have differed on the No Child Left Behind law since its inception, but that those differences have been overshadowed by the National Education Association’s April lawsuit challenging the act and by widely publicized examples of state resistance to the legislation.
Monty Neill, the co-executive director of the National Center for Fair & Open Testing, or FairTest, a Cambridge, Mass.-based group critical of standardized tests, said most civil rights groups have found “serious flaws” with the law, including an over-emphasis on testing and a lack of adequate funding.
Calling for Changes
Mr. Neill helped write a joint statement last fall that calls for substantial changes to the law, which is due for renewal by Congress in 2007. More than 50 groups support the continuing effort, including the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the League of United Latin American Citizens, the Asian American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, the NEA, and the National School Boards Association.
“You can’t just outline these requirements and sanction students and teachers without also providing the resources to do it,” said Mr. Jackson of the NAACP.
Reg Weaver, the president of the 2.7 million-member NEA, said some critics are erroneously portraying the union as anti-No Child Left Behind to drive a wedge between it and civil rights groups.
In fact, Mr. Weaver argues there are few differences in their positions, because the union supports standards, accountability, and elimination of achievement gaps.
“All we’re talking about is fixing it and funding it,” he said of the law. “I think it’s a cruel hoax to have the data disaggregated and find out what you need, but in many instances not have the needs of the students met.”
Civil rights advocates do share common criticisms of several provisions under the law, including concerns about the quality of testing for English-language learners and a wish to extend the law’s transfer option to allow students to move to better schools in neighboring districts, not just their home districts.
Raul Gonzalez, the legislative director for the National Council of La Raza, believes that cohesiveness proves that views of the law are not that far apart.
“I believe that the civil rights community, at the end of the day, will come up with some principles that we can all rally behind,” he said.
Vol. 25, Issue 01, Pages 1,20-21
?
Joint Organizational Statement on No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act
October 21, 2004
The undersigned education, civil rights, children’s, disability, and citizens’ organizations are committed to the No Child Left Behind Act’s objectives of strong academic achievement for all children and closing the achievement gap. We believe that the federal government has a critical role to play in attaining these goals. We endorse the use of an accountability system that helps ensure all children, including children of color, from low-income families, with disabilities, and of limited English proficiency, are prepared to be successful, participating members of our democracy.
While we all have different positions on various aspects of the law, based on concerns raised
during the implementation of NCLB, we believe the following significant, constructive
corrections are among those necessary to make the Act fair and effective. Among these concerns are: over-emphasizing standardized testing, narrowing curriculum and instruction to focus on test preparation rather than richer academic learning; over-identifying schools in need of improvement; using sanctions that do not help improve schools; inappropriately excluding low-scoring children in order to boost test results; and inadequate funding. Overall, the law’s emphasis needs to shift from applying sanctions for failing to raise test scores to holding states and localities accountable for making the systemic changes that improve student achievement.
Recommended Changes in NCLB
Progress Measurement
1. Replace the law's arbitrary proficiency targets with ambitious achievement targets based on rates of success actually achieved by the most effective public schools.
2. Allow states to measure progress by using students’ growth in achievement as well as their performance in relation to pre-determined levels of academic proficiency.
3. Ensure that states and school districts regularly report to the government and the public their progress in implementing systemic changes to enhance educator, family, and community capacity to improve student learning.
4. Provide a comprehensive picture of students' and schools' performance by moving from an overwhelming reliance on standardized tests to using multiple indicators of student achievement in addition to these tests.
5. Fund research and development of more effective accountability systems that better meet the goal of high academic achievement for all children
Assessments
6. Help states develop assessment systems that include district and school-based measures in order to provide better, more timely information about student learning.
7. Strengthen enforcement of NCLB provisions requiring that assessments must:
· Be aligned with state content and achievement standards;
· Be used for purposes for which they are valid and reliable;
· Be consistent with nationally recognized professional and technical standards;
· Be of adequate technical quality for each purpose required under the Act;
· Provide multiple, up-to-date measures of student performance including measures that assess higher order thinking skills and understanding; and
· Provide useful diagnostic information to improve teaching and learning.
8. Decrease the testing burden on states, schools and districts by allowing states to assess students annually in selected grades in elementary, middle schools, and high schools.
Building Capacity
9. Ensure changes in teacher and administrator preparation and continuing professional development that research evidence and experience indicate improve educational quality and student achievement.
