This piece critiques not only market-based higher education, but to some extent, long-distance learning that apparently gets done rather poorly through the privately owned and managed University of Phoenix. "About 95 percent of instructors are part-time, according to federal statistics, compared with an average of 47 percent across all universities. Most have full-time day jobs. Courses are written at university headquarters, easing class preparation time for instructors." Its graduation rate, at 16%, is among the nation's lowest.
-Angela
February 11, 2007
Troubles Grow for a University Built on Profits
By SAM DILLON
PHOENIX — The University of Phoenix became the nation’s largest private university by delivering high profits to investors and a solid, albeit low-overhead, education to midcareer workers seeking college degrees.
But its reputation is fraying as prominent educators, students and some of its own former administrators say the relentless pressure for higher profits, at a university that gets more federal student financial aid than any other, has eroded academic quality.
According to federal statistics and government audits, the university relies more on part-time instructors than all but a few other postsecondary institutions, and its accelerated academic schedule races students through course work in about half the time of traditional universities. The university says that its graduation rate, using the federal standard, is 16 percent, which is among the nation’s lowest, according to Department of Education data. But the university has dozens of campuses, and at many, the rate is even lower.
In an interview, William J. Pepicello, the university’s new president, defended its academic quality and said it met the needs of working students who had been largely ignored by traditional colleges.
But many students say they have had infuriating experiences at the university before dropping out, contributing to the poor graduation rate. In recent interviews, current and former students in Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Texas and Washington who studied at University of Phoenix campuses in those states or online complained of instructional shortcuts, unqualified professors and recruiting abuses. Many of their comments echoed experiences reported by thousands of other students on consumer Web sites.
The complaints have built through months of turmoil. The president resigned, as did the chief executive and other top officers at the Apollo Group, the university’s parent corporation. A federal court reinstated a lawsuit accusing the university of fraudulently obtaining hundreds of millions of dollars in financial aid. The university denies wrongdoing. Apollo stock fell so far that in November, CNBC featured it on a “Biggest Losers” segment. The stock has since gained back some ground. In November, the Intel Corporation excluded the university from its tuition reimbursement program, saying it lacked top-notch accreditation.
It adds up to a damaging turnaround for an institution that rocketed from makeshift origins here in 1976 to become the nation’s largest private university, with 300,000 students on campuses in 39 states and online. Its fortunes are closely watched because it is the giant of for-profit postsecondary education; it received $1.8 billion in federal student aid in 2004-5.
“Wall Street has put them under inordinate pressure to keep up the profits, and my take on it is that they succumbed to that,” said David W. Breneman, dean of the Curry School of Education at the University of Virginia. “They seem to have really stumbled.”
In the interview, Dr. Pepicello shrugged off the bad news. Many top corporations still pay for employees to attend the university, he said, and the exodus of top officials has resulted from a healthy search for new directions. “We are reinventing ourselves,” Dr. Pepicello said.
The government measures graduation rates as the percentage of first-time undergraduates who obtain a degree within six years. On average across all American universities, the rate is 55 percent. Dr. Pepicello said this was a poor yardstick for comparing other universities with his, which serves mostly older students who started college elsewhere. Alongside the 16 percent rate, the university Web site also publishes a 59 percent graduation rate, but that is based on nonstandard calculations and does not allow comparison with other universities, he said. The official rates at some University of Phoenix campuses are extremely low — 6 percent at the Southern California campus, 4 percent among online students — and he acknowledged extraordinary attrition among younger students.
“We have not done as good a job as we could,” he said, adding that the university was creating tutoring and other services to help keep students.
“The university takes quality in the classroom seriously,” he said. The university brings a low-overhead approach not only to its campuses, most of which are office buildings near freeways, but also to its academic model. About 95 percent of instructors are part-time, according to federal statistics, compared with an average of 47 percent across all universities. Most have full-time day jobs. Courses are written at university headquarters, easing class preparation time for instructors.
The College Board reports the university’s annual tuition and fees as $9,630, about half the average at private four-year colleges and twice that of four-year public colleges.
Students take one course at a time, online or in evening classes, which meet for four hours, once a week, for five or six weeks, depending on degree level. As a result, students spend 20 to 24 hours with an instructor during each course, compared with about 40 hours at a traditional university. The university also requires students to teach one another by working on projects for four or five hours per week in what it calls “learning teams.”
Government auditors in 2000 ruled that this schedule fell short of the minimum time required for federal aid programs, and the university paid a $6 million settlement. But in 2002, the Department of Education relaxed its requirements, and the university’s stripped-down schedule is an attractive feature for many adults eager to obtain a university degree while working. But critics say it leaves courses with little meat.
“Their business degree is an M.B.A. Lite,” said Henry M. Levin, a professor of higher education at Teachers College at Columbia University. “I’ve looked at their course materials. It’s a very low level of instruction.”
In November, the university’s reliance on part-time faculty caused a problem with Intel, hundreds of whose employees it has educated. Alan Fisher, an Intel manager, said the company had decided to pay for employees to attend only highly accredited programs. Although Phoenix is regionally accredited, it lacks approval from the most prestigious accrediting agency for business schools, the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business.
John J. Fernandes, the association’s president, said the university had never applied. “They’re smart enough to understand their chances of approval would be low,” Mr. Fernandes said. “They have a lot of come-and-go faculty. We like institutions where the faculty is stable and can ensure that students are being educated by somebody who knows what they’re doing.”
Dr. Pepicello defended the effectiveness of the faculty, saying instructors were carefully certified.
Most educators acknowledge that the university has helped traditional institutions recognize the needs of older students.
Some of the university’s detractors suggest that it has always relied too much on part-time faculty and raced too quickly through course material. Others say the university’s academic program was once better but has deteriorated in breakneck expansion — it has opened 50 campuses in a decade. Today, even a cursory Internet search will turn up criticism on sites like ripoffreport.com and uopexperience.com.
“Phoenix claims that 95 percent of their students are satisfied, but the reports we get indicate otherwise,” said James R. Hood, founder of a similar site, consumeraffairs.com.
Many reports follow a similar pattern. Students say they liked recruiters’ descriptions of the classes, but after enrolling concluded that they were learning too little or paying too much. Many who quit say they were left with huge debts.
Robert Wancha, 42, a former National Guard commander who is pursuing a bachelor’s degree in information technology at the university’s Detroit campus, said that in a computer course last fall his instructor, Christopher G. Stanglewicz, had boasted that he had a doctorate but did little teaching, instead assigning students to work in learning teams while he toyed with his computer.
Mr. Stanglewicz, reached at his home, acknowledged that he had covered only a fraction of the syllabus , partly, he said, because the university required him to cram too much information into too few sessions.
“Students get overwhelmed,” he said. Mr. Stanglewicz asserted in the interview that he had earned a doctorate in economics from the University of Kentucky. But the authorities there said his name was not in their records. (Dr. Pepicello said that Mr. Stanglewicz had never told the university that he had a doctorate, and that he was qualified to teach.)
Not all students are critics. Yvonne-Louise Catino, 43, of Bloomington, Minn., who is studying online for a doctorate, said she believed she was getting a rigorous education. In a week, Ms. Catino said, she might read eight journal articles and write several essays. “I love the online environment,” she said, “being able to direct where I want to go.”
But some students said their early enthusiasm had soured.
Stacey Clark, 32, an office manager in East Wenatchee, Wash., enrolled in online courses in April and was delighted to receive A’s in her first courses, she said. Later, Ms. Clark decided her instructors were too disengaged to criticize her work. One returned a 2,500-word essay on performance-enhancing drugs with an A but not one comment, she said.
“You’re not learning from an actual teacher, you’re teaching yourself,” Ms. Clark said.
Many students accuse recruiters of misleading them, and the university’s legal troubles trace back to similar accusations of recruitment abuses. In 2003, two enrollment counselors in California filed a whistle-blower lawsuit in federal court accusing the university of paying them based on how many students they enrolled, a violation of a federal rule.
After the lawsuit was filed, the Department of Education sent inspectors to California and Arizona campuses. The department’s report, which became public in 2004, concluded that the university had provided incentives to recruit unqualified students and “systematically operates in a duplicitous manner.”
The university paid $9.8 million to settle the matter, while admitting no wrongdoing. But the department’s searing portrait of academic abuse aroused skepticism among many educators.
Dr. Breneman was finishing a chapter on the university in a book he helped edit when he read the report in 2004. He said he found it “credible and compelling.”
When the book, “Earnings from Learning: the Rise of For-Profit Universities,” was published last year, it said the university’s academic model was convenient for working students, but included a “cautionary note” saying the recruiting scandal had raised “disturbing questions.”
Those questions are likely to dog the university as it defends itself in the lawsuit, which a district court had dismissed but an appellate court reinstated in September. The university could be forced to repay hundreds of millions of dollars if it loses. It asked the Supreme Court last month to review the appellate ruling, arguing that an adverse outcome in the lawsuit could expose it to “potentially bankrupting liability.”
Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company
Sunday, February 11, 2007
Saturday, February 10, 2007
Senator wants to put physical back in education
This is long over-due! -Angela
Senator wants to put physical back in education
Proposal would mandate daily physical activity daily through eighth grade
By Corrie MacLaggan
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Friday, February 09, 2007
State Sen. Jane Nelson, a Lewisville Republican who once taught sixth grade, remembers that when her students came back from physical education, they were alert and ready to learn.
A legislative proposal Nelson filed Thursday would mandate at least 30 minutes a day of "moderate or vigorous" physical activity for students in kindergarten through eighth grade. Recess wouldn't count. The plan would also require twice-a-year physical fitness assessments for students in grades K-12.
"Teachers know what happens when kids get stuck behind a desk all day," Nelson, chairwoman of the Senate Health and Human Services Committee, told reporters Thursday. "They get restless, they aren't focused on learning, and, most importantly, it is downright unhealthy."
In a state where more than a third of schoolchildren are overweight, Nelson says it's critical for Texas students to have daily physical education, as they did until 1995, when lawmakers overhauled education laws to strengthen academics. Texas schools now require elementary students to have 135 minutes of weekly physical education and for middle school students to have P.E. twice a week or a total of two semesters.
Nelson's office could not immediately provide information on the proposal's cost, but a spokesman said some private companies have shown interest in investing in the project.
Diana Everett, executive director of the Texas Association for Health, Physical Education, Recreation and Dance, supports the proposal but worries that without money for additional physical-education teachers, schools would "cram 150 fifth-graders in a gym and call it P.E."
The proposed fitness assessment — which would measure aerobic capacity, body composition, muscle strength, endurance and flexibility — would help education officials better understand how students' physical health affects academic achievement and dropout rates, Nelson said.
Nelson's plan has 23 co-authors in the 31-member state Senate, and state Rep. Rob Eissler, R-The Woodlands, who is chairman of the House Public Education Committee, is sponsoring an identical version of the bill in his chamber.
As Nelson unveiled details Thursday, she and Eissler were joined by some of Texas' top health and education gurus, including Dr. Kenneth Cooper of the Cooper Institute in Dallas, Paul Carrozza of Austin's RunTex and Texas Education Commissioner Shirley Neeley.
cmaclaggan@statesman.com; 445-3548
http://www.statesman.com/news/content/region/legislature/stories/02/09/9pe.html
Senator wants to put physical back in education
Proposal would mandate daily physical activity daily through eighth grade
By Corrie MacLaggan
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Friday, February 09, 2007
State Sen. Jane Nelson, a Lewisville Republican who once taught sixth grade, remembers that when her students came back from physical education, they were alert and ready to learn.
A legislative proposal Nelson filed Thursday would mandate at least 30 minutes a day of "moderate or vigorous" physical activity for students in kindergarten through eighth grade. Recess wouldn't count. The plan would also require twice-a-year physical fitness assessments for students in grades K-12.
"Teachers know what happens when kids get stuck behind a desk all day," Nelson, chairwoman of the Senate Health and Human Services Committee, told reporters Thursday. "They get restless, they aren't focused on learning, and, most importantly, it is downright unhealthy."
In a state where more than a third of schoolchildren are overweight, Nelson says it's critical for Texas students to have daily physical education, as they did until 1995, when lawmakers overhauled education laws to strengthen academics. Texas schools now require elementary students to have 135 minutes of weekly physical education and for middle school students to have P.E. twice a week or a total of two semesters.
Nelson's office could not immediately provide information on the proposal's cost, but a spokesman said some private companies have shown interest in investing in the project.
Diana Everett, executive director of the Texas Association for Health, Physical Education, Recreation and Dance, supports the proposal but worries that without money for additional physical-education teachers, schools would "cram 150 fifth-graders in a gym and call it P.E."
The proposed fitness assessment — which would measure aerobic capacity, body composition, muscle strength, endurance and flexibility — would help education officials better understand how students' physical health affects academic achievement and dropout rates, Nelson said.
Nelson's plan has 23 co-authors in the 31-member state Senate, and state Rep. Rob Eissler, R-The Woodlands, who is chairman of the House Public Education Committee, is sponsoring an identical version of the bill in his chamber.
As Nelson unveiled details Thursday, she and Eissler were joined by some of Texas' top health and education gurus, including Dr. Kenneth Cooper of the Cooper Institute in Dallas, Paul Carrozza of Austin's RunTex and Texas Education Commissioner Shirley Neeley.
cmaclaggan@statesman.com; 445-3548
http://www.statesman.com/news/content/region/legislature/stories/02/09/9pe.html
Lawmaker wants to tweak state pledge (of Allegiance)
Do other states have to mess with this? -Angela
Lawmaker wants to tweak state pledge
Legislation would add "under God"
By Jason Embry
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Friday, February 02, 2007
God is on a roll at the Texas Legislature.
A Houston-area lawmaker proposed Thursday putting "under God" in the 74-year-old pledge to the Texas flag, which Texas students recite each day.
That followed earlier votes by the House and Senate — with almost no opposition from either party — to put the phrase "in God we trust" on the electronic message boards at the heads of each chamber. The Senate went an extra step and asked the State Preservation Board to install the words in gold letters on the frieze above the Senate lectern.
The pledge to the Texas flag now reads, "Honor the Texas flag; I pledge allegiance to thee, Texas, one and indivisible."
Rep. Debbie Riddle, R-Tomball, proposed Thursday to change the last clause to "Texas, one state under God and indivisible." Riddle said she thought something was missing from the Texas pledge when she recited it with the national pledge, which mentions God.
"Our Judeo-Christian heritage, our religious heritage, is woven throughout the fabric of our history," she said.
The Legislature established the state pledge in 1933. It's only been changed once: The original pledge referred to "the Texas flag of 1836." That was removed in 1965 because it did not refer to the current Lone Star flag.
Since 2003, state law has required pledges to the Texas and American flags in school, as well as a moment of silence.
Rep. Donna Howard, D-Austin, was one of two House members who voted against displaying "in God we trust."
"I think of the House of Representatives as being a place where we should respect and honor those we represent, regardless of their religious traditions," she said. She added that the best way to show respect to constituents was to focus on the most important issues.
jembry@statesman.com
http://www.statesman.com/news/content/region/legislature/stories/02/02/2pledge.html
Lawmaker wants to tweak state pledge
Legislation would add "under God"
By Jason Embry
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Friday, February 02, 2007
God is on a roll at the Texas Legislature.
A Houston-area lawmaker proposed Thursday putting "under God" in the 74-year-old pledge to the Texas flag, which Texas students recite each day.
That followed earlier votes by the House and Senate — with almost no opposition from either party — to put the phrase "in God we trust" on the electronic message boards at the heads of each chamber. The Senate went an extra step and asked the State Preservation Board to install the words in gold letters on the frieze above the Senate lectern.
The pledge to the Texas flag now reads, "Honor the Texas flag; I pledge allegiance to thee, Texas, one and indivisible."
Rep. Debbie Riddle, R-Tomball, proposed Thursday to change the last clause to "Texas, one state under God and indivisible." Riddle said she thought something was missing from the Texas pledge when she recited it with the national pledge, which mentions God.
"Our Judeo-Christian heritage, our religious heritage, is woven throughout the fabric of our history," she said.
The Legislature established the state pledge in 1933. It's only been changed once: The original pledge referred to "the Texas flag of 1836." That was removed in 1965 because it did not refer to the current Lone Star flag.
Since 2003, state law has required pledges to the Texas and American flags in school, as well as a moment of silence.
Rep. Donna Howard, D-Austin, was one of two House members who voted against displaying "in God we trust."
"I think of the House of Representatives as being a place where we should respect and honor those we represent, regardless of their religious traditions," she said. She added that the best way to show respect to constituents was to focus on the most important issues.
jembry@statesman.com
http://www.statesman.com/news/content/region/legislature/stories/02/02/2pledge.html
Perry wants tougher academic standards for financial aid students
The state always want to get tougher and tougher on kids. I agree as expressed below that this is get-tough kind of policy does work against the state's general goal of closing the gap (though not against selective admissions which is a direction that some of our leadership wants to take us in). -Angela
Perry wants tougher academic standards for financial aid students
Part of education plan would require repayment if grant recipients don't graduate on time.
By Ralph K.M. Haurwitz
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Friday, February 02, 2007
Students would have to meet much tougher academic standards to qualify for state-funded financial aid under a proposed overhaul of higher education spending announced Thursday by Gov. Rick Perry.
What's more, students who do not graduate on time would have to repay their aid.
Those provisions, which would represent major changes in the state's financial aid policies, immediately stirred concern among some legislators, financial aid specialists and college officials, who worry that the college-going prospects of thousands of low-income students could be diminished.
