There is a policy move in Texas to impact opportunities for immigrant youth in higher education as follows:
HB 50 by Riddle - Relating to information required to establish resident status in connection with tuition and fees charged by public institutions of higher education.
HB 255 by Berman - Relating to prohibiting admission by public institutions of higher education of applicants who are not lawfully authorized to be present in the United States.
HB 262 by Berman - Relating to information regarding the citizenship status of students.
HB 418 by Brown, Betty - Relating to the determination of resident status of students by public institutions of higher education.
HB 577 by Sheffield - Relating to requiring public institutions of higher education to notify the federal Student Exchange and Visitor Information System (SEVIS) regarding the withdrawal or nonattendance of certain foreign students.
Monday, February 16, 2009
Does improving education reduce poverty or does reducing poverty improve education?
Below is Dr. Stephen Krashen's response to the Kristoff piece. The short answer is that reducing poverty improves education, strongly pointing to the limits of the educational system itself in turning poverty around. Not that the school is entirely helpless since we already know that a good or great teacher can make an enormous difference in children's lives. Here's where equitable public policies related to health, housing, school finance, and a more expansive opportunity structure in general, can make all the difference in the world. -Angela
The New York Times, February 15, 2009
Our Greatest National Shame
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
So maybe I was wrong. I used to consider health care our greatest
national shame, considering that we spend twice as much on medical
care as many European nations, yet American children are twice as
likely to die before the age of 5 as Czech children — and American
women are 11 times as likely to die in childbirth as Irish women.
Yet I’m coming to think that our No. 1 priority actually must be
education. That makes the new fiscal stimulus package a landmark, for
it takes a few wobbly steps toward reform and allocates more than $100
billion toward education.
That’s a hefty sum — by comparison, the Education Department’s
entire discretionary budget for the year was $59 billion — and it
will save America’s schools from the catastrophe that they were
facing. A University of Washington study had calculated that the
recession would lead to cuts of 574,000 school jobs without a
stimulus.
“We dodged a bullet the size of a freight train,” notes Amy
Wilkins of the Education Trust, an advocacy group in Washington.
So for those who oppose education spending in the stimulus, a
question: Do you really believe that slashing half a million teaching
jobs would be fine for the economy, for our children and for our
future?
Education Secretary Arne Duncan describes the stimulus as a
“staggering opportunity,” the kind that comes once in a lifetime.
He argues: “We have to educate our way to a better economy, that’s
the only way long term to get there.”
That’s exactly right, and it’s partly why I shifted my views of
the relative importance of education and health. One of last year’s
smartest books was “The Race Between Education and Technology,” by
Claudia Goldin and Lawrence F. Katz, both Harvard professors. They
offer a wealth of evidence to argue that America became the world’s
leading nation largely because of its emphasis on mass education at a
time when other countries educated only elites (often, only male
elites).
They show that America’s educational edge created prosperity and
equality alike — but that this edge was eclipsed in about the 1970s,
and since then one country after another has surpassed us in
education.
Perhaps we should have fought the “war on poverty” with schools
— or, as we’ll see in a moment, with teachers.
Some education programs have done remarkably well in overcoming the
pathologies of poverty. Children who went through the Perry Preschool
program in Michigan, for example, were 25 percent less likely to drop
out of high school years later than their peers in a control group,
and committed half as many violent felonies. They were one-third less
likely to become teenage parents or addicts, and half as likely to get
abortions.
Likewise, the KIPP program, the subject of a fine book by Jay
Mathews, has attracted rave reviews for schools that turn low-income
students’ lives around.
There are legitimate questions about whether such programs are
scalable and would succeed if introduced more broadly. But we do know
that the existing national school system is broken, and that we’re
not trying hard enough to fix it.
“We have a good sense from the data where there are big
opportunities,” notes Douglas Staiger, an economist at Dartmouth
College who studies education.
The hardest nut to crack is high schools — we don’t have a strong
sense yet how to rescue them. But there’s a real excitement at what
we are learning about K-8 education.
First, good teachers matter more than anything; they are
astonishingly important. It turns out that having a great teacher is
far more important than being in a small class, or going to a good
school with a mediocre teacher. A Los Angeles study suggested that
four consecutive years of having a teacher from the top 25 percent of
the pool would erase the black-white testing gap.
Second, our methods to screen potential teachers, or determine which
ones are good, don’t work. The latest Department of Education study,
published this month, showed again that there is no correlation
between teacher certification and teacher effectiveness. Particularly
in lower grades, it also doesn’t seem to matter if a teacher has a
graduate degree or went to a better college or had higher SATs.
The implication is that throwing money at a broken system won’t fix
it, but that resources are necessary as part of a package that
involves scrapping certification, measuring better through testing
which teachers are effective, and then paying them significantly more
— with special bonuses to those who teach in “bad” schools.
One of the greatest injustices is that America’s best teachers
overwhelmingly teach America’s most privileged students. In
contrast, the most disadvantaged students invariably get the least
effective teachers, year after year — until they drop out.
This stimulus package offers a new hope that we may begin to reform
our greatest national shame, education.
Sent to the New York Times, Feb 15, 2009
Does improving education reduce poverty or does reducing poverty
improve education?
Nicholas Kristoff thinks that education is the key to reducing
poverty and that our schools are "Our greatest national shame" (Feb
15). There is, however, strong evidence that poverty is the major
cause of low academic achievement.