10. Enhance state and local capacity to effectively implement the comprehensive changes required to increase the knowledge and skills of administrators, teachers, families, and communities to support high student achievement.
Sanctions
11. Ensure that improvement plans are allowed sufficient time to take hold before applying sanctions; sanctions should not be applied if they undermine existing effective reform efforts.
12. Replace sanctions that do not have a consistent record of success with interventions that enable schools to make changes that result in improved student achievement.
Funding
13. Raise authorized levels of NCLB funding to cover a substantial percentage of the costs that states and districts will incur to carry out these recommendations, and fully fund the law at those levels without reducing expenditures for other education programs.
14. Fully fund Title I to ensure that 100 percent of eligible children are served.
We, the undersigned, will work for the adoption of these recommendations as central structural changes needed to NCLB at the same time that we advance our individual organization’s proposals.
Advancement Project
American Association of School Administrators
American Association of University Women
ASPIRA
Association of School Business Officials International (ASBO)
Campaign for Fiscal Equity/ACCESS
Children's Defense Fund
Citizens for Effective Schools
Council for Children with Behavioral Disorders
Council for Exceptional Children
Cross City Campaign for Urban School Reform
Division for Learning Disabilities of the Council for Exceptional Children (DLD/CEC)
FairTest: The National Center for Fair & Open Testing
Forum for Education and Democracy
International Reading Association
Learning Disabilities Association of America
National Alliance of Black School Educators
National Association of School Psychologists
National Association of Social Workers
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)
National Association for Bilingual Education (NABE)
National Down Syndrome Congress
National Education Association
National School Boards Association
National Urban League
Service Employees International Union
School Social Work Association of America
Forced integration, moreover, was not forced on those patronizing the schools and businesses but rather on those who owned and operated them. In contrast, the politically weakest individuals in the system (children and their teachers) are held responsible for the outcomes when these correlate to funding and the flow of finance over which neither has any control—alongside a host of other issues beyond schools related to housing, health care, crime, and poverty that most school reform models ignore.
This current high-stakes model is akin to making consumers responsible for the quality of a product over which they had no role in making. This approach doesn’t even make good business sense—unless, of course, the real purpose here is to discredit public schools to pave the way to vouchers and privatization. Yet such critical analyses are rare with the press opting, in my opinion, to either sensationalize differences or treat in a reductive manner legitimate differences in perspective that exist between civil rights groups when such is inevitable with legislation that is as over-arching as NCLB. -Angela
Published: August 31, 2005
Civil Rights Groups Split Over NCLB
Accountability Provisions Stirring Heated Debate
By Karla Scoon Reid /Edweek.org
Leading national civil rights groups and advocates are increasingly divided over whether the No Child Left Behind Act will improve the academic achievement of poor and minority students, a rift that is generating conversation and concern among a circle of people accustomed to working together.
The differences of opinion range from qualified support to harsh criticism, leaving some longtime civil rights activists on opposing sides for the first time. “Unity is always best,” said John H. Jackson, the national director of education for the NAACP, which has joined forces with those seeking major changes to the nearly 4-year-old federal law. “But a little of what everyone is saying is correct. Each side is presenting a voice that needs to be heard.”
The divisions are deep enough that last year, two civil rights groups joined forces with a prominent business organization to form the Achievement Alliance, a coalition that counters attacks on the law.
Few civil rights advocates disagree with the law’s overarching goal: bringing all U.S. students’ state test scores in reading and mathematics to the proficient level by 2013-14. Because that goal requires closing gaps between African-American and Hispanic students and their white peers, most support the law’s mandate to break down performance data for racial, ethnic, economic, and other subgroups to hold schools and districts accountable for their progress.
But the law’s sanctions for failing to make adequate yearly progress toward its goals have some in the civil rights community claiming it penalizes and stigmatizes struggling districts and schools without giving them the resources needed to improve.
Others believe the law is the best tool available to pressure schools and districts to ensure that all students receive a high-quality education. The NCLB law, the centerpiece of President Bush’s agenda for schools, passed Congress in 2001 with large bipartisan majorities.
The debate came into sharp focus this summer, when the Civil Rights Project at Harvard University released a report examining district-level accountability under the federal law in six states. It concluded that districts facing sanctions, such as student transfers, serve large numbers of poor and minority students.
The report, which characterized the law as having a “racially disproportionate impact,” also contended that federally approved changes to some states’ accountability standards are letting predominantly white suburban districts off the hook.