Still, reaction to the governor's proposal was largely upbeat, and many officials described it as perhaps the most ambitious higher education plan put forward by a Texas governor in decades.
"I love the idea, first of all, of focusing more attention on higher education, and of putting more money into higher education and more money into loans and scholarships," said Mike McKinney, chancellor of the Texas A&M University System and a former Perry chief of staff. "I would think nobody could be opposed to those things. The details will get worked out."
Perry wants to boost overall state spending on higher education in the next two years by nearly 8 percent, to $9.8 billion. Financial aid programs would increase by about $363 million, or 60 percent. Public colleges and universities would receive extra funding for each student they graduate.
"I happen to think the success of the State of Texas rests firmly on this legislation and the men and women in this room," Perry said at a news conference in the Capitol, where he was flanked by higher education leaders and several lawmakers. "We are looking at an entirely new way to fund higher education."
For example, three state grant programs for low-income students would be consolidated into a new program called the Tuition Assistance Grant. To qualify, students would need at least a 3.0 grade-point average in high school. They would have to maintain at least a 3.0 in college and meet certain progress requirements to remain eligible.
If they don't graduate within five years for a four-year degree plan or within six years for a five-year plan, they would have to pay the aid back, without interest, except in cases of hardship. It's not clear whether students whose grades slip would have to repay aid.
There is no high school GPA requirement under the grants now in place, and students must maintain a 2.5 average in college to remain eligible.
In the jargon of college financial aid, a grant is widely regarded as money that does not have to be repaid. Robert Black, a spokesman for Perry, said the plan does not misuse the term.
"It's a grant upfront," Black said. "If they don't do what is required, they have to repay it."
Sen. Florence Shapiro, R-Plano, chairwoman of the Education Committee, and Rep. Geanie Morrison, R-Victoria, chairwoman of the Higher Education Committee — endorsed Perry's proposal.
Two other lawmakers with considerable influence on higher education policy — Sens. Royce West, D-Dallas, and Rodney Ellis, D-Houston — praised the governor for making higher education a top priority but expressed concern that more stringent academic requirements and a greater emphasis on loans might harm low-income and minority students.
"Many of these issues were debated at length last session, and there was a consensus in both chambers and on both sides of the aisle that we cannot add more restrictions and rely on more loans if we hope to close the gaps and open the door to college to more Texans," Ellis said in a statement.
Stephen Kinslow, president of Austin Community College, said the 3.0 requirement and repayment provision "may very well present a significant problem, but I don't have enough data to make a firm statement on it. I give the governor high marks and Senator Shapiro and Representative Morrison high marks for making higher education a priority in this term."
Find this article at:
http://www.statesman.com/news/content/region/legislature/stories/02/02/2highed.html
Perry wants tougher academic standards for financial aid students
Part of education plan would require repayment if grant recipients don't graduate on time.
By Ralph K.M. Haurwitz
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Friday, February 02, 2007
Students would have to meet much tougher academic standards to qualify for state-funded financial aid under a proposed overhaul of higher education spending announced Thursday by Gov. Rick Perry.
What's more, students who do not graduate on time would have to repay their aid.
Those provisions, which would represent major changes in the state's financial aid policies, immediately stirred concern among some legislators, financial aid specialists and college officials, who worry that the college-going prospects of thousands of low-income students could be diminished.
Still, reaction to the governor's proposal was largely upbeat, and many officials described it as perhaps the most ambitious higher education plan put forward by a Texas governor in decades.
"I love the idea, first of all, of focusing more attention on higher education, and of putting more money into higher education and more money into loans and scholarships," said Mike McKinney, chancellor of the Texas A&M University System and a former Perry chief of staff. "I would think nobody could be opposed to those things. The details will get worked out."
Perry wants to boost overall state spending on higher education in the next two years by nearly 8 percent, to $9.8 billion. Financial aid programs would increase by about $363 million, or 60 percent. Public colleges and universities would receive extra funding for each student they graduate.
"I happen to think the success of the State of Texas rests firmly on this legislation and the men and women in this room," Perry said at a news conference in the Capitol, where he was flanked by higher education leaders and several lawmakers. "We are looking at an entirely new way to fund higher education."
For example, three state grant programs for low-income students would be consolidated into a new program called the Tuition Assistance Grant. To qualify, students would need at least a 3.0 grade-point average in high school. They would have to maintain at least a 3.0 in college and meet certain progress requirements to remain eligible.
If they don't graduate within five years for a four-year degree plan or within six years for a five-year plan, they would have to pay the aid back, without interest, except in cases of hardship. It's not clear whether students whose grades slip would have to repay aid.
There is no high school GPA requirement under the grants now in place, and students must maintain a 2.5 average in college to remain eligible.
In the jargon of college financial aid, a grant is widely regarded as money that does not have to be repaid. Robert Black, a spokesman for Perry, said the plan does not misuse the term.
"It's a grant upfront," Black said. "If they don't do what is required, they have to repay it."
Sen. Florence Shapiro, R-Plano, chairwoman of the Education Committee, and Rep. Geanie Morrison, R-Victoria, chairwoman of the Higher Education Committee — endorsed Perry's proposal.
Two other lawmakers with considerable influence on higher education policy — Sens. Royce West, D-Dallas, and Rodney Ellis, D-Houston — praised the governor for making higher education a top priority but expressed concern that more stringent academic requirements and a greater emphasis on loans might harm low-income and minority students.
"Many of these issues were debated at length last session, and there was a consensus in both chambers and on both sides of the aisle that we cannot add more restrictions and rely on more loans if we hope to close the gaps and open the door to college to more Texans," Ellis said in a statement.
Stephen Kinslow, president of Austin Community College, said the 3.0 requirement and repayment provision "may very well present a significant problem, but I don't have enough data to make a firm statement on it. I give the governor high marks and Senator Shapiro and Representative Morrison high marks for making higher education a priority in this term."
Find this article at:
http://www.statesman.com/news/content/region/legislature/stories/02/02/2highed.html
Friday, February 09, 2007
The Ciudad Juarez Declaration and the New Wave of Border Activism
Very thoughtful piece. -Angela
IRC Americas
americas.irc-online.org
A New World of Citizen Action, Analysis, and Policy Options
IRC Americas
A New World of Citizen Action, Analysis, and Policy Options
Packing into a van along with other New Mexico youths, Rodrigo Rodriguez and his friends headed south to Ciudad Juarez one brisk day this past fall with a serious purpose in mind: finding common ground with other young people from throughout the borderlands on immigration and other issues that affect their communities.
“The forum itself is just an awesome spot for people to come together from all over the place to net- work and work together to figure out ways, develop ways, to work together and further their caus- es,” said Rodriguez, a youth intern with the Albuquerque-based Southwest Organizing Project (SWOP). Dedicated to the empowerment of low-income populations and people of color, Rodriguez’s group played a leading roll in New Mexico in organizing last spring’s pro-immigrant protests.
Like other social forums, the Ciudad Juarez forum aimed to bring together a broad spectrum of peo- ple working in social movements to discuss, debate, and ultimately formulate an alternative political agenda under the slogan “Another World Is Possible.” Not an organization per se, or even an attempt to form yet another coalition, the BSF showcased the struggles of dozens of NGOs in the borderlands and beyond. While many of the attendees had youthful faces, their movements mark time strug- gling for racial, social, and economic justice in the region. Veteran BSF organizers cut their teeth in previous cross-border mobilizations that fought NAFTA and the World Trade Organization, battled the proposed Sierra Blanca nuclear dump, and struggled for a halt to the femicides that became public in Ciudad Juarez in 1993.
Ruben Solis, co-director of the San Antonio-based Center for Justice, and leading BSF organizer, con- sidered the BSF as representing a new stage in cross-border movements that picked up steam dur- ing the 1990s. “It’s creating a new wave, but it recuperates and brings together all that’s hap- pened before in a phase of new development,” Solis said. A key goal of the Border Social Forum was to merge often “competing” agendas of non-govern- mental organizations into a mutual solidarity front, according to Solis.
Among the numerous U.S. and Mexican groups participating in the Ciudad Juarez forum were the Southwest Public Workers Union, Center for Justice, Bracero Project, Southwest Network for Environmental and Economic Justice, Pastoral Obrera, Labor Studies and Action Workshop, Americas Program Citizen Action Profile The Ciudad Juarez Declaration and the New Wave of Border Activism
By Kent Paterson | January 16, 2007
Nearly one thousand people gathered in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, Oct. 12-15, 2006 at the first ever Border Social Forum (BSF). Modeled after the massive World Social Forum that draws tens of thousands of people every year, the Ciudad Juarez gathering featured dozens of workshops, a border “reality tour” and street demonstrations against the Bush administration’s planned series of new border walls and the North American Free Trade Agreement. At the conclusion of the BSF, delegates from U.S. and Mexican non-governmental organizations issued a 23-point declaration that calls for sweeping changes in immigration, human rights, labor, economic, and environmental policies on both sides of the U.S.- Mexico border.
Center for Research and Worker Solidarity, Grassroots Global Justice, Just Transition Alliance, Mexico Solidarity Network, and Justice for Our Daughters. Signaling a new burst of activism, the BSF figured high in several significant movement initiatives that visited the Mexico-U.S. border during 2006. Other examples included the Indigenous Summit of the Americas held just days before the BSF, the growing transnational movement against the toxic dump at La Choya proposed for the Sonora desert on sacred Tohono O’odham lands, and the Zapatistas’ Other Campaign that toured the north- ern Mexican border states of Baja California, Sonora, Chihuahua, Coahuila, Nuevo Leon, and Tamaulipas.
In all the resurgent movements, mass actions including highway protests and international bridge blockades were prominent features. Organizing two partial closures of the Santa Fe Bridge between Ciudad Juarez and El Paso, Texas, to protest of the Bush Administration’s “Wall of Death,” the BSF was no exception. Cross-fertilization of the movements is evident in many aspects, reflected, for example, in across-the-board demands for immigrant rights, Native American sovereignty, and environmental justice.
Transcending regionalism, the BSF connected the struggles of African-American Hurricane Katrina victims to flood victims in northern Mexico, criti- cized border walls in both the United States and Israel/Palestine, called for the freedom of five Cuban prisoners held by the United States in maxi- mum security prisons, and expressed support for the democratic struggle in Oaxaca waged by the Assembly of the Peoples of Oaxaca (APPO). Organized in the months following last spring’s huge pro-immigrant rallies supported by millions of people in the United States, the BSF likewise came on the heels of a backlash by conservative forces that witnessed the U.S. Congress approving a 700-mile series of new border walls, as well as the passage of local ordinances in municipalities from California to Pennsylvania that seek to deny undocumented workers housing and other services. At the same time, a number of U.S. state and local governments are enlisting state and local police to enforce federal immigration laws. Ciudad Juárez: Laboratory of the Future?
Moreover, the BSF was held at a time of increasing polarization, violence and environmental contami- nation in the Mexico-U.S. borderlands. Once dubbed the “Laboratory of Our Future” by author Charles Bowden, Ciudad Juarez was an appropriate place to convene the BSF. Marked by great con- trasts of wealth and deprivation, the city was slammed with widespread flooding in the weeks prior to the forum and many poor neighborhoods were washed out. Since the 1990s, wages in the hundreds of foreign-owned maquiladora plants have decreased, narco-violence has gone unabated, and scores of sex-related serial killings have remained unpunished. First noticed in Ciudad Juarez, the femicides have since spread to other parts of Chihuahua state and different states of Mexico.
Adriana Carmona, a lawyer for the Chihuahua City- based Justice for Our Daughters and the Women’s Human Rights Center, said national and interna- tional protests have forced the Mexican state to take new reports of disappearances of young women seriously, and also begin addressing some cases of domestic violence, but that impunity americas.irc-online.org
A New World of Citizen Action, Analysis, and Policy Options p. 2 reigns in femicides suspected to be committed by members of organized crime. “We still don’t have a systematic, permanent campaign in Ciudad Juarez directed against violence towards women,” Carmona said. Prior to the passage of NAFTA in 1993, the U.S. and Mexican governments pledged to begin clean- ing up the border environment and improving sub- standard infrastructure. Labor and environmental side agreements attached to the trinational pact were supposed to protect the environment and workers’ rights. Almost 15 years later, backsliding is everywhere. Schemes for new toxic dumps, leftover contamination from old industrial sites, and air pollution from overly-congested border crossings are just a few of the negative border realities today.
“We don’t believe the environment is getting bet- ter,” stated San Diego-Tijuana activist José Bravo, the executive director of the Just Transition Alliance. Bravo criticized both the U.S. and Mexican governments for not prioritizing environ- mental justice and not putting adequate resources into environmental protection.
As for labor rights, Bravo pointed out that corpora- tions simply threaten to move to Asia if the costs of doing business on the border are perceived as too expensive. “Maquilas will move around the world to see which country will offer the best deal,” he said. Bravo’s group provides an excellent example of binational agenda-building, working with five different networks of people of color and environmental justice in the United States, as well as with the United Steel Workers Union.
Making the Broader Connections
at the BSF
A highlight of the BSF was a “reality tour” of low- income Ciudad Juarez neighborhoods and industri- al sites. Halting on the banks of the Rio Grande in the Felipe Angeles neighborhood, reality tour guests peered directly across the river at the moth- balled Asarco copper smelter located in El Paso only a couple of miles from the southern New Mexico city of Sunland Park.
The old smelter is a rusting emblem of how envi- ronmental issues affect communities on both sides of the border. Shut down in 1999, the plant is at the center of a fight between Asarco’s owner, Grupo Mexico, and environmental groups and political leaders from Mexico and the United States over the company’s plans to renew its Texas state environmental permit and restart production. The Carlyle Group, associated with George Herbert Walker Bush, is a principal investor in Grupo Mexico.
Asarco opponents maintain that a revived smelter will degrade an already polluted binational airshed, and they blame the transnational company for americas.irc-online.org
A New World of Citizen Action, Analysis, and Policy Options p. 3
Challenges for Cross-border Movements The immigration reform policy debate has been recast by the mass media and U.S. government circles from a human rights issue to a “border security” problem.
While the Nov. 7 Democratic Congressional victory and budget shortfalls jeopardize Bush administration plans for new border walls, elite trade-offs on the border security issue are in the works that involve exchanging border walls for a virtual border of high-tech mili- tary surveillance, strict travel controls and the massive deployment of Border Patrol and National Guard troops. Prospects for immigrant legalization face watered-down proposals for lengthy citizenship eligibility requirements, narrowed eligibility pools, and temporary guest worker programs. Growing outbreaks of xenophobia and racism are reported in the United States, both on the local and national levels. Global trade and economic justice issues, which were submerged by 9-11 and the Iraq war, still rank low on the international policy agenda.
The environmental and labor deficits of NAFTAand other interna- tional trade pacts are worsening. The final lifting of tariffs on corn and other basic grains portend renewed crisis in the Mexican countryside by 2008. An increased tendency towards governmental repression is readily visible in both Mexico and the U.S., as exemplified by Washington’s continued raids on illegal immigrant workers and their families, as well the Mexican government’s implementation of a virtual state of siege in the state of Oaxaca. Official corruption, most often publicized in Mexico but also a factor in the United States, impedes environmental, social, and economic justice.
Sometimes “competing” NGO agendas hinder joint actions, requir- ing fluid but non-hegemonic, unified forms of coordination, coopera- tion, and action.
decades of lead, arsenic, and other heavy metals contamination of neighborhoods in El Paso, Ciudad Juarez, and Sunland Park. The company flatly denies any responsibility. Immediately preceding the BSF, the Sierra Club released a memo from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) it obtained through the Freedom of Information Act that reported Asarco had been illegally incinerating hazardous wastes during the 1990s. The document did not spell out exactly what Asarco burned. “I felt violated, and actually it wasn’t a surprise either that the city has covered this up and that these environmental agencies that are supposedly out there to watch out for our health aided in cov- ering up this terrible secret,” said Jacqueline Barragan of the University of Texas at El Paso group Students Against Asarco.
Leading the reality tour was former maquiladora worker Veronica Leyva, the Ciudad Juarez represen- tative of the Mexico Solidarity Network. Leyva gave outsiders a close-up look at the two faces of Ciudad Juarez: the glimmering city of shiny new boulevards and chic strip malls on one side, and the dusty, mean burg of shantytowns and low-wage factory jobs on the other. Similar to downtown redevelopment projects in El Paso, Albuquerque, and other U.S. cities, the Juarez city and Chihuahua state governments are earmarking public monies for gentrification while many other community needs remain underfunded.
“It’s important for you to see the channeling of economic resources by the government to the big industries, big capital,” Leyva told visitors. “This channeling of resources has not permitted the development of the popular colonias.” Making the connections between geography, people and issues, SWOP’s Rodriguez noted the similarities between Ciudad Juarez’s colonias and Pajarito Mesa, a windswept mesa community approximately 10 miles southwest of the Duke City’s downtown. There, approximately 1,500 people live mainly in trailers without paved roads, utility services or running water. “People don’t realize that there are people living like that in Albuquerque right now,” he added.
Following the reality tour, the BSF delegates attended an agenda-packed round for workshops and plenary sessions. Co-conducted by Kat Rodriguez of the Tucson-based Human Rights Coalition, the session on immigration painted a grim picture of death from dehydration, creeping militarization, and entrapped populations. Rodriguez detailed the human cost from tightened border controls that force would-be crossers into remote desert crossings where extremes of heat and cold leave a bigger and bigger trail of bodies. She said her group has documented the deaths of at least 689 people in the Arizona-Sonora border region during the last three years alone. Of 317 unidentified victims, 17 of the remains are so deteriorated it is impossible “to know if they were male or female,” Rodriguez said.
americas.irc-online.org A New World of Citizen Action, Analysis, and Policy Options p. 4
Proposals and Demands:
• Reject border walls and militarization, femicide and violence against women, pollution, free trade pacts, Plan Puebla Panama, attacks against the Oaxaca popular movement, and the official treatment of flood victims in both Louisiana and Ciudad Juarez.
• Adopt comprehensive immigration reform laws that legislate full rights for all immigrants, including social services and amnesty.
• Binational boycott of Kimberly Clark, a company associated with Wisconsin Congressman James Sensenbrenner, congressional sponsor of HR 4437 that paved the way for the Secure Fence Act.
• Just compensation for veterans of the 1942-64 Bracero program of Mexican guest workers in the United States.
• Oppose privatization of water resources, and support the food sov- ereignty concept promoted by the global Via Campesina movement.
• Demand a revision of the agricultural provisions of NAFTA, and a halt to the use of proprietary hybrid seed and the patenting of seed stock by multinational corporations.
• Solidarity with the families and workers of the Pasta de Conchos mine in northern Mexico’s Coahuila state, where 65 miners were killed in an explosion blamed on leaking gas in February 2006. The mine was operated by Grupo Mexico, also the owner of the old Asarco smelter in El Paso. Support the demands of workers for accountability.
• Demand the immediate release of five Cuban nationals held in U.S. prisons and accused of spying by the U.S. government.
• Uphold gender equality, support the dissemination of adequate information about sexual and reproductive rights.
• A call for international observers to monitor Lomas de Poleo, a Ciudad Juárez neighborhood that is the site of a land ownership conflict between long-time residents and members of a prominent local family.
The Arizona activist challenged the economic underpinnings for the phenomena of mass migration and community dislocation. “I think the first thing that we need is to demand a renegotiation of the free trade agreements, NAFTA, and CAFTA,” she said. “Nobody asks why people are coming here.”
After three days of neighborhood tours, speakers, small group dialogues, and plenary sessions, the BSF participants issued a 23-point statement call- ing for fundamental changes in economic, social, environmental, and immigration policies. The statement declares: “We are part of the formidable force of struggle and hope that came about throughout the world with the initial World Social Forum in Porto Alegre in 2001. The World Social Forum is part of a social movement against the neoliberal agenda, the modern form of colonialism and imperialism. We are citizens of the planet and as such we are the bearers of a set of economic, social, political, cultural, and environmental rights, which all in authority must uphold equally for all people regardless of our age, gender, social class, ethnicity or migratory status.”
Cross-Border Organizing Spreads South
Energized by the first Border Social Forum, organ- izers plan a similar gathering for the southern Mexican border. Bordering Guatemala and Belize, the region shares many of the characteristics of the Mexico-U.S. border, including human traffick- ing, drug smuggling, and gender and social vio- lence. Washington has long demanded that the Mexican government crack down on its southern border, and a new initiative launched by the Calderon administration is underway, with still unforeseen consequences.
Meanwhile, the months ahead promise to be busy ones for popular struggles that now transcend bor- ders. Activists who attended the BSF have a full plate of upcoming gatherings in the Americas and Africa.
Reaffirming their commitment to the migrant cause, the BSF delegates endorsed a call for a mass protest and national strike planned for May 1, 2007 in both the United States and Mexico. Participants of the Ciudad Juarez gathering plan to carry their cross-border spirit of solidarity to the first-ever U.S. Social Forum scheduled for June 27- July 1, 2007 in Atlanta, Georgia.
Additionally, the BSF’s veterans are involved in organizing the third “alternative people’s summit” outside the U.S.-Mexico Border Governors Conference in Nogales, Sonora, also set for next summer, where members of non-governmental organizations will draft a list of demands to be presented to the 10 Mexican and U.S. border gov- ernors.
Organizer Ruben Solis, who attended a social forum in Puerto Rico after the Ciudad Juarez event, arrived at this initial assessment of the impact of the October forum: “It carried out what we intend- ed in terms of creating an [intersection] and con- vergence between the movements,” Solis said. “It has a multiplying effect; it’s very positive.” Kent Paterson is a freelance journalist based in Albuquerque, NM, and a frequent contributor to the IRC Americas Program (online at www.americaspoli- cy.org).
RESOURCES:
Ciudad Juarez Border Social Forum Declaration of
October 15, 2006
www.forosocialfronterizo.com
United States Social Forum
www.ussf2007.org
Center for Justice
Tel: 210-222-1704
e-mail: grulla@igc.org
Southwest Organizing Project
Tel: 505-247-8832
fax: 505-247-9972
e-mail: Swop@swop.net
www.swop.net
Just Transition Alliance
Tel: 619-474-4001
e-mail: justtransition@global.net
www.jtlalliance.org
Mexico Solidarity Network
Tel: 202-544-9355
773-583-7728
www.mexicosolidarity.org
americas.irc-online.org
A New World of Citizen Action, Analysis, and Policy Options p. 5
Justice for Our Daughters
Tel: (011-52) 614-411-0960 /4 14 73 52 /4 19 34 01
e-mail: justiciapara_nuestrashijas@yahoo.com.mx
espanol.geocities.com/justhijas
Human Rights Coalition
Tel: 520-770-1373
Published by the Americas Program of the International Relations Center (IRC, online at www.irc-online.org). ©Creative Commons - some
Web location:
http://americas.irc-online.org/amcit/3911
http://americas.irc-online.org/amcit/3911
IRC Americas
americas.irc-online.org
A New World of Citizen Action, Analysis, and Policy Options
IRC Americas
A New World of Citizen Action, Analysis, and Policy Options
Packing into a van along with other New Mexico youths, Rodrigo Rodriguez and his friends headed south to Ciudad Juarez one brisk day this past fall with a serious purpose in mind: finding common ground with other young people from throughout the borderlands on immigration and other issues that affect their communities.
“The forum itself is just an awesome spot for people to come together from all over the place to net- work and work together to figure out ways, develop ways, to work together and further their caus- es,” said Rodriguez, a youth intern with the Albuquerque-based Southwest Organizing Project (SWOP). Dedicated to the empowerment of low-income populations and people of color, Rodriguez’s group played a leading roll in New Mexico in organizing last spring’s pro-immigrant protests.
Like other social forums, the Ciudad Juarez forum aimed to bring together a broad spectrum of peo- ple working in social movements to discuss, debate, and ultimately formulate an alternative political agenda under the slogan “Another World Is Possible.” Not an organization per se, or even an attempt to form yet another coalition, the BSF showcased the struggles of dozens of NGOs in the borderlands and beyond. While many of the attendees had youthful faces, their movements mark time strug- gling for racial, social, and economic justice in the region. Veteran BSF organizers cut their teeth in previous cross-border mobilizations that fought NAFTA and the World Trade Organization, battled the proposed Sierra Blanca nuclear dump, and struggled for a halt to the femicides that became public in Ciudad Juarez in 1993.
Ruben Solis, co-director of the San Antonio-based Center for Justice, and leading BSF organizer, con- sidered the BSF as representing a new stage in cross-border movements that picked up steam dur- ing the 1990s. “It’s creating a new wave, but it recuperates and brings together all that’s hap- pened before in a phase of new development,” Solis said. A key goal of the Border Social Forum was to merge often “competing” agendas of non-govern- mental organizations into a mutual solidarity front, according to Solis.
Among the numerous U.S. and Mexican groups participating in the Ciudad Juarez forum were the Southwest Public Workers Union, Center for Justice, Bracero Project, Southwest Network for Environmental and Economic Justice, Pastoral Obrera, Labor Studies and Action Workshop, Americas Program Citizen Action Profile The Ciudad Juarez Declaration and the New Wave of Border Activism
By Kent Paterson | January 16, 2007
Nearly one thousand people gathered in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, Oct. 12-15, 2006 at the first ever Border Social Forum (BSF). Modeled after the massive World Social Forum that draws tens of thousands of people every year, the Ciudad Juarez gathering featured dozens of workshops, a border “reality tour” and street demonstrations against the Bush administration’s planned series of new border walls and the North American Free Trade Agreement. At the conclusion of the BSF, delegates from U.S. and Mexican non-governmental organizations issued a 23-point declaration that calls for sweeping changes in immigration, human rights, labor, economic, and environmental policies on both sides of the U.S.- Mexico border.
Center for Research and Worker Solidarity, Grassroots Global Justice, Just Transition Alliance, Mexico Solidarity Network, and Justice for Our Daughters. Signaling a new burst of activism, the BSF figured high in several significant movement initiatives that visited the Mexico-U.S. border during 2006. Other examples included the Indigenous Summit of the Americas held just days before the BSF, the growing transnational movement against the toxic dump at La Choya proposed for the Sonora desert on sacred Tohono O’odham lands, and the Zapatistas’ Other Campaign that toured the north- ern Mexican border states of Baja California, Sonora, Chihuahua, Coahuila, Nuevo Leon, and Tamaulipas.
In all the resurgent movements, mass actions including highway protests and international bridge blockades were prominent features. Organizing two partial closures of the Santa Fe Bridge between Ciudad Juarez and El Paso, Texas, to protest of the Bush Administration’s “Wall of Death,” the BSF was no exception. Cross-fertilization of the movements is evident in many aspects, reflected, for example, in across-the-board demands for immigrant rights, Native American sovereignty, and environmental justice.
Transcending regionalism, the BSF connected the struggles of African-American Hurricane Katrina victims to flood victims in northern Mexico, criti- cized border walls in both the United States and Israel/Palestine, called for the freedom of five Cuban prisoners held by the United States in maxi- mum security prisons, and expressed support for the democratic struggle in Oaxaca waged by the Assembly of the Peoples of Oaxaca (APPO). Organized in the months following last spring’s huge pro-immigrant rallies supported by millions of people in the United States, the BSF likewise came on the heels of a backlash by conservative forces that witnessed the U.S. Congress approving a 700-mile series of new border walls, as well as the passage of local ordinances in municipalities from California to Pennsylvania that seek to deny undocumented workers housing and other services. At the same time, a number of U.S. state and local governments are enlisting state and local police to enforce federal immigration laws. Ciudad Juárez: Laboratory of the Future?
Moreover, the BSF was held at a time of increasing polarization, violence and environmental contami- nation in the Mexico-U.S. borderlands. Once dubbed the “Laboratory of Our Future” by author Charles Bowden, Ciudad Juarez was an appropriate place to convene the BSF. Marked by great con- trasts of wealth and deprivation, the city was slammed with widespread flooding in the weeks prior to the forum and many poor neighborhoods were washed out. Since the 1990s, wages in the hundreds of foreign-owned maquiladora plants have decreased, narco-violence has gone unabated, and scores of sex-related serial killings have remained unpunished. First noticed in Ciudad Juarez, the femicides have since spread to other parts of Chihuahua state and different states of Mexico.
Adriana Carmona, a lawyer for the Chihuahua City- based Justice for Our Daughters and the Women’s Human Rights Center, said national and interna- tional protests have forced the Mexican state to take new reports of disappearances of young women seriously, and also begin addressing some cases of domestic violence, but that impunity americas.irc-online.org
A New World of Citizen Action, Analysis, and Policy Options p. 2 reigns in femicides suspected to be committed by members of organized crime. “We still don’t have a systematic, permanent campaign in Ciudad Juarez directed against violence towards women,” Carmona said. Prior to the passage of NAFTA in 1993, the U.S. and Mexican governments pledged to begin clean- ing up the border environment and improving sub- standard infrastructure. Labor and environmental side agreements attached to the trinational pact were supposed to protect the environment and workers’ rights. Almost 15 years later, backsliding is everywhere. Schemes for new toxic dumps, leftover contamination from old industrial sites, and air pollution from overly-congested border crossings are just a few of the negative border realities today.
“We don’t believe the environment is getting bet- ter,” stated San Diego-Tijuana activist José Bravo, the executive director of the Just Transition Alliance. Bravo criticized both the U.S. and Mexican governments for not prioritizing environ- mental justice and not putting adequate resources into environmental protection.
As for labor rights, Bravo pointed out that corpora- tions simply threaten to move to Asia if the costs of doing business on the border are perceived as too expensive. “Maquilas will move around the world to see which country will offer the best deal,” he said. Bravo’s group provides an excellent example of binational agenda-building, working with five different networks of people of color and environmental justice in the United States, as well as with the United Steel Workers Union.
Making the Broader Connections
at the BSF
A highlight of the BSF was a “reality tour” of low- income Ciudad Juarez neighborhoods and industri- al sites. Halting on the banks of the Rio Grande in the Felipe Angeles neighborhood, reality tour guests peered directly across the river at the moth- balled Asarco copper smelter located in El Paso only a couple of miles from the southern New Mexico city of Sunland Park.
The old smelter is a rusting emblem of how envi- ronmental issues affect communities on both sides of the border. Shut down in 1999, the plant is at the center of a fight between Asarco’s owner, Grupo Mexico, and environmental groups and political leaders from Mexico and the United States over the company’s plans to renew its Texas state environmental permit and restart production. The Carlyle Group, associated with George Herbert Walker Bush, is a principal investor in Grupo Mexico.
Asarco opponents maintain that a revived smelter will degrade an already polluted binational airshed, and they blame the transnational company for americas.irc-online.org
A New World of Citizen Action, Analysis, and Policy Options p. 3
Challenges for Cross-border Movements The immigration reform policy debate has been recast by the mass media and U.S. government circles from a human rights issue to a “border security” problem.
While the Nov. 7 Democratic Congressional victory and budget shortfalls jeopardize Bush administration plans for new border walls, elite trade-offs on the border security issue are in the works that involve exchanging border walls for a virtual border of high-tech mili- tary surveillance, strict travel controls and the massive deployment of Border Patrol and National Guard troops. Prospects for immigrant legalization face watered-down proposals for lengthy citizenship eligibility requirements, narrowed eligibility pools, and temporary guest worker programs. Growing outbreaks of xenophobia and racism are reported in the United States, both on the local and national levels. Global trade and economic justice issues, which were submerged by 9-11 and the Iraq war, still rank low on the international policy agenda.
The environmental and labor deficits of NAFTAand other interna- tional trade pacts are worsening. The final lifting of tariffs on corn and other basic grains portend renewed crisis in the Mexican countryside by 2008. An increased tendency towards governmental repression is readily visible in both Mexico and the U.S., as exemplified by Washington’s continued raids on illegal immigrant workers and their families, as well the Mexican government’s implementation of a virtual state of siege in the state of Oaxaca. Official corruption, most often publicized in Mexico but also a factor in the United States, impedes environmental, social, and economic justice.
Sometimes “competing” NGO agendas hinder joint actions, requir- ing fluid but non-hegemonic, unified forms of coordination, coopera- tion, and action.
decades of lead, arsenic, and other heavy metals contamination of neighborhoods in El Paso, Ciudad Juarez, and Sunland Park. The company flatly denies any responsibility. Immediately preceding the BSF, the Sierra Club released a memo from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) it obtained through the Freedom of Information Act that reported Asarco had been illegally incinerating hazardous wastes during the 1990s. The document did not spell out exactly what Asarco burned. “I felt violated, and actually it wasn’t a surprise either that the city has covered this up and that these environmental agencies that are supposedly out there to watch out for our health aided in cov- ering up this terrible secret,” said Jacqueline Barragan of the University of Texas at El Paso group Students Against Asarco.
Leading the reality tour was former maquiladora worker Veronica Leyva, the Ciudad Juarez represen- tative of the Mexico Solidarity Network. Leyva gave outsiders a close-up look at the two faces of Ciudad Juarez: the glimmering city of shiny new boulevards and chic strip malls on one side, and the dusty, mean burg of shantytowns and low-wage factory jobs on the other. Similar to downtown redevelopment projects in El Paso, Albuquerque, and other U.S. cities, the Juarez city and Chihuahua state governments are earmarking public monies for gentrification while many other community needs remain underfunded.
“It’s important for you to see the channeling of economic resources by the government to the big industries, big capital,” Leyva told visitors. “This channeling of resources has not permitted the development of the popular colonias.” Making the connections between geography, people and issues, SWOP’s Rodriguez noted the similarities between Ciudad Juarez’s colonias and Pajarito Mesa, a windswept mesa community approximately 10 miles southwest of the Duke City’s downtown. There, approximately 1,500 people live mainly in trailers without paved roads, utility services or running water. “People don’t realize that there are people living like that in Albuquerque right now,” he added.
Following the reality tour, the BSF delegates attended an agenda-packed round for workshops and plenary sessions. Co-conducted by Kat Rodriguez of the Tucson-based Human Rights Coalition, the session on immigration painted a grim picture of death from dehydration, creeping militarization, and entrapped populations. Rodriguez detailed the human cost from tightened border controls that force would-be crossers into remote desert crossings where extremes of heat and cold leave a bigger and bigger trail of bodies. She said her group has documented the deaths of at least 689 people in the Arizona-Sonora border region during the last three years alone. Of 317 unidentified victims, 17 of the remains are so deteriorated it is impossible “to know if they were male or female,” Rodriguez said.
americas.irc-online.org A New World of Citizen Action, Analysis, and Policy Options p. 4
Proposals and Demands:
• Reject border walls and militarization, femicide and violence against women, pollution, free trade pacts, Plan Puebla Panama, attacks against the Oaxaca popular movement, and the official treatment of flood victims in both Louisiana and Ciudad Juarez.