Accountability at Issue
Gary Orfield, the director of the Civil Rights Project, said some civil rights leaders who were “very involved” in writing the law believe in demanding a level of academic achievement from schools and districts and setting deadlines to get the job done. But that approach is not founded in any research or understanding of effective ways of improving education, he argued.
Assessing the No Child Left Behind Act
Raul Gonzalez
Legislative Director, National Council of La Raza
"For the most part, civil rights groups all have the same goal in mind. Given the breadth of NCLB, it shouldn't be a surprise that there are some differences of opinion."
Gary Orfield
Director, Civil Rights Project, Harvard University
Civil rights leaders are "absolutely committed to racial justice. It's a matter of understanding how to get there."
Reg Weaver
President, National Education Association
"There's a growing chorus of dissatisfaction with the implementation of NCLB that can't be swept under the rug."
The “adequate yearly progress” requirements and sanctions in the law were “misconceived in serious ways by people who had the best of intentions,” Mr. Orfield said. He added that the measures have resulted in “unanticipated, deep consequences” that are undermining efforts to improve schools.
The Achievement Alliance immediately issued a news release to counter the Civil Rights Project’s conclusions.
“The fact that students in larger, more diverse districts are being paid attention to and given extra help is a welcome change in an education system that routinely shortchanges such students,” the statement said. “This additional support should not be characterized as punishment.”
The Achievement Alliance is made up of the Citizens’ Commission on Civil Rights, a national watchdog group; the National Council of La Raza, a leading Hispanic advocacy group; the Education Trust, a research and advocacy group that promotes high achievement for poor and minority students; the Business Roundtable, an association of chief executives of major corporations; and the National Center for Educational Accountability, an Austin, Texas-based nonprofit organization that promotes the use of data to improve learning. The other groups are located in Washington.
“Kids were getting punished before this,” said William L. Taylor, the chairman of the Citizens’ Commission, who helped write the education law. “Even if they’re not held back in school, they are coming out of school without having learned what’s necessary to be effective participants in society.”
Mr. Taylor, a veteran desegregation lawyer and longtime activist, characterized the split within the civil rights community as harmful to achieving the law’s goals.
“It’s a war on the whole idea of reform. Gary [Orfield] wasn’t opposed to sanctions when it came to dealing with segregated schools,” he said. “When public officials are not carrying out their duties, you sanction them.”
Observers say that civil rights advocates have differed on the No Child Left Behind law since its inception, but that those differences have been overshadowed by the National Education Association’s April lawsuit challenging the act and by widely publicized examples of state resistance to the legislation.
Monty Neill, the co-executive director of the National Center for Fair & Open Testing, or FairTest, a Cambridge, Mass.-based group critical of standardized tests, said most civil rights groups have found “serious flaws” with the law, including an over-emphasis on testing and a lack of adequate funding.
Calling for Changes
Mr. Neill helped write a joint statement last fall that calls for substantial changes to the law, which is due for renewal by Congress in 2007. More than 50 groups support the continuing effort, including the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the League of United Latin American Citizens, the Asian American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, the NEA, and the National School Boards Association.
“You can’t just outline these requirements and sanction students and teachers without also providing the resources to do it,” said Mr. Jackson of the NAACP.
Reg Weaver, the president of the 2.7 million-member NEA, said some critics are erroneously portraying the union as anti-No Child Left Behind to drive a wedge between it and civil rights groups.
In fact, Mr. Weaver argues there are few differences in their positions, because the union supports standards, accountability, and elimination of achievement gaps.
“All we’re talking about is fixing it and funding it,” he said of the law. “I think it’s a cruel hoax to have the data disaggregated and find out what you need, but in many instances not have the needs of the students met.”
Civil rights advocates do share common criticisms of several provisions under the law, including concerns about the quality of testing for English-language learners and a wish to extend the law’s transfer option to allow students to move to better schools in neighboring districts, not just their home districts.
Raul Gonzalez, the legislative director for the National Council of La Raza, believes that cohesiveness proves that views of the law are not that far apart.
“I believe that the civil rights community, at the end of the day, will come up with some principles that we can all rally behind,” he said.
Vol. 25, Issue 01, Pages 1,20-21
?
Joint Organizational Statement on No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act
October 21, 2004
The undersigned education, civil rights, children’s, disability, and citizens’ organizations are committed to the No Child Left Behind Act’s objectives of strong academic achievement for all children and closing the achievement gap. We believe that the federal government has a critical role to play in attaining these goals. We endorse the use of an accountability system that helps ensure all children, including children of color, from low-income families, with disabilities, and of limited English proficiency, are prepared to be successful, participating members of our democracy.