• Adopt comprehensive immigration reform laws that legislate full rights for all immigrants, including social services and amnesty.
• Binational boycott of Kimberly Clark, a company associated with Wisconsin Congressman James Sensenbrenner, congressional sponsor of HR 4437 that paved the way for the Secure Fence Act.
• Just compensation for veterans of the 1942-64 Bracero program of Mexican guest workers in the United States.
• Oppose privatization of water resources, and support the food sov- ereignty concept promoted by the global Via Campesina movement.
• Demand a revision of the agricultural provisions of NAFTA, and a halt to the use of proprietary hybrid seed and the patenting of seed stock by multinational corporations.
• Solidarity with the families and workers of the Pasta de Conchos mine in northern Mexico’s Coahuila state, where 65 miners were killed in an explosion blamed on leaking gas in February 2006. The mine was operated by Grupo Mexico, also the owner of the old Asarco smelter in El Paso. Support the demands of workers for accountability.
• Demand the immediate release of five Cuban nationals held in U.S. prisons and accused of spying by the U.S. government.
• Uphold gender equality, support the dissemination of adequate information about sexual and reproductive rights.
• A call for international observers to monitor Lomas de Poleo, a Ciudad Juárez neighborhood that is the site of a land ownership conflict between long-time residents and members of a prominent local family.
The Arizona activist challenged the economic underpinnings for the phenomena of mass migration and community dislocation. “I think the first thing that we need is to demand a renegotiation of the free trade agreements, NAFTA, and CAFTA,” she said. “Nobody asks why people are coming here.”
After three days of neighborhood tours, speakers, small group dialogues, and plenary sessions, the BSF participants issued a 23-point statement call- ing for fundamental changes in economic, social, environmental, and immigration policies. The statement declares: “We are part of the formidable force of struggle and hope that came about throughout the world with the initial World Social Forum in Porto Alegre in 2001. The World Social Forum is part of a social movement against the neoliberal agenda, the modern form of colonialism and imperialism. We are citizens of the planet and as such we are the bearers of a set of economic, social, political, cultural, and environmental rights, which all in authority must uphold equally for all people regardless of our age, gender, social class, ethnicity or migratory status.”
Cross-Border Organizing Spreads South
Energized by the first Border Social Forum, organ- izers plan a similar gathering for the southern Mexican border. Bordering Guatemala and Belize, the region shares many of the characteristics of the Mexico-U.S. border, including human traffick- ing, drug smuggling, and gender and social vio- lence. Washington has long demanded that the Mexican government crack down on its southern border, and a new initiative launched by the Calderon administration is underway, with still unforeseen consequences.
Meanwhile, the months ahead promise to be busy ones for popular struggles that now transcend bor- ders. Activists who attended the BSF have a full plate of upcoming gatherings in the Americas and Africa.
Reaffirming their commitment to the migrant cause, the BSF delegates endorsed a call for a mass protest and national strike planned for May 1, 2007 in both the United States and Mexico. Participants of the Ciudad Juarez gathering plan to carry their cross-border spirit of solidarity to the first-ever U.S. Social Forum scheduled for June 27- July 1, 2007 in Atlanta, Georgia.
Additionally, the BSF’s veterans are involved in organizing the third “alternative people’s summit” outside the U.S.-Mexico Border Governors Conference in Nogales, Sonora, also set for next summer, where members of non-governmental organizations will draft a list of demands to be presented to the 10 Mexican and U.S. border gov- ernors.
Organizer Ruben Solis, who attended a social forum in Puerto Rico after the Ciudad Juarez event, arrived at this initial assessment of the impact of the October forum: “It carried out what we intend- ed in terms of creating an [intersection] and con- vergence between the movements,” Solis said. “It has a multiplying effect; it’s very positive.” Kent Paterson is a freelance journalist based in Albuquerque, NM, and a frequent contributor to the IRC Americas Program (online at www.americaspoli- cy.org).
RESOURCES:
Ciudad Juarez Border Social Forum Declaration of
October 15, 2006
www.forosocialfronterizo.com
United States Social Forum
www.ussf2007.org
Center for Justice
Tel: 210-222-1704
e-mail: grulla@igc.org
Southwest Organizing Project
Tel: 505-247-8832
fax: 505-247-9972
e-mail: Swop@swop.net
www.swop.net
Just Transition Alliance
Tel: 619-474-4001
e-mail: justtransition@global.net
www.jtlalliance.org
Mexico Solidarity Network
Tel: 202-544-9355
773-583-7728
www.mexicosolidarity.org
americas.irc-online.org
A New World of Citizen Action, Analysis, and Policy Options p. 5
Justice for Our Daughters
Tel: (011-52) 614-411-0960 /4 14 73 52 /4 19 34 01
e-mail: justiciapara_nuestrashijas@yahoo.com.mx
espanol.geocities.com/justhijas
Human Rights Coalition
Tel: 520-770-1373
Published by the Americas Program of the International Relations Center (IRC, online at www.irc-online.org). ©Creative Commons - some
Web location:
http://americas.irc-online.org/amcit/3911
http://americas.irc-online.org/amcit/3911
Thursday, February 08, 2007
A Perfect Storm
Download this report (pdf) here: Executive Summary (pdf) The full report of the “Perfect Storm” can be accessed in pdf format at this link.
-Angela
Our nation is in the midst of a perfect storm, according to ETS researchers — and the forecast is grim — unless we invest in policies that will change our perilous course.
A report from ETS's Policy Information Center, America's Perfect Storm: Three Forces Changing Our Nation's Future, looks at the convergence of three powerful sociological and economical forces that are changing our nation's future:
substantial disparities in skill levels (reading and math)
seismic economic changes (widening wage gaps)
sweeping demographic shifts (less education, lower skills)
There is little chance that economic opportunities will improve among key segments of our population if we follow our current path. To date, educational reform has not been sufficient to solve the problem. National test results show no evidence of improvement over the last 20 years. Scores are flat and achievement gaps persist. Hope for a better life — with decent jobs and livable wages — will vanish unless we act now.
We must raise our learning levels, increase our reading and math skills and narrow the existing achievement gaps, or these forces will turn the American Dream into an American Tragedy — putting our nation at risk.
Press Conference Highlights
(Video: February 5, 2007) — ETS President and CEO Kurt Landgraf discusses ETS's landmark report America's Perfect Storm: Three Forces Changing our Nation's Future, at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. The report warns of three converging forces that are putting our nation at risk: inadequate literacy skills, a changing economy and a diverse population and workforce.
Watch Video — (Window's Media File, 291 kbps, 5:57 Playing Time)
-Angela
Our nation is in the midst of a perfect storm, according to ETS researchers — and the forecast is grim — unless we invest in policies that will change our perilous course.
A report from ETS's Policy Information Center, America's Perfect Storm: Three Forces Changing Our Nation's Future, looks at the convergence of three powerful sociological and economical forces that are changing our nation's future:
substantial disparities in skill levels (reading and math)
seismic economic changes (widening wage gaps)
sweeping demographic shifts (less education, lower skills)
There is little chance that economic opportunities will improve among key segments of our population if we follow our current path. To date, educational reform has not been sufficient to solve the problem. National test results show no evidence of improvement over the last 20 years. Scores are flat and achievement gaps persist. Hope for a better life — with decent jobs and livable wages — will vanish unless we act now.
We must raise our learning levels, increase our reading and math skills and narrow the existing achievement gaps, or these forces will turn the American Dream into an American Tragedy — putting our nation at risk.
Press Conference Highlights
(Video: February 5, 2007) — ETS President and CEO Kurt Landgraf discusses ETS's landmark report America's Perfect Storm: Three Forces Changing our Nation's Future, at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. The report warns of three converging forces that are putting our nation at risk: inadequate literacy skills, a changing economy and a diverse population and workforce.
Watch Video — (Window's Media File, 291 kbps, 5:57 Playing Time)
Education about much more than test scores
Thursday, February 8, 2007
Education about much more than test scores
Timothy Leonard
The No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) is up for renewal this year in the Congress. This may be an opportunity to genuinely help the children of the poor and disadvantaged in this country, yet when I hear U.S. senators and representatives from both parties talk about the need for school districts "to raise scores," it is difficult to be hopeful. Education is simply not about scores anymore than losing weight is about scales.
As a result of NCLB, school districts, especially those with high numbers of students from disadvantaged backgrounds, focus intensely on achievement test scores and benchmark tests - tests which often possess items which are incorrect, or ask only for recognition of the so-called right answer.
In addition, these tests are built upon standards which have been written by persons far removed from the actual experience of the teachers and students engaged in the testing process.
Most teachers know that standards are negotiated every day between themselves and their students who will learn only what they choose to learn. The trick is to encourage them to learn far beyond what they originally intended. Turning that trick takes knowledge, persistence, ingenuity, patience, trust, active listening, toughness, kindness, humor, and a willingness to engage students in active learning. Teachers are doing this every day throughout our region, yet the only thing that seems to matter to politicians and bureaucrats are the scores.
Scores are important. But they must be viewed in the context of what teachers know about what is happening in their classrooms. Under the current regime, what is happening in the classroom, if viewed at all, is viewed in the context of the scores. This is nuts. It's like a parent saying, "If you think the baby is cute, you should see the pictures" - except in this case all you see is a number.
The renewal of NCLB needs to shift its intense focus away from test scores to the care, support and encouragement of teachers. This means more money for salaries, staff development, and programs to make sure teachers develop the skills that research tells us it takes to engage students to choose to become knowledgeable in the arts and sciences as well as reading and mathematics, and to become responsible citizens.
Timothy Leonard of Hyde Park is an adjunct professor at Xavier University working with teachers in Southwestern Ohio, Northern Kentucky and Southeastern Indiana.
PCopyright 2007, Enquirer.com
http://news.enquirer.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070208/EDIT02/702080321/1090
Education about much more than test scores
Timothy Leonard
The No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) is up for renewal this year in the Congress. This may be an opportunity to genuinely help the children of the poor and disadvantaged in this country, yet when I hear U.S. senators and representatives from both parties talk about the need for school districts "to raise scores," it is difficult to be hopeful. Education is simply not about scores anymore than losing weight is about scales.
As a result of NCLB, school districts, especially those with high numbers of students from disadvantaged backgrounds, focus intensely on achievement test scores and benchmark tests - tests which often possess items which are incorrect, or ask only for recognition of the so-called right answer.
In addition, these tests are built upon standards which have been written by persons far removed from the actual experience of the teachers and students engaged in the testing process.
Most teachers know that standards are negotiated every day between themselves and their students who will learn only what they choose to learn. The trick is to encourage them to learn far beyond what they originally intended. Turning that trick takes knowledge, persistence, ingenuity, patience, trust, active listening, toughness, kindness, humor, and a willingness to engage students in active learning. Teachers are doing this every day throughout our region, yet the only thing that seems to matter to politicians and bureaucrats are the scores.
Scores are important. But they must be viewed in the context of what teachers know about what is happening in their classrooms. Under the current regime, what is happening in the classroom, if viewed at all, is viewed in the context of the scores. This is nuts. It's like a parent saying, "If you think the baby is cute, you should see the pictures" - except in this case all you see is a number.
The renewal of NCLB needs to shift its intense focus away from test scores to the care, support and encouragement of teachers. This means more money for salaries, staff development, and programs to make sure teachers develop the skills that research tells us it takes to engage students to choose to become knowledgeable in the arts and sciences as well as reading and mathematics, and to become responsible citizens.
Timothy Leonard of Hyde Park is an adjunct professor at Xavier University working with teachers in Southwestern Ohio, Northern Kentucky and Southeastern Indiana.
PCopyright 2007, Enquirer.com
http://news.enquirer.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070208/EDIT02/702080321/1090
Voucher plan is not best for Texas students
Voucher plan is not best for Texas students
EDITORIAL BOARD
Thursday, February 08, 2007
Voucher proposals that spend taxpayers' money to send students to private schools would have not fared well in Texas.
A sizeable majority of Texans wants their tax money going to the local public schools, not private academies and religious schools. The huge rally at the Capitol on Wednesday to lobby the Legislature for a pilot voucher program isn't going to change that dynamic.
Legislators answer to voters in their home districts, not the organized lobby pushing a voucher project that takes money from public schools and spends it in private ones. Lawmakers have rejected voucher plans in the past and should do so with the one being proposed for this session.
San Antonio physician James Leininger has spent millions of dollars over much of the past two decades trying to launch a voucher project in Texas, so far without success. He has invested huge amounts of his own fortune in two voucher — he calls them scholarship — programs in San Antonio. He has also given millions to political campaigns aimed at electing pro-voucher candidates and defeating anti-voucher ones. He lost big on that gamble last year when five candidates he supported were defeated at the polls.
Leininger's personal philanthropy in San Antonio is admirable. And his dedication to the cause he has given so much of his life and resources to — school choice — is unquestioned. He seems to genuinely care about the education of disadvantaged, inner-city students.
But his tactics are questionable, and Leininger acknowledges that his efforts to manipulate the Legislature through large campaign donations backfired. More to the point, the school choice system he is pushing does not work for millions of Texas students.
Leininger, whose business fortune helped fund Wednesday's Capitol rally, fervently believes students trapped in failing schools should have the option of a better public school or a private one. And he just as fervently believes that the state should provide at least some of the money for those who seek a private education.
Urban districts do have problems, and far too many Texas students are trapped in failing schools. But sending tax dollars away from those schools and into private ones will not help troubled schools improve. Leininger's heart is in the right place, but the course he has chosen is wrong.
The best answer for the more than 4 million Texans in public schools is to use state and local expertise, dedication and resources to improve those schools. A voucher program that gives part of those resources to private entities will, in the long run, harm the public schools.
A vital part of the social compact we all live with is the system of public schools. Our focus, locally and nationally, should be on making that system work as well as it possibly can. Pulling the best and most motivated students from the public schools through a voucher program eventually will cripple the system, possibly beyond repair.
That may be what some of the school choice advocates would like to see. But for most Texans, that is a future too bleak to imagine, much less support.
Find this article at:
http://www.statesman.com/news/content/region/legislature/stories/02/08/8vouchers_edit.html
EDITORIAL BOARD
Thursday, February 08, 2007
Voucher proposals that spend taxpayers' money to send students to private schools would have not fared well in Texas.
A sizeable majority of Texans wants their tax money going to the local public schools, not private academies and religious schools. The huge rally at the Capitol on Wednesday to lobby the Legislature for a pilot voucher program isn't going to change that dynamic.
Legislators answer to voters in their home districts, not the organized lobby pushing a voucher project that takes money from public schools and spends it in private ones. Lawmakers have rejected voucher plans in the past and should do so with the one being proposed for this session.
San Antonio physician James Leininger has spent millions of dollars over much of the past two decades trying to launch a voucher project in Texas, so far without success. He has invested huge amounts of his own fortune in two voucher — he calls them scholarship — programs in San Antonio. He has also given millions to political campaigns aimed at electing pro-voucher candidates and defeating anti-voucher ones. He lost big on that gamble last year when five candidates he supported were defeated at the polls.
Leininger's personal philanthropy in San Antonio is admirable. And his dedication to the cause he has given so much of his life and resources to — school choice — is unquestioned. He seems to genuinely care about the education of disadvantaged, inner-city students.
But his tactics are questionable, and Leininger acknowledges that his efforts to manipulate the Legislature through large campaign donations backfired. More to the point, the school choice system he is pushing does not work for millions of Texas students.
Leininger, whose business fortune helped fund Wednesday's Capitol rally, fervently believes students trapped in failing schools should have the option of a better public school or a private one. And he just as fervently believes that the state should provide at least some of the money for those who seek a private education.
Urban districts do have problems, and far too many Texas students are trapped in failing schools. But sending tax dollars away from those schools and into private ones will not help troubled schools improve. Leininger's heart is in the right place, but the course he has chosen is wrong.
The best answer for the more than 4 million Texans in public schools is to use state and local expertise, dedication and resources to improve those schools. A voucher program that gives part of those resources to private entities will, in the long run, harm the public schools.
A vital part of the social compact we all live with is the system of public schools. Our focus, locally and nationally, should be on making that system work as well as it possibly can. Pulling the best and most motivated students from the public schools through a voucher program eventually will cripple the system, possibly beyond repair.
That may be what some of the school choice advocates would like to see. But for most Texans, that is a future too bleak to imagine, much less support.
Find this article at:
http://www.statesman.com/news/content/region/legislature/stories/02/08/8vouchers_edit.html
In study, bilingual brains stay sharp longer
In study, bilingual brains stay sharp longer
Benefits for older people may include greater ability to focus amid distractions.
By Carrie Peyton Dahlberg - Bee Staff Writer
Published 12:00 am PST Wednesday, February 7, 2007
After school, Carlos and Carmen Nguyen shuttle between two sets of grandparents in happy bursts of English, Spanish, Tagalog and Vietnamese.
Their parents love the way languages open their children's eyes to the family's heritage and to other cultures.
Yet when they began their multilingual journey, they never imagined that Carlos and Carmen, now 6 and 9, also might be developing brains especially good at ignoring distractions and better able to withstand aging.
"This is incredible," said the children's mother, Irene Bersola-Nguyen, a child development lecturer at California State University, Sacramento, who has been trading delighted e-mails with friends and colleagues about the latest study on the bilingual brain.
A team of Canadian researchers who studied people being treated for dementia found that those who regularly used two languages reported their first symptoms of a fading mind about four years later than those who used only one language.
That work, published in February's edition of the journal Neuropsychologia, follows a 2004 study that found older bilingual people were better at paying close attention despite distractions.
"Language pays off big time," said Ellen Bialystok, lead researcher on both studies and a scientist with the Baycrest Research Centre for Aging and the Brain in Toronto.
Bialystok and others cautioned that so many factors contribute to healthy aging, it would be premature to say language skills definitely delay dementia. Still, growing indications that bilingualism may deliver lifelong benefits in cognition have captured the attention of educators and researchers.
"Ellen Bialystok is a pioneer in this field, and she's generating quite a buzz," said Tamar Gollan, a University of California, San Diego, psychiatry professor who studies bilingualism. "People all over the world are replicating her findings for some of her earlier work."
Few places in the United States have more at stake in understanding the bilingual brain than California, where a staggering 42 percent of people age 5 and older speak a language other than English at home. In Sacramento County, it's 29 percent. With the immigrant population and the proportion of those who are fully bilingual both expected to grow, California could be a living laboratory for examining the impact of what we gain -- and lose -- from speaking more than one language.
There are clearly losses as well as gains, said Gollan, whose own research probes the subtle deficits of bilinguals. Yet when she weighed them, she came down soundly on the side of raising her own small children with two languages.
Bialystok, who began studying bilingual kids decades ago, believes one key to their special brainpower lies in the way they must constantly decide which language to use and which to suppress. For people who use two languages daily, "every time you want to speak one language, the other language is activated" in the brain as well, she said.
"That means you need a mechanism so that you're only drawing from the right pool (of words). It's going be a mechanism that works extremely fast ... while you're producing sentences. It's way below your radar for detecting what's happening."
So bilinguals get far more practice than monolinguals in using the part of the brain that focuses our attention, helping us sort through conflicting information and ignore distractions. Using two languages seems to bolster rapid decision-making, multi-tasking and perhaps memory.
To measure the effect in older adults, Bialystok used one of the many psychological tests designed to confound us, because we have to respond to information with conflicting cues. It may be a picture that requires you to move your left hand, which shows up on the right side of a computer screen. Or it may be the word "green," written in red letters. In such tests, bilingual people in their 70s did noticeably better than monolingual people. With lots of practice, the one-language speakers eventually caught up.
Fergus Craik, a senior scientist at Baycrest's Rotman Research Institute who collaborates with Bialystok, said ongoing research seems to point to memory advantages. Bilingualism may bolster the kind of memory that lets us recall specific things that happened to us or recognize a person out of context, Craik said.
Both researchers suspect that bilingualism may delay dementia in the same way that other intense mental activity is believed to, whether it's playing an instrument or solving puzzles.
Not everyone is convinced the "use it or lose it" strategy for maintaining a healthy brain has been proven, but it's something "we're all thinking about," said Dr. Charles DeCarli, a UC Davis neurology professor who heads the UCD Alzheimer's Disease Research Center.
"To the authors' credit, they're not saying that learning a language at age 50 is going to help you. In that regard, they're very cautious," DeCarli said.
While he wouldn't discourage anyone from studying a language, he recommends exercise, eating right and controlling blood pressure and cholesterol as surer bets for adults who want to delay dementia, based on what is known today.
DeCarli suspects further research may eventually trace the greatest brain-boosting advantages of bilingualism to childhood, between birth and ages 14 to 18, when crucial connections in the brain are being forged. When kids grow up speaking multiple languages, the same word juggling that helps them fend off distraction also exacts a price -- on vocabulary and on speed.
"For every single object or concept, if you're bilingual, you have two labels, and it takes additional time to learn twice as many words," UC San Diego researcher Gollan said. "It doesn't come for free."
Using their strongest language, bilingual people take just the tiniest bit longer -- about 8/100th of a second more -- to name an object when they're shown its picture, Gollan said.
When they're asked to rattle off lists, such as all the words you can think of in one minute that start with "S" or all the animals you can think of, they can't list as many. The difficulties that bilinguals have in their best language follow the same pattern as the difficulties that monolingual people with Alzheimer's have on such tests -- somewhat weaker with letter lists and more impaired with categories such as animals, Gollan said. Most of the effects are so slight a bilingual person would probably never notice, she said, but they're still important to understand.
"In the world, it's probable that bilinguals outnumber monolinguals," Gollan said, yet most of the research into language processing, cognitive skills and aging is done on monolingual subjects.
One cognitive problem that bilingual people might notice, Gollan added, is that they're likelier to struggle with that "tip of the tongue" sensation, when they know a word but for a fleeting moment can't produce it.
So far, that hasn't bothered Carlos and Carmen Nguyen of Sacramento, although both admit they fumble the most in Vietnamese. Their best language is English, their mother said, with Spanish a close second because they attend a dual-language immersion school.
The kids like the way languages let them reach out to cousins, grandparents and friends. And Carmen, who just took third place in a national essay contest about bilingualism, isn't ready to stop at four.
Next, she plans to learn French.
Benefits for older people may include greater ability to focus amid distractions.
By Carrie Peyton Dahlberg - Bee Staff Writer
Published 12:00 am PST Wednesday, February 7, 2007
After school, Carlos and Carmen Nguyen shuttle between two sets of grandparents in happy bursts of English, Spanish, Tagalog and Vietnamese.
Their parents love the way languages open their children's eyes to the family's heritage and to other cultures.
Yet when they began their multilingual journey, they never imagined that Carlos and Carmen, now 6 and 9, also might be developing brains especially good at ignoring distractions and better able to withstand aging.
"This is incredible," said the children's mother, Irene Bersola-Nguyen, a child development lecturer at California State University, Sacramento, who has been trading delighted e-mails with friends and colleagues about the latest study on the bilingual brain.
A team of Canadian researchers who studied people being treated for dementia found that those who regularly used two languages reported their first symptoms of a fading mind about four years later than those who used only one language.
That work, published in February's edition of the journal Neuropsychologia, follows a 2004 study that found older bilingual people were better at paying close attention despite distractions.
"Language pays off big time," said Ellen Bialystok, lead researcher on both studies and a scientist with the Baycrest Research Centre for Aging and the Brain in Toronto.
Bialystok and others cautioned that so many factors contribute to healthy aging, it would be premature to say language skills definitely delay dementia. Still, growing indications that bilingualism may deliver lifelong benefits in cognition have captured the attention of educators and researchers.
"Ellen Bialystok is a pioneer in this field, and she's generating quite a buzz," said Tamar Gollan, a University of California, San Diego, psychiatry professor who studies bilingualism. "People all over the world are replicating her findings for some of her earlier work."
Few places in the United States have more at stake in understanding the bilingual brain than California, where a staggering 42 percent of people age 5 and older speak a language other than English at home. In Sacramento County, it's 29 percent. With the immigrant population and the proportion of those who are fully bilingual both expected to grow, California could be a living laboratory for examining the impact of what we gain -- and lose -- from speaking more than one language.
There are clearly losses as well as gains, said Gollan, whose own research probes the subtle deficits of bilinguals. Yet when she weighed them, she came down soundly on the side of raising her own small children with two languages.
Bialystok, who began studying bilingual kids decades ago, believes one key to their special brainpower lies in the way they must constantly decide which language to use and which to suppress. For people who use two languages daily, "every time you want to speak one language, the other language is activated" in the brain as well, she said.
"That means you need a mechanism so that you're only drawing from the right pool (of words). It's going be a mechanism that works extremely fast ... while you're producing sentences. It's way below your radar for detecting what's happening."
So bilinguals get far more practice than monolinguals in using the part of the brain that focuses our attention, helping us sort through conflicting information and ignore distractions. Using two languages seems to bolster rapid decision-making, multi-tasking and perhaps memory.
To measure the effect in older adults, Bialystok used one of the many psychological tests designed to confound us, because we have to respond to information with conflicting cues. It may be a picture that requires you to move your left hand, which shows up on the right side of a computer screen. Or it may be the word "green," written in red letters. In such tests, bilingual people in their 70s did noticeably better than monolingual people. With lots of practice, the one-language speakers eventually caught up.
Fergus Craik, a senior scientist at Baycrest's Rotman Research Institute who collaborates with Bialystok, said ongoing research seems to point to memory advantages. Bilingualism may bolster the kind of memory that lets us recall specific things that happened to us or recognize a person out of context, Craik said.
Both researchers suspect that bilingualism may delay dementia in the same way that other intense mental activity is believed to, whether it's playing an instrument or solving puzzles.
Not everyone is convinced the "use it or lose it" strategy for maintaining a healthy brain has been proven, but it's something "we're all thinking about," said Dr. Charles DeCarli, a UC Davis neurology professor who heads the UCD Alzheimer's Disease Research Center.
"To the authors' credit, they're not saying that learning a language at age 50 is going to help you. In that regard, they're very cautious," DeCarli said.
While he wouldn't discourage anyone from studying a language, he recommends exercise, eating right and controlling blood pressure and cholesterol as surer bets for adults who want to delay dementia, based on what is known today.
DeCarli suspects further research may eventually trace the greatest brain-boosting advantages of bilingualism to childhood, between birth and ages 14 to 18, when crucial connections in the brain are being forged. When kids grow up speaking multiple languages, the same word juggling that helps them fend off distraction also exacts a price -- on vocabulary and on speed.
"For every single object or concept, if you're bilingual, you have two labels, and it takes additional time to learn twice as many words," UC San Diego researcher Gollan said. "It doesn't come for free."
Using their strongest language, bilingual people take just the tiniest bit longer -- about 8/100th of a second more -- to name an object when they're shown its picture, Gollan said.
When they're asked to rattle off lists, such as all the words you can think of in one minute that start with "S" or all the animals you can think of, they can't list as many. The difficulties that bilinguals have in their best language follow the same pattern as the difficulties that monolingual people with Alzheimer's have on such tests -- somewhat weaker with letter lists and more impaired with categories such as animals, Gollan said. Most of the effects are so slight a bilingual person would probably never notice, she said, but they're still important to understand.
"In the world, it's probable that bilinguals outnumber monolinguals," Gollan said, yet most of the research into language processing, cognitive skills and aging is done on monolingual subjects.
One cognitive problem that bilingual people might notice, Gollan added, is that they're likelier to struggle with that "tip of the tongue" sensation, when they know a word but for a fleeting moment can't produce it.
So far, that hasn't bothered Carlos and Carmen Nguyen of Sacramento, although both admit they fumble the most in Vietnamese. Their best language is English, their mother said, with Spanish a close second because they attend a dual-language immersion school.
The kids like the way languages let them reach out to cousins, grandparents and friends. And Carmen, who just took third place in a national essay contest about bilingualism, isn't ready to stop at four.
Next, she plans to learn French.
Run! Hide! The Illegal Border Crossing Experience
February 4, 2007
Heads Up | Hidalgo, Mexico
Run! Hide! The Illegal Border Crossing Experience
By PATRICK O’GILFOIL HEALY
CLAD in black clothes and moonlight, our guide Poncho adjusted his ski mask and faced us to speak. The desert has claimed many lives, he said, but tonight we would make it across the border.
The night was crisp and clear in the central Mexican highlands, the moon illuminating mesquite trees, cactus and pastures. Our group of 13 was about to set out on one of Mexico’s more bizarre tourist attractions: a make-believe trip illegally crossing the Rio Grande from Mexico into the United States.
“Where are you going to, my friends?” Poncho asked the people clustered around him.
“To Texas,” a skinny Mexican teenager replied.
“And you?” he asked another man.
“California.”
The four-hour caminata nocturna — nighttime hike — traverses desert, hills, brambles and riverbeds in the Parque EcoAlberto, an eco-park communally owned by the Hñahñu Indians who live on some 3,000 acres of land in the state of Hidalgo, about three hours northwest of Mexico City (and roughly 700 miles from the border).
Organizers say they opened the park about two and a half years ago, with financing from the Mexican government, and began the caminata as a way to offer tourists a taste of life as an illegal immigrant.
The Hñahñus are people who know something about that life. Of the approximately 2,200 Hñahñus from this area, 700 live in Mexico and 1,500 live “on the other side” — mostly in Las Vegas and other parts of Nevada, where they install drywall, drive trucks or work on farms, residents say. Many of the tour guides here have crossed the real border several times.
“Being an immigrant isn’t a source of pride,” said Poncho, whose real name is Alfonso Martinez. “We abandon the family, the language, the earth. We lose our sense of community. The idea here is to raise people’s consciousness about what immigrants go through.”
Of course, compared with actually crossing the border, the caminata is as watered down as an airport cocktail. The guides don’t desert their groups, and the most danger visitors face is twisting an ankle or walking into a low-hanging tree branch.
The idea of tourists’ aping illegal immigrants can seem crass, like Marie Antoinette playing peasant on the grounds of Versailles. But the guides describe the caminata as an homage to the path immigrants have beaten across the border. And the park’s approach to consciousness-raising is novel, but not completely unique. In 2000, the humanitarian group Doctors Without Borders set up a camp of tents, medical stations and latrines in Central Park to recreate the setting of a refugee camp. Last year, the refugee-camp project returned to New York and also traveled to Atlanta and Nashville.
Park guides say about 3,000 tourists — mostly Mexican — have hiked the caminata since it began in July 2004. It costs 200 pesos (about $18 at 11 pesos to the dollar), and tourists who want to stick around at the park can also go river-rafting, rappel down a cliff and sleep in cabins with roofs of maguey leaves. But guides say the mock border-crossing is the park’s main draw.
“Of course it’s just a game, where you’re always safe and where there are no real fights,” said Antonio Flores, a sociology professor from Querétaro, in central Mexico, who hiked the caminata in November with a group of students. “It was very interesting, very important. Often, immigration is a subject so far away. This gave us a chance to experience it through our own steps.”
My group’s hike began outside a white stucco church, where we huddled around Poncho and another masked guide, Luís Santiago. About 10 Hñahñus accompanied us on the walk, playing the role of fellow immigrants. The men explained they were heading north to look for work. A woman carrying a 2-year-old girl slung in a shawl said she was seeking her boyfriend.
After unfurling the Mexican flag and singing the national anthem, the guides organized us, telling us to walk in a file, strongest in back, weakest and slowest in front.
“In the night, everyone is equal,” Poncho said. “Here, everyone wins, not just the fastest or smartest. If we make it, we all make it; if they catch one, they catch us all.”
They advised us to be brave, to remember our ancestors and to hit the ground if we heard gunshots.
We’d been walking down a gravel road for 10 minutes when people started shouting and tearing off into the dark. “Vamos rápido!” they shouted. “Vamos corriendo! Hasta el puente! Apúrense!” (“Let’s get moving! To the bridge! Get going!”) Behind us, headlights and the police drew nearer.
“Run!” Mr. Santiago shouted, frantically directing us toward a concrete bridge at the bottom of the sloping road. “Shut off that light, they’re coming. Fast, fast. Damn it, shut off that light!”
Sirens whooped. We scrambled down a hill of loose dirt, tripping and stumbling over rocks and gouges in the ground. We ended up in a mire along the Tula River, ankle-deep in mud and water.
A 5-year-old boy known as El Relleno showed up and guided us through the brush.
“Come on, this way,” he said, jumping around moonlit puddles.
Poncho shooed us into a thicket of bush. We’d nearly been discovered by the Border Patrol. We hid as men with flashlights roamed the field in front of us, taunting us in Spanish and accented English.
“Come here, guys,” they said. “Ya sé que están escondidos. We know you’re hiding. We’re going to send you back to Mexico.”
“Escuchen!” said another, telling us to listen up. “No van a cruzar el rio. You’re not going to get across the river.”
Suddenly, someone from our group darted from the bushes and past the guards.
“Stop! Stop!” yelled the guards, and fired a half-dozen shots (blanks, of course). “Where you running, huh?”
About 70 Hñahñus make part of their living as guides, guards or fellow immigrants on the hike. One of them, Purificación Álvarez, said that visitors often walked away stunned.
“They learn to value the liberty they have in their own countries, that they don’t have to run and be chased in their own lives,” she said.
When the smell of gunfire dissipated, we sneaked away, crossing cornfields, passing drowsy mules and slipping under barbed-wire fences. Brown moths darted in and out of the flashlight beams, and the guides philosophized about the significance of the hike, the empathy it aims to teach.
At one point, we paused at the river’s edge, where Mr. Santiago told us to cast a stone into the water to symbolically expel evil spirits. We did, and then Poncho pointed up at the night sky.
“Look up,” he said. “A rain of stars. This is a magical place.”
Parque EcoAlberto, (52-75) 9727-7016; www.parqueecoalberto.com.mx.
Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company
Wednesday, February 07, 2007
Voucher advocate wants state to take over private program
Voucher advocate wants state to take over private program
San Antonio businessman warns his $50 million, 10-year effort is due to end next year.
By Jason Embry
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Wednesday, February 07, 2007
James Leininger, who has spent millions of dollars on Texas political campaigns, said Tuesday that the 2,000 students in the private school voucher programs he personally bankrolls will be "out on the street" if the Legislature does not approve a publicly funded voucher plan this year.
The San Antonio physician and businessman said his 10-year, $50 million commitment to fund a program for students in San Antonio's Edgewood school district is set to expire next year.
He wants the Legislature to step in and provide public money for those students — and other low-income students around the state — to attend private schools or transfer to other public schools.
"If the Legislature doesn't act, those kids are going to be out on the street," he said.
Leininger has been a quiet political force in recent years, shying away from public comment while giving pro-voucher candidates millions.
He spent about $5 million in the 2006 election cycle, according to Texans for Public Justice, which tracks campaign spending and advocates limits on campaign donations.
He is now shifting tactics by talking more openly about voucher programs, which he has said should be reserved for low-income students, and his own political activity.