While we all have different positions on various aspects of the law, based on concerns raised
during the implementation of NCLB, we believe the following significant, constructive
corrections are among those necessary to make the Act fair and effective. Among these concerns are: over-emphasizing standardized testing, narrowing curriculum and instruction to focus on test preparation rather than richer academic learning; over-identifying schools in need of improvement; using sanctions that do not help improve schools; inappropriately excluding low-scoring children in order to boost test results; and inadequate funding. Overall, the law’s emphasis needs to shift from applying sanctions for failing to raise test scores to holding states and localities accountable for making the systemic changes that improve student achievement.
Recommended Changes in NCLB
Progress Measurement
1. Replace the law's arbitrary proficiency targets with ambitious achievement targets based on rates of success actually achieved by the most effective public schools.
2. Allow states to measure progress by using students’ growth in achievement as well as their performance in relation to pre-determined levels of academic proficiency.
3. Ensure that states and school districts regularly report to the government and the public their progress in implementing systemic changes to enhance educator, family, and community capacity to improve student learning.
4. Provide a comprehensive picture of students' and schools' performance by moving from an overwhelming reliance on standardized tests to using multiple indicators of student achievement in addition to these tests.
5. Fund research and development of more effective accountability systems that better meet the goal of high academic achievement for all children
Assessments
6. Help states develop assessment systems that include district and school-based measures in order to provide better, more timely information about student learning.
7. Strengthen enforcement of NCLB provisions requiring that assessments must:
· Be aligned with state content and achievement standards;
· Be used for purposes for which they are valid and reliable;
· Be consistent with nationally recognized professional and technical standards;
· Be of adequate technical quality for each purpose required under the Act;
· Provide multiple, up-to-date measures of student performance including measures that assess higher order thinking skills and understanding; and
· Provide useful diagnostic information to improve teaching and learning.
8. Decrease the testing burden on states, schools and districts by allowing states to assess students annually in selected grades in elementary, middle schools, and high schools.
Building Capacity
9. Ensure changes in teacher and administrator preparation and continuing professional development that research evidence and experience indicate improve educational quality and student achievement.
10. Enhance state and local capacity to effectively implement the comprehensive changes required to increase the knowledge and skills of administrators, teachers, families, and communities to support high student achievement.
Sanctions
11. Ensure that improvement plans are allowed sufficient time to take hold before applying sanctions; sanctions should not be applied if they undermine existing effective reform efforts.
12. Replace sanctions that do not have a consistent record of success with interventions that enable schools to make changes that result in improved student achievement.
Funding
13. Raise authorized levels of NCLB funding to cover a substantial percentage of the costs that states and districts will incur to carry out these recommendations, and fully fund the law at those levels without reducing expenditures for other education programs.
14. Fully fund Title I to ensure that 100 percent of eligible children are served.
We, the undersigned, will work for the adoption of these recommendations as central structural changes needed to NCLB at the same time that we advance our individual organization’s proposals.
Advancement Project
American Association of School Administrators
American Association of University Women
ASPIRA
Association of School Business Officials International (ASBO)
Campaign for Fiscal Equity/ACCESS
Children's Defense Fund
Citizens for Effective Schools
Council for Children with Behavioral Disorders
Council for Exceptional Children
Cross City Campaign for Urban School Reform
Division for Learning Disabilities of the Council for Exceptional Children (DLD/CEC)
FairTest: The National Center for Fair & Open Testing
Forum for Education and Democracy
International Reading Association
Learning Disabilities Association of America
National Alliance of Black School Educators
National Association of School Psychologists
National Association of Social Workers
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)
National Association for Bilingual Education (NABE)
National Down Syndrome Congress
National Education Association
National School Boards Association
National Urban League
Service Employees International Union
School Social Work Association of America
Letter by a Superintenden
This comes from TexasISD.com—a highly critical assessment of the legislature deemed as anti-school by a Superintendent from Devine ISD. -Angela
TexasISD General News
Letter by a Superintendent
By Rickey Williams
Aug 30, 2005, 08:31
Fw: Letter by a superintendent
My party, the Republican Party, although holding the Governor's Mansion and
a majority in the Texas House and Senate, has failed to develop a workable
system to finance Texas public schools in one regular and two special
sessions this year.