In a lengthy interview Tuesday with the American-Statesman editorial board, he said one reason he's showing his face more is because his private program is almost out of money.
In response, Kathy Miller of the anti-voucher Texas Freedom Network said: "Private schools may be willing to put those kids out on the street, but the great thing about our neighborhood public schools is that they would never do that."
There appears to be little momentum at the Capitol this year for a publicly funded voucher program. The House could not pass a pilot voucher plan last year, and, by Leininger's count, he's lost five allies in the 150-member body since then.
House Speaker Tom Craddick and Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst support limited voucher programs, but neither sounded ready to make a hard sell for the issue when asked about it this week.
"I think we need to do a better job of being able to explain what it is that we're trying to accomplish to help at-risk kids and not undo public education," Dewhurst said.
Though the Senate avoided a public voucher debate last year, House members on both sides of the issue caught flak for their votes.
"A lot of House members feel like, at this point, it needs to come from the Senate to see if there's support for it before they get involved," Craddick said.
Gov. Rick Perry, a longtime voucher proponent, did not mention them in his 55-minute State of the State speech Tuesday.
Leininger credited public school employees with defeating repeated voucher proposals.
"A lot of these (legislators) know there will be a price to pay if they embrace it," he said.
But the issue is by no means dead. Thousands of Texans, many of them families from private schools, are expected to rally for vouchers outside the Capitol today.
Leininger brought to the editorial board meeting Aimee Cantu, whose 10-year-old son uses a Leininger voucher.
Cantu said she wanted to shield her son from the violence and drugs that she remembers from public schools.
"I didn't want him pigeonholed in the same schools that I went to, the same schools that failed me, failed my sisters, failed my parents," she said.
Leininger said he wants the Legislature to approve a voucher program in nine big-city districts, including Austin's. The voucher would be worth up to 90 percent of the per-student operating cost in the local district, with the district keeping the remaining 10 percent.
Schools that choose to take the voucher would have to follow federal and state nondiscrimination rules but would not have to change their admissions standards, Leininger said.
Some voucher opponents fear that private schools will accept only high-achieving students, but Leininger said his programs have proven otherwise.
"It's the kids who are having the worst time that choose," he said. "The ones that are doing great and they're in the National Honor Society aren't leaving."
Up to 20,000 students could get vouchers in the first year under Leininger's program, which has no legislative sponsor so far.
Leininger made a particularly big splash in last year's Republican primary, when he funded five challengers to anti-voucher GOP incumbents almost exclusively. Two of the challengers won. He indicated that he will continue to write checks to pro-voucher candidates.
But Miller, of the Freedom Network, didn't sound scared.
"The Legislature has rejected vouchers for more than a decade because Texans don't want vouchers," she said. "Nothing has changed about that."
jembry@statesman.com
Find this article at:
http://www.statesman.com/news/content/region/legislature/stories/02/07/7vouchers.html
Monday, February 05, 2007
We'll wait and see
Read about President Bush's support for vouchers. -Angela
Sun, Feb. 04, 2007 / Star-Telegram
We'll wait and see
In the more than 5,500 words of his Jan. 23 State of the Union address, President Bush devoted fewer than 200 words to education. But all of them were aimed at what since the beginning of his administration clearly has been one of his strongest domestic policy initiatives: the No Child Left Behind Act.
No matter the brevity of those remarks. The 5-year-old NCLB is before Congress again this year for its scheduled reauthorization, and the Bush administration is pushing hard for it. The day after the State of the Union speech, Education Secretary Margaret Spellings released a 15-page document outlining the continued programs and NCLB enhancements that Bush and his team want.
Some of the initiatives hinted at in the State of the Union address the now-majority Democrats in Congress have declared dead on arrival.
Bush said:
That local leaders should have "flexibility to turn around failing schools." The next day, Spellings' document showed the bizarre meaning of that line. In states -- not Texas -- where teachers are members of unions and have collective bargaining contracts, Bush wants school administrators to have the power to ignore those contracts in order to reassign teachers while restructuring failing schools. He also wants to allow school leaders to ignore state limits on the number of charter schools and reopen failed schools as charters if necessary.
Yes, the president and Congress are powerful, but nothing in the Constitution gives them the power to interfere with state public education policy in this way.
That the new NCLB should give "families with children stuck in failing schools the right to choose someplace better." By that, we now know that he meant federal vouchers of up to $4,000 for children to attend private schools and grants to states for voucher programs that would pay all private school tuition, fees and costs, as well as transportation expenses for low-income children who have been assigned to failing public schools.
Bush couldn't get vouchers in the original NCLB, and Democrats say he won't get them this time, either.
Nevertheless, Congress is likely to reauthorize No Child Left Behind in some form this year.
For now, the ball is still in the president's court. His budget proposals, scheduled for release this week, will show how much money Bush is willing to put behind his proposed NCLB enhancements. Education advocates all along have complained that the promises of NCLB have not been matched with necessary funding.
Among other things, Bush says he wants to give states more money to help low-income high school students, money to reward teachers and principals who raise student achievement or who work in the neediest schools, money to strengthen math teaching in elementary and middle schools, money for "Striving Readers" programs in grades six through 12, and money to help schools implement improvement plans.
That's a lot of money -- or a lot of empty promises. We'll see which.
The document released by Spellings ("Building on Results: A Blueprint for Strengthening the No Child Left Behind Act") makes it clear that Bush will not retreat from the law's primary tenets:
Annual testing in reading and math, with results broken down by student groups in a effort to close achievement gaps.
A goal of having all students reading and doing math at or above grade level by 2014. (Only four states -- Delaware, Kansas, North Carolina and Oklahoma -- are on track to meet that goal.)
Qualified teachers in core academic subjects in every classroom.
Timely information on school performance, as well as information on education options, supplied to parents or guardians of all students.
All cynicism aside, there are several good parts to Bush's proposals. For one, he acknowledges the increasingly competitive nature of today's technological world and would add science to school testing requirements, with grade-level proficiency required by the 2019-20 school year.
Under NCLB, student tests have been designed and graded by the states, and states also determine what constitutes a passing score. Education experts have cited what they call a "race to the bottom," in which some states have set achievement requirements exceedingly low to avoid any NCLB sanctions. Bush would counteract that by requiring states to participate in a nationwide testing program, the National Assessment of Educational Progress, and to report those results to parents.
And Bush would allow states with adequate data collection systems to show that they are on their way to meeting NCLB goals by measuring growth in individual student achievement, not just raw pass-or-fail test results.
Bush can point to some improvements in educational results since the law went into effect, but there is a long way to go. If nothing else, maybe the coming debate will demonstrate that, on both sides of the political aisle, education is important.
© 2007 Star-Telegram and wire service sources. All Rights Reserved.
http://www.dfw.com
Sun, Feb. 04, 2007 / Star-Telegram
We'll wait and see
In the more than 5,500 words of his Jan. 23 State of the Union address, President Bush devoted fewer than 200 words to education. But all of them were aimed at what since the beginning of his administration clearly has been one of his strongest domestic policy initiatives: the No Child Left Behind Act.
No matter the brevity of those remarks. The 5-year-old NCLB is before Congress again this year for its scheduled reauthorization, and the Bush administration is pushing hard for it. The day after the State of the Union speech, Education Secretary Margaret Spellings released a 15-page document outlining the continued programs and NCLB enhancements that Bush and his team want.
Some of the initiatives hinted at in the State of the Union address the now-majority Democrats in Congress have declared dead on arrival.
Bush said:
That local leaders should have "flexibility to turn around failing schools." The next day, Spellings' document showed the bizarre meaning of that line. In states -- not Texas -- where teachers are members of unions and have collective bargaining contracts, Bush wants school administrators to have the power to ignore those contracts in order to reassign teachers while restructuring failing schools. He also wants to allow school leaders to ignore state limits on the number of charter schools and reopen failed schools as charters if necessary.
Yes, the president and Congress are powerful, but nothing in the Constitution gives them the power to interfere with state public education policy in this way.
That the new NCLB should give "families with children stuck in failing schools the right to choose someplace better." By that, we now know that he meant federal vouchers of up to $4,000 for children to attend private schools and grants to states for voucher programs that would pay all private school tuition, fees and costs, as well as transportation expenses for low-income children who have been assigned to failing public schools.
Bush couldn't get vouchers in the original NCLB, and Democrats say he won't get them this time, either.
Nevertheless, Congress is likely to reauthorize No Child Left Behind in some form this year.
For now, the ball is still in the president's court. His budget proposals, scheduled for release this week, will show how much money Bush is willing to put behind his proposed NCLB enhancements. Education advocates all along have complained that the promises of NCLB have not been matched with necessary funding.
Among other things, Bush says he wants to give states more money to help low-income high school students, money to reward teachers and principals who raise student achievement or who work in the neediest schools, money to strengthen math teaching in elementary and middle schools, money for "Striving Readers" programs in grades six through 12, and money to help schools implement improvement plans.
That's a lot of money -- or a lot of empty promises. We'll see which.
The document released by Spellings ("Building on Results: A Blueprint for Strengthening the No Child Left Behind Act") makes it clear that Bush will not retreat from the law's primary tenets:
Annual testing in reading and math, with results broken down by student groups in a effort to close achievement gaps.
A goal of having all students reading and doing math at or above grade level by 2014. (Only four states -- Delaware, Kansas, North Carolina and Oklahoma -- are on track to meet that goal.)
Qualified teachers in core academic subjects in every classroom.
Timely information on school performance, as well as information on education options, supplied to parents or guardians of all students.
All cynicism aside, there are several good parts to Bush's proposals. For one, he acknowledges the increasingly competitive nature of today's technological world and would add science to school testing requirements, with grade-level proficiency required by the 2019-20 school year.
Under NCLB, student tests have been designed and graded by the states, and states also determine what constitutes a passing score. Education experts have cited what they call a "race to the bottom," in which some states have set achievement requirements exceedingly low to avoid any NCLB sanctions. Bush would counteract that by requiring states to participate in a nationwide testing program, the National Assessment of Educational Progress, and to report those results to parents.
And Bush would allow states with adequate data collection systems to show that they are on their way to meeting NCLB goals by measuring growth in individual student achievement, not just raw pass-or-fail test results.
Bush can point to some improvements in educational results since the law went into effect, but there is a long way to go. If nothing else, maybe the coming debate will demonstrate that, on both sides of the political aisle, education is important.
© 2007 Star-Telegram and wire service sources. All Rights Reserved.
http://www.dfw.com
Friday, February 02, 2007
Texans and Their Tests
This is a very important read for folks in Texas and folks across the U.S. We saw this coming a few years back. Now, mandatory standardized testing for graduating seniors is closer to becoming a reality. To give colleges money on the basis of test scores promises to punish diversity and reward the already privileged as suggested herein.
As with TAKS testing, this will clearly crowd out college curricula related to service learning and community engagement activities. This sterilization of the curricula is ultimately a form of social control that uses a cost-efficiency rationale in order to reduce the very complex enterprise of higher education to economistic goals. In so doing, prevalent concerns pertaining to the deep divisions and unequal access in our society based on class, race, national origin, and gender get eclipsed. This, in my opinion, should be vigorously protested.
-Angela
Feb. 2, 2007
Texans and Their Tests
When the Education Secretary’s Commission on the Future of Higher Education started meeting, many professors and college leaders feared it would push for some sort of mandatory standardized testing of graduating college seniors — a prospect they saw as inconsistent with the values of liberal education. In the end, the Spellings Commission didn’t make such a recommendation. But in Texas — home to the education secretary and the panel’s chair — mandatory standardized testing for graduating seniors may now be on the way.
Texas Gov. Rick Perry, a Republican, on Thursday proposed a major expansion of state support for public higher education and for student aid. He also proposed one of the broadest testing requirements for graduating college students to date. Seniors would be required to take either licensure exams in their fields or Education Testing Service exams for various college majors. While students would not be required to pass the exams to graduate, colleges’ state funds would be linked to students’ scores, so institutions where many students did well on the standardized exams would get more money.
Perry says that the exit exams are needed “to protect integrity” in higher education and the tax support going to colleges. Many higher education leaders in the state are thrilled with the attention he’s paying to their institutions, and his willingness to provide real increases in financial support.
But faculty groups and advocates for Latino students are concerned about the testing requirement. Many fear that the exams will encourage a “teaching to the test” approach that’s not appropriate in higher education, that colleges will have incentives to place more emphasis in admissions on standardized tests, and that the new system will encourage uniformity and discourage creativity in undergraduate education.
Other critics said that the system was set up in a way that would reward places like the University of Texas at Austin — where graduates are likely to perform well on standardized tests. As a result, these critics fear, money will flow to the wealthiest universities and not to the institutions in south Texas that serve Latino students who are less likely to have attended competitive high schools.
“I’d give a flunking grade to the testing proposal,” said Charles Zucker, executive director of the Texas Faculty Association. “There is now a widespread consensus in Texas that all of the K-12 standardized testing that we have done has not really worked. We’ve had massive amounts of teaching to the test going on, and now that there’s a consensus that that has failed, the governor wants to institute the same plan for higher education.”
Many details of the testing plan are unclear. ETS, which stands to gain a lot of business, was unaware that the governor had proposed using its testing system until called for this article (although officials acknowledged that it was possible that someone at ETS was aware or had briefed Texas officials).
The Major Field Tests that Texas plans to use are currently offered for 15 undergraduate majors and also for M.B.A. programs. All of the tests are multiple choice and they are purchased by the institution giving them (at a rate of $25 per student), which in turn can schedule administration of the tests when it wishes. ETS officials said that one of the purposes of the test was to help with accountability and that, to date, no statewide initiative was in use on par with what Perry is proposing.
A spokesman for Perry said that the tests would give parents and students “a simple and understandable way to compare the quality of degree programs offered at different schools, and academic departments would be able to better assess and refine curricula.”
Bill Wynne, a solutions implementation specialist at ETS, said that the tests were developed based on surveys of experts in the field about what items are important. Compared to the Collegiate Learning Assessment, a tool many colleges are embracing in response to accountability pressures, the major tests “are more discipline-specific,” Wynne said. Sample questions on the history test touch on the Black Death, Hegel, colonialism, Confucianism, ancient Rome and the civil rights movement.
As to the format of the tests, which do not feature writing, he said that psychometricians have determined “that to measure knowledge, multiple choice is the best way to go.”
While Wynne said he was surprised by the news about Texas on Thursday, he said he expected to see the test adopted soon in other broad programs like the one Perry proposed. “I think you are going to see these accountability initiatives coming out of the Margaret Spellings initiative,” he said.
Raymund Paredes, commissioner of higher education in Texas, said he viewed the governor’s plan as a “broad outline” that would be refined in the weeks ahead. He said that standardized testing “is needed to guard against grade inflation or other ways of getting artificial results,” but he also acknowledged the “tremendous variability across institutions and across disciplines.”
For starters, there are plenty of majors that don’t lead to licensure exams and that ETS doesn’t include in its major tests. ETS tests history but not philosophy, music but not art, sociology but not anthropology, and literature in English but not literature in other languages. Paredes said that other tests would need to be identified, or perhaps students might take other admissions tests, such as the Graduate Record Exam or the Law School Admission Test.
Paredes acknowledged that those tests were not comparable to the major tests endorsed by the governor, but Perry’s spokesman said that the coordinating board would be given some flexibility to come up with tests that aren’t provided in the ETS program. Paredes said that details would be worked out in discussions with campus leaders, legislators and the governor.
Paredes said that he realized that some academics distrust standardized testing, but he said that it was essential to “confirm that the students who have graduated have actually acquired the necessary knowledge and skills.” He added: “My concern is not over-testing, but how do you develop effective measurements of learning outcomes?” He said that academic programs need “to have a certain integrity, and you have to have minimal standards.” Asked if many Texas programs lacked such standards, he said: “It’s not clear by and large anywhere. We haven’t had measurable learning outcomes.”
Critics of testing said that the governor’s plan would create the wrong incentives for Texas colleges. “Under Governor Perry’s misguided proposal, an easy way for a Texas institution to ensure that it will get a high rating accompanied by monetary awards is to limit admission to students who already score high on the standardized tests that will be used to determine the cash bonuses,” said Bob Schaeffer, public education director of the National Center for Fair & Open Testing. “Alternatively, they can narrow their curriculum to test preparation for the exit exam. In either case, test scores may soar but educational quality will be undermined — the end result will be another phony ‘Texas miracle.’ “
He added that the proposal was “not surprising given the test-fixated Texas dominance of the U.S. Department of Education and, especially, its commission on higher education led by Charles Miller. All are true believers in the notion that more tests magically lead to more learning, despite mounds of data to the contrary.”
David Hinojosa, a lawyer on education issues for the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, said that he was very pleased to see the governor propose large increases in higher education budgets, but very concerned about linking new money to standardized testing. Not only will the beneficiaries probably be the research universities that tend to be the wealthiest institutions already, but the institutions that stand to gain the least are those that educate large numbers of students who graduated from poor high schools and who “perhaps by some coincidence educate a substantially higher number of minority students.”
MALDEF and other groups have been involved in a sustained effort over the last 20 years to help colleges in predominantly Latino south Texas gain more programs and more funds — and the institutions in that region have experienced significant growth as a result. “There doesn’t seem to have been any study on the effects that this testing would have with the universities that serve south Texas and all along the border,” Hinojosa said. “After years of having to fight for funding of those programs, we remain quite fearful that there will be a reversal of the dollars.”