Not only have the elected officials of my party made the profession of
public education their whipping boy, but fewer of the state's best and
brightest students will choose education as their profession.
My party has become the enemy of public education in Texas. The Republican
Party has consistently wrapped itself in the banner of local control but has
turned on itself in legislating areas of local decisions.
If the Legislature can propose and pass laws detrimental to public education
without outcries from the public, then we as educators must shoulder most
of, if not all, the blame. If eradicating cupcake parties from elementary
campuses creates more public outcry than reducing teachers' pensions, then
we in the profession must better inform the public of our mission.
The first word in public education is public. Without the support of the
public, there is little we can do to fend off the blitzkrieg of assaults
every two years from the Legislature in the always fashionable name of
"education reform."
Public schools take all students who enter our doors regardless of their
abilities. We offer programs to accelerate instruction for students who have
special learning needs and offer courses for college credit. We teach
foreign language to English speakers and the English language to foreigners.
We drive, feed, exercise, remediate and accelerate any and all students.
There is accountability, technology, ESL, LEPs, ARDs, IEPs, AEPs, ISS,
SROs, drugs, drug dogs, drug testing, guns, gangs, steroids and,
unfortunately, consternation from the lawmakers and rule-makers who should
be supportive of what we do but instead tell us we're not good enough as
they push through more and more unfunded mandates.
The governor enjoys the jingle, "We don't need more money for education, we
need more education for our money." If that's the case, then let teachers
teach, let principals oversee their campuses and stop asking public
educators to correct all of society's ills. If the Legislature worked as
hard upholding its promise of increasing teachers' salaries to the national
average as it has cutting property taxes, then we would have more
college-bound students choosing education as their profession and less of a
need for emergency certified teachers.
We must elect officials who value public education and recognize that public
education is the cornerstone of our American democratic way of life. We do
not need public education executioners as our legislative leaders. We need
legislative leaders who will execute legislation that is positive for all
Texans and positive for public education. We didn't create the $1.50 cap on
school funding, but we're told to run the schools regardless of increased
costs. We didn't create the deficit in the Teacher Retirement System by
reducing the state's contribution in 1995, but now we're mandated to put
more of our salary into the system and accept a cut in benefits.
It is shocking that the Legislature would cut teachers' pensions and then
propose to increase their own pension by raising the pay for judges and
hiding their individual votes from the public through a voice vote. If
raising the salaries of judges is the right thing to do, then make the vote
a part of the public record.
We, the public and public educators, must change our message and the
leadership in the Legislature. The current Legislature has done the talk.
After the elections in this and subsequent Novembers, if we do our job, the
enemies of public education and their supporters in the Legislature will
take a walk.
Rickey Williams is superintendent of the Devine School District.
C Copyright 2001 by TexasISD.com
TexasISD General News
Letter by a Superintendent
By Rickey Williams
Aug 30, 2005, 08:31
Fw: Letter by a superintendent
My party, the Republican Party, although holding the Governor's Mansion and
a majority in the Texas House and Senate, has failed to develop a workable
system to finance Texas public schools in one regular and two special
sessions this year.
Not only have the elected officials of my party made the profession of
public education their whipping boy, but fewer of the state's best and
brightest students will choose education as their profession.
My party has become the enemy of public education in Texas. The Republican
Party has consistently wrapped itself in the banner of local control but has
turned on itself in legislating areas of local decisions.
If the Legislature can propose and pass laws detrimental to public education
without outcries from the public, then we as educators must shoulder most
of, if not all, the blame. If eradicating cupcake parties from elementary
campuses creates more public outcry than reducing teachers' pensions, then
we in the profession must better inform the public of our mission.
The first word in public education is public. Without the support of the
public, there is little we can do to fend off the blitzkrieg of assaults
every two years from the Legislature in the always fashionable name of
"education reform."
Public schools take all students who enter our doors regardless of their
abilities. We offer programs to accelerate instruction for students who have
special learning needs and offer courses for college credit. We teach
foreign language to English speakers and the English language to foreigners.
We drive, feed, exercise, remediate and accelerate any and all students.
There is accountability, technology, ESL, LEPs, ARDs, IEPs, AEPs, ISS,
SROs, drugs, drug dogs, drug testing, guns, gangs, steroids and,
unfortunately, consternation from the lawmakers and rule-makers who should
be supportive of what we do but instead tell us we're not good enough as
they push through more and more unfunded mandates.