Zucker, of the Texas Faculty Association, said that his members were just starting to study the governor’s plan, and that they appreciated Perry putting higher education “on the front burner.”
But he said that multiple parts of the plan create problems for professors. One part would award some funds based on graduation rates. While Zucker said that professors want to help students graduate on time, he also said that many students lack sufficient preparation to do well — and take a long time to graduate for all kinds of reasons, many of them valid. “If you are trying to maintain academic standards, how do you do that when a college’s funding depends on head count for graduation? It doesn’t take much of an imagination to see a dean calling in professors — many of them adjuncts — and telling them to start passing a lot more students.”
And Zucker said that the testing proposal would lead to “a cookie-cutter approach” to higher education. “One of the great wonders of higher education is the unique perspectives and approaches professors bring to classes,” he said. They won’t be able to do so if they are facing pressure “to just teach students so they get a high score on an exit exam.”
Zucker acknowledged that colleges need to think hard about how to “bring everyone up to a certain level,” but he said that when you focus on standardized tests, you end up with minimal standards. “You can teach to the test and have everyone have minimal standards, but what do you give up to get that?”
— Scott Jaschik
The original story and user comments can be viewed online at http://insidehighered.com/news/2007/02/02/texas.
© Copyright 2006 Inside Higher Ed
As with TAKS testing, this will clearly crowd out college curricula related to service learning and community engagement activities. This sterilization of the curricula is ultimately a form of social control that uses a cost-efficiency rationale in order to reduce the very complex enterprise of higher education to economistic goals. In so doing, prevalent concerns pertaining to the deep divisions and unequal access in our society based on class, race, national origin, and gender get eclipsed. This, in my opinion, should be vigorously protested.
-Angela
Feb. 2, 2007
Texans and Their Tests
When the Education Secretary’s Commission on the Future of Higher Education started meeting, many professors and college leaders feared it would push for some sort of mandatory standardized testing of graduating college seniors — a prospect they saw as inconsistent with the values of liberal education. In the end, the Spellings Commission didn’t make such a recommendation. But in Texas — home to the education secretary and the panel’s chair — mandatory standardized testing for graduating seniors may now be on the way.
Texas Gov. Rick Perry, a Republican, on Thursday proposed a major expansion of state support for public higher education and for student aid. He also proposed one of the broadest testing requirements for graduating college students to date. Seniors would be required to take either licensure exams in their fields or Education Testing Service exams for various college majors. While students would not be required to pass the exams to graduate, colleges’ state funds would be linked to students’ scores, so institutions where many students did well on the standardized exams would get more money.
Perry says that the exit exams are needed “to protect integrity” in higher education and the tax support going to colleges. Many higher education leaders in the state are thrilled with the attention he’s paying to their institutions, and his willingness to provide real increases in financial support.
But faculty groups and advocates for Latino students are concerned about the testing requirement. Many fear that the exams will encourage a “teaching to the test” approach that’s not appropriate in higher education, that colleges will have incentives to place more emphasis in admissions on standardized tests, and that the new system will encourage uniformity and discourage creativity in undergraduate education.
Other critics said that the system was set up in a way that would reward places like the University of Texas at Austin — where graduates are likely to perform well on standardized tests. As a result, these critics fear, money will flow to the wealthiest universities and not to the institutions in south Texas that serve Latino students who are less likely to have attended competitive high schools.
“I’d give a flunking grade to the testing proposal,” said Charles Zucker, executive director of the Texas Faculty Association. “There is now a widespread consensus in Texas that all of the K-12 standardized testing that we have done has not really worked. We’ve had massive amounts of teaching to the test going on, and now that there’s a consensus that that has failed, the governor wants to institute the same plan for higher education.”
Many details of the testing plan are unclear. ETS, which stands to gain a lot of business, was unaware that the governor had proposed using its testing system until called for this article (although officials acknowledged that it was possible that someone at ETS was aware or had briefed Texas officials).
The Major Field Tests that Texas plans to use are currently offered for 15 undergraduate majors and also for M.B.A. programs. All of the tests are multiple choice and they are purchased by the institution giving them (at a rate of $25 per student), which in turn can schedule administration of the tests when it wishes. ETS officials said that one of the purposes of the test was to help with accountability and that, to date, no statewide initiative was in use on par with what Perry is proposing.
A spokesman for Perry said that the tests would give parents and students “a simple and understandable way to compare the quality of degree programs offered at different schools, and academic departments would be able to better assess and refine curricula.”
Bill Wynne, a solutions implementation specialist at ETS, said that the tests were developed based on surveys of experts in the field about what items are important. Compared to the Collegiate Learning Assessment, a tool many colleges are embracing in response to accountability pressures, the major tests “are more discipline-specific,” Wynne said. Sample questions on the history test touch on the Black Death, Hegel, colonialism, Confucianism, ancient Rome and the civil rights movement.
As to the format of the tests, which do not feature writing, he said that psychometricians have determined “that to measure knowledge, multiple choice is the best way to go.”
While Wynne said he was surprised by the news about Texas on Thursday, he said he expected to see the test adopted soon in other broad programs like the one Perry proposed. “I think you are going to see these accountability initiatives coming out of the Margaret Spellings initiative,” he said.
Raymund Paredes, commissioner of higher education in Texas, said he viewed the governor’s plan as a “broad outline” that would be refined in the weeks ahead. He said that standardized testing “is needed to guard against grade inflation or other ways of getting artificial results,” but he also acknowledged the “tremendous variability across institutions and across disciplines.”
For starters, there are plenty of majors that don’t lead to licensure exams and that ETS doesn’t include in its major tests. ETS tests history but not philosophy, music but not art, sociology but not anthropology, and literature in English but not literature in other languages. Paredes said that other tests would need to be identified, or perhaps students might take other admissions tests, such as the Graduate Record Exam or the Law School Admission Test.
Paredes acknowledged that those tests were not comparable to the major tests endorsed by the governor, but Perry’s spokesman said that the coordinating board would be given some flexibility to come up with tests that aren’t provided in the ETS program. Paredes said that details would be worked out in discussions with campus leaders, legislators and the governor.
Paredes said that he realized that some academics distrust standardized testing, but he said that it was essential to “confirm that the students who have graduated have actually acquired the necessary knowledge and skills.” He added: “My concern is not over-testing, but how do you develop effective measurements of learning outcomes?” He said that academic programs need “to have a certain integrity, and you have to have minimal standards.” Asked if many Texas programs lacked such standards, he said: “It’s not clear by and large anywhere. We haven’t had measurable learning outcomes.”
Critics of testing said that the governor’s plan would create the wrong incentives for Texas colleges. “Under Governor Perry’s misguided proposal, an easy way for a Texas institution to ensure that it will get a high rating accompanied by monetary awards is to limit admission to students who already score high on the standardized tests that will be used to determine the cash bonuses,” said Bob Schaeffer, public education director of the National Center for Fair & Open Testing. “Alternatively, they can narrow their curriculum to test preparation for the exit exam. In either case, test scores may soar but educational quality will be undermined — the end result will be another phony ‘Texas miracle.’ “
He added that the proposal was “not surprising given the test-fixated Texas dominance of the U.S. Department of Education and, especially, its commission on higher education led by Charles Miller. All are true believers in the notion that more tests magically lead to more learning, despite mounds of data to the contrary.”
David Hinojosa, a lawyer on education issues for the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, said that he was very pleased to see the governor propose large increases in higher education budgets, but very concerned about linking new money to standardized testing. Not only will the beneficiaries probably be the research universities that tend to be the wealthiest institutions already, but the institutions that stand to gain the least are those that educate large numbers of students who graduated from poor high schools and who “perhaps by some coincidence educate a substantially higher number of minority students.”
MALDEF and other groups have been involved in a sustained effort over the last 20 years to help colleges in predominantly Latino south Texas gain more programs and more funds — and the institutions in that region have experienced significant growth as a result. “There doesn’t seem to have been any study on the effects that this testing would have with the universities that serve south Texas and all along the border,” Hinojosa said. “After years of having to fight for funding of those programs, we remain quite fearful that there will be a reversal of the dollars.”
Zucker, of the Texas Faculty Association, said that his members were just starting to study the governor’s plan, and that they appreciated Perry putting higher education “on the front burner.”
But he said that multiple parts of the plan create problems for professors. One part would award some funds based on graduation rates. While Zucker said that professors want to help students graduate on time, he also said that many students lack sufficient preparation to do well — and take a long time to graduate for all kinds of reasons, many of them valid. “If you are trying to maintain academic standards, how do you do that when a college’s funding depends on head count for graduation? It doesn’t take much of an imagination to see a dean calling in professors — many of them adjuncts — and telling them to start passing a lot more students.”
And Zucker said that the testing proposal would lead to “a cookie-cutter approach” to higher education. “One of the great wonders of higher education is the unique perspectives and approaches professors bring to classes,” he said. They won’t be able to do so if they are facing pressure “to just teach students so they get a high score on an exit exam.”
Zucker acknowledged that colleges need to think hard about how to “bring everyone up to a certain level,” but he said that when you focus on standardized tests, you end up with minimal standards. “You can teach to the test and have everyone have minimal standards, but what do you give up to get that?”
— Scott Jaschik
The original story and user comments can be viewed online at http://insidehighered.com/news/2007/02/02/texas.
© Copyright 2006 Inside Higher Ed
[United Nations] Panel Issues Bleak Report on Climate Change
This is a highly significant and definitive report on global warming in case you haven’t seen it. Wonder whether global warming or global responsibilities will appear on the proposed Texas mandatory college exit exam?
FYI, today (Feb. 2) is also the anniversary of the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. That somehow seems significant.
-Angela
NY TIMES
Panel Issues Bleak Report on Climate Change
By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL and ANDREW C. REVKIN
Published: February 2, 2007
PARIS, Feb. 2 In a bleak and powerful assessment of the future of
the planet, the leading international network of climate change
scientists has concluded for the first time that global warming is
"unequivocal" and that human activity is the main driver, "very
likely" causing most of the rise in temperatures since 1950.
In its fourth assessment of global warming, released Friday, the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change used its strongest language
yet in drawing a link between human activity and recent warming.
They said the world is already committed to centuries of warming,
shifting weather patterns and rising seas, resulting from the buildup
of gases in the atmosphere that trap heat. But the warming can be
substantially blunted by prompt action, the panel of scientists said
in a report released here today.
The report summarized the fourth assessment since 1990 by the group,
the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change of the United Nations,
sizing up the causes and consequences of climate change. But it is the
first in which the group asserts with near certainty more than 90
percent confidence that carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping
greenhouse gases from human activities have been the main causes of
warming since 1950.
In its last report, in 2001, the panel, consisting of hundreds of
scientists and reviewers, put the confidence level at between 66 and
90 percent. Both reports are online at http://www.ipcc.ch
If carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere reach twice their
pre-industrial levels, the report said, the global climate will
probably warm by 3.5 to 8 degrees. But there would be more than a
1-in-10 chance of much greater warming, a situation many earth
scientists say poses an unacceptable risk.
Many energy and environment experts see such a doubling as a foregone
conclusion sometime after midcentury unless there is a prompt and
sustained shift away from the 20th-century pattern of unfettered
burning of coal and oil, the main sources of carbon dioxide, and an
aggressive quest for expanded and improved nonpolluting energy options.
Even an increased level of warming that falls in the middle of the
group’s range of projections would likely cause significant stress to
ecosystems and alter longstanding climate patterns that shape water
supplies and agricultural production, according to many climate
experts and biologists.
While the new report projected a modest rise in seas by 2100 between
7 and 23 inches it also concluded that seas would continue to rise,
and crowded coasts retreat, for at least 1,000 years to come. By
comparison, seas rose about 6 to 9 inches in the 20th century.
John P. Holdren, an energy and climate expert at Harvard University,
said that the “report powerfully underscores the need for a massive
effort to slow the pace of global climatic disruption before
intolerable consequences become inevitable.” [Read a report by Mr.
Holdren. (PDF format)]
“Since 2001 there has been a torrent of new scientific evidence on the
magnitude, human origins and growing impacts of the climatic changes
that are underway,” said Mr. Holdren, who is the president of the
American Association for the Advancement of Science. “In overwhelming
proportions, this evidence has been in the direction of showing faster
change, more danger and greater confidence about the dominant role of
fossil fuel burning and tropical deforestation in causing the changes
that are being observed.”
The conclusions came after a three-year review of hundreds of studies
of clues illuminating past climate shifts, observations of retreating
ice, warming and rising seas, and other shifts around the planet, and
a greatly expanded suite of supercomputer simulations used to test how
earth will respond to a building blanket of gases that hold heat in
the atmosphere.
The section released today was a 20-page summary for policymakers,
which was approved early this morning by teams of officials from more
than 100 countries after three days and nights of wrangling over
wording with the lead authors, all of whom are scientists.
It described far-flung ramifications for both humans and nature.
“It is very likely that hot extremes, heat waves and heavy
precipitation events will continue to become more frequent,” said the summary.
Generally, the scientists said, more precipitation will fall at higher
latitudes, which are likely also to see lengthened growing seasons,
while semi-arid, subtropical regions already chronically beset by
drought could see a further 20-percent drop in rainfall under the
midrange scenario for increases in the greenhouse gases.
The summary added a new chemical consequence of the buildup of carbon
dioxide to the list of mainly climatic and biological impacts foreseen
in its previous reports: a drop in the pH of seawater as oceans absorb
billions of tons of carbon dioxide, which forms carbonic acid when
partly dissolved. Marine biologists have said that could imperil some
kinds of corals and plankton.
A vast improvement in the science of climatology including “larges
amounts of new and more comprehensive data” has allowed the group to
become far more confident and specific in its predictions, compared
with its previous assessment in 2001, the authors said.
The report essentially caps a half-century-long effort to discern
whether humans, through the buildup of carbon dioxide and other gases
released mainly by burning fuels and forests, could influence the
earth’s climate system in potentially momentous ways.
The group operates under the aegis of the United Nations and was
chartered in 1988 a year of record heat, burning forests, and the
first big headlines about global warming to provide regular reviews
of climate science to governments to inform policy choices.
Government officials are involved in shaping the summary of each
report, but the scientist-authors, who are unpaid, have the final say
over the thousands of pages in four underlying technical reports that
will be completed and published later this year.
Big questions remain about the speed and extent of some impending
changes, both because of uncertainty about future population and
pollution trends and the complex interrelationships of the greenhouse
emissions, clouds, dusty kinds of pollution, the oceans and earth’s
veneer of life, which both emits and soaks up carbon dioxide and other
such gases.
But a broad array of scientists, including authors of the report and
independent experts, said the latest analysis was the most sobering
view yet of a century of transition after thousands of years of
relatively stable climate conditions to a new norm of continual change.
Should greenhouse gases continue to accumulate in the atmosphere at
even a moderate pace, average temperatures by the end of the century
could match those last seen 125,000 years ago, in the previous warm
spell between ice ages, the report said.
At that time, the panel said, sea levels were 12 to 20 feet higher
than they are now. Muych of that extra water is now trapped in the ice
sheets of Greenland and Antarctica, which are eroding in some places.
The panel said there was no solid scientific understanding of how
rapidly the vast stores of ice in polar regions will melt, so their
estimates on new sea levels were based mainly on how much the warmed
oceans will expand, and not on contributions from the melting of ice
now on land.
Other scientists have recently reported evidence that the glaciers and
ice sheets in the Arctic and Antarctic could flow seaward far more
quickly than estimated in the past, and they have proposed that the
risks to coastal areas could be much more imminent. But the I.P.C.C.
is proscribed by its charter from entering into speculation, and so
could not include such possible instabilities in its assessment.
Michel Jarraud, the secretary general of the United Nations World
Meteorological Organization, said the lack of clarity should offer no
one comfort. “The speed with which melting ice sheets are raising sea
levels is uncertain, but the report makes clear that sea levels will
rise inexorably over the coming centuries,” he said. “It is a question
of when and how much, and not if,” he said, adding: “While the
conclusions are disturbing, decision makers are now armed with the
latest facts and will be better able to respond to these realities.”
Achim Steiner, the executive director of the United Nations
Environment Program, which oversees the I.P.C.C. along with the
meteorological group, said society now had plenty of information on
which to act.
“The implications of global warming over the coming decades for our
industrial economy, water supplies, agriculture, biological diversity
and even geopolitics are massive,” he said. “This new report should
spur policymakers to get off the fence and put strong and effective
policies in place to tackle greenhouse gas emissions.”
The warming and other climate shifts will be highly variable around
the world, with the Arctic particularly seeing much higher
temperatures, said Susan Solomon, the co-leader of the team writing
the summary and the section of the I.P.C.C. report on basic science.
She is an atmospheric scientist for the National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration.
The kinds of vulnerabilities are very much dependent on where you are,
Dr. Solomon said in a telephone interview. “If you’re living in parts
of tropics and they’re getting drier and you’re a farmer there are
some very acute issues associated with even small changes in rainfall
changes we’re already seeing are significant,” she said. “If you are
an Inuit and you’re seeing your sea ice retreating already that’s
affecting your lifestyle and culture.”
The 20-page summary is a sketch of the findings that are most germane
to the public and world leaders.
The full I.P.C.C. report, thousands of pages of technical background,
will be released in four sections through the year the first on
basic science, then sections on impacts and options for limiting
emissions and limiting inevitable harms, and finally a synthesis of
all of the findings near year’s end.
In a news conference in Paris, Dr. Solomon declined to provide her own
views on how society should respond to the momentous changes projected
in the study.