The governor enjoys the jingle, "We don't need more money for education, we
need more education for our money." If that's the case, then let teachers
teach, let principals oversee their campuses and stop asking public
educators to correct all of society's ills. If the Legislature worked as
hard upholding its promise of increasing teachers' salaries to the national
average as it has cutting property taxes, then we would have more
college-bound students choosing education as their profession and less of a
need for emergency certified teachers.
We must elect officials who value public education and recognize that public
education is the cornerstone of our American democratic way of life. We do
not need public education executioners as our legislative leaders. We need
legislative leaders who will execute legislation that is positive for all
Texans and positive for public education. We didn't create the $1.50 cap on
school funding, but we're told to run the schools regardless of increased
costs. We didn't create the deficit in the Teacher Retirement System by
reducing the state's contribution in 1995, but now we're mandated to put
more of our salary into the system and accept a cut in benefits.
It is shocking that the Legislature would cut teachers' pensions and then
propose to increase their own pension by raising the pay for judges and
hiding their individual votes from the public through a voice vote. If
raising the salaries of judges is the right thing to do, then make the vote
a part of the public record.
We, the public and public educators, must change our message and the
leadership in the Legislature. The current Legislature has done the talk.
After the elections in this and subsequent Novembers, if we do our job, the
enemies of public education and their supporters in the Legislature will
take a walk.
Rickey Williams is superintendent of the Devine School District.
C Copyright 2001 by TexasISD.com
Federal leaders pledge relaxed rules for schools
by Ben Feller, Associated Press | September 1, 2005
WASHINGTON -- The schools devastated by Hurricane Katrina, and those trying to help them, will be given leeway in complying with a federal law that aims to raise education standards.
US education leaders said yesterday that they will consider broad requests for relief from states in the overwhelmed Gulf Coast, meaning schools could get significantly more time to raise yearly test scores or to ensure that all their teachers meet federal qualifications.
''You can be assured that the red tape will be put in the drawer," the deputy education secretary, Ray Simon, said after taking part in a White House meeting about hurricane response.
An estimated hundreds of thousands of displaced students will attend school in a different district, if not a different state, as the school year begins. Education officials also pledged to relax rules on college aid, including timelines for students to pay their loans.
As the storm's fallout became clearer, officials in schools and colleges in states such as Georgia, Kansas, Ohio, Virginia, and Tennessee pledged to enroll displaced students.
''Children are being dislocated, literally," Simon said. ''They're homeless. They're traveling hundreds of miles to find temporary homes, which means they will also have to travel several hundred miles to find schools."
In response, the Education Department told school chiefs in Alabama, Florida, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas that they could expect fast relief. State leaders are still figuring out what kind of help they will seek, but they are expected to jump on the department's offer to consider waivers under the No Child Left Behind Act.
Henry Johnson, the assistant secretary over elementary and secondary education, is a former state school superintendent in Mississippi. He said that in five or six coastal counties in that state, half the schools have been leveled. The other half, he said, are so damaged that it is unclear whether they can be used this year.
© Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company
WASHINGTON -- The schools devastated by Hurricane Katrina, and those trying to help them, will be given leeway in complying with a federal law that aims to raise education standards.
US education leaders said yesterday that they will consider broad requests for relief from states in the overwhelmed Gulf Coast, meaning schools could get significantly more time to raise yearly test scores or to ensure that all their teachers meet federal qualifications.
''You can be assured that the red tape will be put in the drawer," the deputy education secretary, Ray Simon, said after taking part in a White House meeting about hurricane response.
An estimated hundreds of thousands of displaced students will attend school in a different district, if not a different state, as the school year begins. Education officials also pledged to relax rules on college aid, including timelines for students to pay their loans.
As the storm's fallout became clearer, officials in schools and colleges in states such as Georgia, Kansas, Ohio, Virginia, and Tennessee pledged to enroll displaced students.
''Children are being dislocated, literally," Simon said. ''They're homeless. They're traveling hundreds of miles to find temporary homes, which means they will also have to travel several hundred miles to find schools."
In response, the Education Department told school chiefs in Alabama, Florida, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas that they could expect fast relief. State leaders are still figuring out what kind of help they will seek, but they are expected to jump on the department's offer to consider waivers under the No Child Left Behind Act.
Henry Johnson, the assistant secretary over elementary and secondary education, is a former state school superintendent in Mississippi. He said that in five or six coastal counties in that state, half the schools have been leveled. The other half, he said, are so damaged that it is unclear whether they can be used this year.
© Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)