“I honestly believe that it would be a much better service for me to
keep my personal opinions separate than what I can actually offer the
world as a scientist,” she said. “My stepson, who is 29, has an
utterly different view of risks than I do. People are going to have to
make their own judgments.”
Some authors of the report said that no one could honestly point to
any remaining uncertainties as justification for further delay.
“Policy makers paid us to do good science, and now we have high very
scientific confidence in this work this is real, this is real, this
is real,” said Richard B. Alley, one of the lead authors and a
professor at Penn State University. “So now act, the ball’s back in
your court.”
Elisabeth Rosenthal reported from Paris, and Andrew C. Revkin from New York.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/02/science/earth/02cnd-climate.html?ei=5070&en=42d7bc3a1f47c588&ex=1171083600&emc=eta1&pagewanted=all
NY TIMES
Even Before Its Release, World Climate Report Is Criticized as Too Optimistic
By CORNELIA DEAN
Published: February 2, 2007
In its 2001 assessment, its third, the Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change estimated that in the next hundred years sea level
would rise globally by at least a few inches and perhaps as much as
three feet, a catastrophe for low-lying coastal areas and island nations.
In Paris today the panel will issue its fourth assessment, and people
familiar with its deliberations say it will moderate its gloom on sea
level rise, lowering its worst-case estimate.
In theory that is good news, because rising seas bring erosion and
flooding to coastal areas. But a lower estimate has not been uniformly
cheered.
In letters to and conversations with panel members, and in scientific
journals, several climate experts said the estimate was almost
certainly wrong because the panel was leaving out a growing body of
data on melting glaciers and inland ice sheets, which are major
contributors to sea level rise.
Those experts say that unless the finding is modified, the panel
widely cited as an authoritative voice on climate change risks
condemning itself to irrelevance.
Climate experts have “a great deal of confidence” in observations that
sea level rise is accelerating, said Laury Miller, an oceanographer at
the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration who was a
reviewer for part of the coming report.
Good satellite measurements date only from the last decade or so, he
said, so it is hard to draw firm long-term conclusions from them.
Also, he said, computer models of how glaciers and ice sheets melt
cannot account for much of the observed melting, even though
“presumably it is going into the ocean.”
But so far at least, he said, “the observed sea level rise has been
tracking the upper range” of the 2001 estimate. “It’s pretty
unequivocal,” he said.
Michael C. MacCracken, who led the Office of Climate Change in the
Clinton administration and who was also a reviewer for some of the new
assessment, said he could understand why scientists on the panel might
be uneasy about relying too much on models. But in that event, he
said, they should make it known that their estimates did not include
factors like ice sheet movement and collapse, which appear to be accelerating.
In a letter to panel members on Jan. 21, Dr. MacCracken said lowering
the worst-case sea level estimate would “result in a serious
misimpression being conveyed to policy makers and the public.” In
fact, he said, most American experts have felt that the estimate was
already too optimistic.
Other experts said the panel might have missed some important new
developments, because it set a December 2005 cutoff date for
submission of scientific papers and other data.
Since then, researchers have reported that Greenland’s ice sheet is
melting faster than had been thought, that Antarctica is feeding more
melt water into the oceans than had been predicted and that the
melting of glaciers around the world is accelerating rapidly.
In a brief report in today’s issue of the journal Science, an array of
leading climate researchers said recent findings “raise concern that
the climate system, in particular sea level, may be responding
more quickly than climate models indicate.”
But in an interview last week, Susan Solomon, a climate expert at the
National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration and a leader of
one of the climate panel’s working groups, said researchers were
invited several times last year to comment on the group’s work. It
received thousands of comments, she said.
Drew Shindell, a climate expert at the NASA Goddard Institute for
Space Studies, said at a House of Representatives hearing on climate
science on Tuesday that part of the problem was the difficulty of
making firm scientific statements about a field in which research was
moving fast.
Dr. Shindell, who emphasized that he was speaking as an individual,
said, “The melting of Greenland has been accelerating so incredibly
rapidly that the I.P.C.C. report will already be out of date in
predicting sea level rise, which will probably be much worse than is
predicted in the I.P.C.C. report.”
James McCarthy, a climate expert at Harvard who was a leader in the
2001 assessment, noted in an e-mail message that the panel’s report
could be changed until the moment it was made public. Nevertheless, he
said he worried that unless its discussion of sea level rise was
altered, the panel would so underestimate the problem that it would
look “foolishly cautious and maybe even irrelevant” on the issue.
But one prominent critic of mainstream climate science, S. Fred
Singer, a retired physicist, is already seizing on the report as
evidence that people like former Vice President Al Gore who argue that
human activity is changing the earth’s climate are now the contrarians.
Andrew C. Revkin contributed reporting.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/02/science/earth/02cnd-climate.html?ei =
5070&en=42d7bc3a1f47c588&ex=1171083600&emc=eta1&pagewanted=all
FYI, today (Feb. 2) is also the anniversary of the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. That somehow seems significant.
-Angela
NY TIMES
Panel Issues Bleak Report on Climate Change
By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL and ANDREW C. REVKIN
Published: February 2, 2007
PARIS, Feb. 2 In a bleak and powerful assessment of the future of
the planet, the leading international network of climate change
scientists has concluded for the first time that global warming is
"unequivocal" and that human activity is the main driver, "very
likely" causing most of the rise in temperatures since 1950.
In its fourth assessment of global warming, released Friday, the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change used its strongest language
yet in drawing a link between human activity and recent warming.
They said the world is already committed to centuries of warming,
shifting weather patterns and rising seas, resulting from the buildup
of gases in the atmosphere that trap heat. But the warming can be
substantially blunted by prompt action, the panel of scientists said
in a report released here today.
The report summarized the fourth assessment since 1990 by the group,
the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change of the United Nations,
sizing up the causes and consequences of climate change. But it is the
first in which the group asserts with near certainty more than 90
percent confidence that carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping
greenhouse gases from human activities have been the main causes of
warming since 1950.
In its last report, in 2001, the panel, consisting of hundreds of
scientists and reviewers, put the confidence level at between 66 and
90 percent. Both reports are online at http://www.ipcc.ch
If carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere reach twice their
pre-industrial levels, the report said, the global climate will
probably warm by 3.5 to 8 degrees. But there would be more than a
1-in-10 chance of much greater warming, a situation many earth
scientists say poses an unacceptable risk.
Many energy and environment experts see such a doubling as a foregone
conclusion sometime after midcentury unless there is a prompt and
sustained shift away from the 20th-century pattern of unfettered
burning of coal and oil, the main sources of carbon dioxide, and an
aggressive quest for expanded and improved nonpolluting energy options.
Even an increased level of warming that falls in the middle of the
group’s range of projections would likely cause significant stress to
ecosystems and alter longstanding climate patterns that shape water
supplies and agricultural production, according to many climate
experts and biologists.
While the new report projected a modest rise in seas by 2100 between
7 and 23 inches it also concluded that seas would continue to rise,
and crowded coasts retreat, for at least 1,000 years to come. By
comparison, seas rose about 6 to 9 inches in the 20th century.
John P. Holdren, an energy and climate expert at Harvard University,
said that the “report powerfully underscores the need for a massive
effort to slow the pace of global climatic disruption before
intolerable consequences become inevitable.” [Read a report by Mr.
Holdren. (PDF format)]
“Since 2001 there has been a torrent of new scientific evidence on the
magnitude, human origins and growing impacts of the climatic changes
that are underway,” said Mr. Holdren, who is the president of the
American Association for the Advancement of Science. “In overwhelming
proportions, this evidence has been in the direction of showing faster
change, more danger and greater confidence about the dominant role of
fossil fuel burning and tropical deforestation in causing the changes
that are being observed.”
The conclusions came after a three-year review of hundreds of studies
of clues illuminating past climate shifts, observations of retreating
ice, warming and rising seas, and other shifts around the planet, and
a greatly expanded suite of supercomputer simulations used to test how
earth will respond to a building blanket of gases that hold heat in
the atmosphere.
The section released today was a 20-page summary for policymakers,
which was approved early this morning by teams of officials from more
than 100 countries after three days and nights of wrangling over
wording with the lead authors, all of whom are scientists.
It described far-flung ramifications for both humans and nature.
“It is very likely that hot extremes, heat waves and heavy
precipitation events will continue to become more frequent,” said the summary.
Generally, the scientists said, more precipitation will fall at higher
latitudes, which are likely also to see lengthened growing seasons,
while semi-arid, subtropical regions already chronically beset by
drought could see a further 20-percent drop in rainfall under the
midrange scenario for increases in the greenhouse gases.
The summary added a new chemical consequence of the buildup of carbon
dioxide to the list of mainly climatic and biological impacts foreseen
in its previous reports: a drop in the pH of seawater as oceans absorb
billions of tons of carbon dioxide, which forms carbonic acid when
partly dissolved. Marine biologists have said that could imperil some
kinds of corals and plankton.
A vast improvement in the science of climatology including “larges
amounts of new and more comprehensive data” has allowed the group to
become far more confident and specific in its predictions, compared
with its previous assessment in 2001, the authors said.
The report essentially caps a half-century-long effort to discern
whether humans, through the buildup of carbon dioxide and other gases
released mainly by burning fuels and forests, could influence the
earth’s climate system in potentially momentous ways.
The group operates under the aegis of the United Nations and was
chartered in 1988 a year of record heat, burning forests, and the
first big headlines about global warming to provide regular reviews
of climate science to governments to inform policy choices.
Government officials are involved in shaping the summary of each
report, but the scientist-authors, who are unpaid, have the final say
over the thousands of pages in four underlying technical reports that
will be completed and published later this year.
Big questions remain about the speed and extent of some impending
changes, both because of uncertainty about future population and
pollution trends and the complex interrelationships of the greenhouse
emissions, clouds, dusty kinds of pollution, the oceans and earth’s
veneer of life, which both emits and soaks up carbon dioxide and other
such gases.
But a broad array of scientists, including authors of the report and
independent experts, said the latest analysis was the most sobering
view yet of a century of transition after thousands of years of
relatively stable climate conditions to a new norm of continual change.
Should greenhouse gases continue to accumulate in the atmosphere at
even a moderate pace, average temperatures by the end of the century
could match those last seen 125,000 years ago, in the previous warm
spell between ice ages, the report said.
At that time, the panel said, sea levels were 12 to 20 feet higher
than they are now. Muych of that extra water is now trapped in the ice
sheets of Greenland and Antarctica, which are eroding in some places.
The panel said there was no solid scientific understanding of how
rapidly the vast stores of ice in polar regions will melt, so their
estimates on new sea levels were based mainly on how much the warmed
oceans will expand, and not on contributions from the melting of ice
now on land.
Other scientists have recently reported evidence that the glaciers and
ice sheets in the Arctic and Antarctic could flow seaward far more
quickly than estimated in the past, and they have proposed that the
risks to coastal areas could be much more imminent. But the I.P.C.C.
is proscribed by its charter from entering into speculation, and so
could not include such possible instabilities in its assessment.
Michel Jarraud, the secretary general of the United Nations World
Meteorological Organization, said the lack of clarity should offer no
one comfort. “The speed with which melting ice sheets are raising sea
levels is uncertain, but the report makes clear that sea levels will
rise inexorably over the coming centuries,” he said. “It is a question
of when and how much, and not if,” he said, adding: “While the
conclusions are disturbing, decision makers are now armed with the
latest facts and will be better able to respond to these realities.”
Achim Steiner, the executive director of the United Nations
Environment Program, which oversees the I.P.C.C. along with the
meteorological group, said society now had plenty of information on
which to act.
“The implications of global warming over the coming decades for our
industrial economy, water supplies, agriculture, biological diversity
and even geopolitics are massive,” he said. “This new report should
spur policymakers to get off the fence and put strong and effective
policies in place to tackle greenhouse gas emissions.”
The warming and other climate shifts will be highly variable around
the world, with the Arctic particularly seeing much higher
temperatures, said Susan Solomon, the co-leader of the team writing
the summary and the section of the I.P.C.C. report on basic science.
She is an atmospheric scientist for the National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration.
The kinds of vulnerabilities are very much dependent on where you are,
Dr. Solomon said in a telephone interview. “If you’re living in parts
of tropics and they’re getting drier and you’re a farmer there are
some very acute issues associated with even small changes in rainfall
changes we’re already seeing are significant,” she said. “If you are
an Inuit and you’re seeing your sea ice retreating already that’s
affecting your lifestyle and culture.”
The 20-page summary is a sketch of the findings that are most germane
to the public and world leaders.
The full I.P.C.C. report, thousands of pages of technical background,
will be released in four sections through the year the first on
basic science, then sections on impacts and options for limiting
emissions and limiting inevitable harms, and finally a synthesis of
all of the findings near year’s end.
In a news conference in Paris, Dr. Solomon declined to provide her own
views on how society should respond to the momentous changes projected
in the study.
“I honestly believe that it would be a much better service for me to
keep my personal opinions separate than what I can actually offer the
world as a scientist,” she said. “My stepson, who is 29, has an
utterly different view of risks than I do. People are going to have to
make their own judgments.”
Some authors of the report said that no one could honestly point to
any remaining uncertainties as justification for further delay.
“Policy makers paid us to do good science, and now we have high very
scientific confidence in this work this is real, this is real, this
is real,” said Richard B. Alley, one of the lead authors and a
professor at Penn State University. “So now act, the ball’s back in
your court.”
Elisabeth Rosenthal reported from Paris, and Andrew C. Revkin from New York.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/02/science/earth/02cnd-climate.html?ei=5070&en=42d7bc3a1f47c588&ex=1171083600&emc=eta1&pagewanted=all
Even Before Its Release, World Climate Report Is Criticized as Too Optimistic
By CORNELIA DEAN
Published: February 2, 2007
In its 2001 assessment, its third, the Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change estimated that in the next hundred years sea level
would rise globally by at least a few inches and perhaps as much as
three feet, a catastrophe for low-lying coastal areas and island nations.
In Paris today the panel will issue its fourth assessment, and people
familiar with its deliberations say it will moderate its gloom on sea
level rise, lowering its worst-case estimate.
In theory that is good news, because rising seas bring erosion and
flooding to coastal areas. But a lower estimate has not been uniformly
cheered.
In letters to and conversations with panel members, and in scientific
journals, several climate experts said the estimate was almost
certainly wrong because the panel was leaving out a growing body of
data on melting glaciers and inland ice sheets, which are major
contributors to sea level rise.
Those experts say that unless the finding is modified, the panel
widely cited as an authoritative voice on climate change risks
condemning itself to irrelevance.
Climate experts have “a great deal of confidence” in observations that
sea level rise is accelerating, said Laury Miller, an oceanographer at
the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration who was a
reviewer for part of the coming report.
Good satellite measurements date only from the last decade or so, he
said, so it is hard to draw firm long-term conclusions from them.
Also, he said, computer models of how glaciers and ice sheets melt
cannot account for much of the observed melting, even though
“presumably it is going into the ocean.”
But so far at least, he said, “the observed sea level rise has been
tracking the upper range” of the 2001 estimate. “It’s pretty
unequivocal,” he said.
Michael C. MacCracken, who led the Office of Climate Change in the
Clinton administration and who was also a reviewer for some of the new
assessment, said he could understand why scientists on the panel might
be uneasy about relying too much on models. But in that event, he
said, they should make it known that their estimates did not include
factors like ice sheet movement and collapse, which appear to be accelerating.
In a letter to panel members on Jan. 21, Dr. MacCracken said lowering
the worst-case sea level estimate would “result in a serious
misimpression being conveyed to policy makers and the public.” In
fact, he said, most American experts have felt that the estimate was
already too optimistic.
Other experts said the panel might have missed some important new
developments, because it set a December 2005 cutoff date for
submission of scientific papers and other data.
Since then, researchers have reported that Greenland’s ice sheet is
melting faster than had been thought, that Antarctica is feeding more
melt water into the oceans than had been predicted and that the
melting of glaciers around the world is accelerating rapidly.
In a brief report in today’s issue of the journal Science, an array of
leading climate researchers said recent findings “raise concern that
the climate system, in particular sea level, may be responding
more quickly than climate models indicate.”
But in an interview last week, Susan Solomon, a climate expert at the
National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration and a leader of
one of the climate panel’s working groups, said researchers were
invited several times last year to comment on the group’s work. It
received thousands of comments, she said.
Drew Shindell, a climate expert at the NASA Goddard Institute for
Space Studies, said at a House of Representatives hearing on climate
science on Tuesday that part of the problem was the difficulty of
making firm scientific statements about a field in which research was
moving fast.
Dr. Shindell, who emphasized that he was speaking as an individual,
said, “The melting of Greenland has been accelerating so incredibly
rapidly that the I.P.C.C. report will already be out of date in
predicting sea level rise, which will probably be much worse than is
predicted in the I.P.C.C. report.”
James McCarthy, a climate expert at Harvard who was a leader in the
2001 assessment, noted in an e-mail message that the panel’s report
could be changed until the moment it was made public. Nevertheless, he
said he worried that unless its discussion of sea level rise was
altered, the panel would so underestimate the problem that it would
look “foolishly cautious and maybe even irrelevant” on the issue.
But one prominent critic of mainstream climate science, S. Fred
Singer, a retired physicist, is already seizing on the report as
evidence that people like former Vice President Al Gore who argue that
human activity is changing the earth’s climate are now the contrarians.
Andrew C. Revkin contributed reporting.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/02/science/earth/02cnd-climate.html?ei =
5070&en=42d7bc3a1f47c588&ex=1171083600&emc=eta1&pagewanted=all
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