US schools with fewer than 25% of children in poverty outscore all
countries in the world in Math and Science (Gerald Bracey, Huffington
Post, July 22, 2007). US children only fall below the international
average when 75% of more of the students in a school are children of
poverty. Studies also show that poor diet and lack of reading material
seriously affect academic performance.
There is room for improvement in education, but when all our children
have the advantages that children from high-income families have, our
schools will be considered the best in the world.
Susan Ohanian puts it this way: Instead of No Child Left Behind, how
about No Child Left Unfed?
Stephen Krashen
The New York Times, February 15, 2009
Our Greatest National Shame
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
So maybe I was wrong. I used to consider health care our greatest
national shame, considering that we spend twice as much on medical
care as many European nations, yet American children are twice as
likely to die before the age of 5 as Czech children — and American
women are 11 times as likely to die in childbirth as Irish women.
Yet I’m coming to think that our No. 1 priority actually must be
education. That makes the new fiscal stimulus package a landmark, for
it takes a few wobbly steps toward reform and allocates more than $100
billion toward education.
That’s a hefty sum — by comparison, the Education Department’s
entire discretionary budget for the year was $59 billion — and it
will save America’s schools from the catastrophe that they were
facing. A University of Washington study had calculated that the
recession would lead to cuts of 574,000 school jobs without a
stimulus.
“We dodged a bullet the size of a freight train,” notes Amy
Wilkins of the Education Trust, an advocacy group in Washington.
So for those who oppose education spending in the stimulus, a
question: Do you really believe that slashing half a million teaching
jobs would be fine for the economy, for our children and for our
future?
Education Secretary Arne Duncan describes the stimulus as a
“staggering opportunity,” the kind that comes once in a lifetime.
He argues: “We have to educate our way to a better economy, that’s
the only way long term to get there.”
That’s exactly right, and it’s partly why I shifted my views of
the relative importance of education and health. One of last year’s
smartest books was “The Race Between Education and Technology,” by
Claudia Goldin and Lawrence F. Katz, both Harvard professors. They
offer a wealth of evidence to argue that America became the world’s
leading nation largely because of its emphasis on mass education at a
time when other countries educated only elites (often, only male
elites).
They show that America’s educational edge created prosperity and
equality alike — but that this edge was eclipsed in about the 1970s,
and since then one country after another has surpassed us in
education.
Perhaps we should have fought the “war on poverty” with schools
— or, as we’ll see in a moment, with teachers.
Some education programs have done remarkably well in overcoming the
pathologies of poverty. Children who went through the Perry Preschool
program in Michigan, for example, were 25 percent less likely to drop
out of high school years later than their peers in a control group,
and committed half as many violent felonies. They were one-third less
likely to become teenage parents or addicts, and half as likely to get
abortions.
Likewise, the KIPP program, the subject of a fine book by Jay
Mathews, has attracted rave reviews for schools that turn low-income
students’ lives around.
There are legitimate questions about whether such programs are
scalable and would succeed if introduced more broadly. But we do know
that the existing national school system is broken, and that we’re
not trying hard enough to fix it.
“We have a good sense from the data where there are big
opportunities,” notes Douglas Staiger, an economist at Dartmouth
College who studies education.
The hardest nut to crack is high schools — we don’t have a strong
sense yet how to rescue them. But there’s a real excitement at what
we are learning about K-8 education.
First, good teachers matter more than anything; they are
astonishingly important. It turns out that having a great teacher is
far more important than being in a small class, or going to a good
school with a mediocre teacher. A Los Angeles study suggested that
four consecutive years of having a teacher from the top 25 percent of
the pool would erase the black-white testing gap.
Second, our methods to screen potential teachers, or determine which
ones are good, don’t work. The latest Department of Education study,
published this month, showed again that there is no correlation
between teacher certification and teacher effectiveness. Particularly
in lower grades, it also doesn’t seem to matter if a teacher has a
graduate degree or went to a better college or had higher SATs.
The implication is that throwing money at a broken system won’t fix
it, but that resources are necessary as part of a package that
involves scrapping certification, measuring better through testing
which teachers are effective, and then paying them significantly more
— with special bonuses to those who teach in “bad” schools.
One of the greatest injustices is that America’s best teachers
overwhelmingly teach America’s most privileged students. In
contrast, the most disadvantaged students invariably get the least
effective teachers, year after year — until they drop out.
This stimulus package offers a new hope that we may begin to reform
our greatest national shame, education.
Sunday, February 15, 2009
Together We Can Create World-Class Schools for All Texas Children
I urge all of you to critically read the full proposal Common Ground.
-Patricia
Together We Can Create World-Class Schools for All Texas Children
By Sandy Kress, Don McAdams, Mike Moses, David Thompson, and Jim Windham
Many education leaders have lamented the lack of consensus and sharp disagreements that have characterized Texas education policy discussions in recent years. In December 2007, the five of us, though we have different views on significant policy issues and have shared in some of these sharp disagreements, agreed to begin the search for common ground and set a different tone for discussion.
Many meetings and many drafts later, we have reached consensus. We are now placing before state education leaders and all Texans interested in world-class public schools Common Ground: A Declaration of Principles and Strategies for Texas Education Policy. We hope our compromise document will serve as a starting point for conversations among a wide range of education leaders and that from these conversations Texans can reach common ground on core education policy issues for the next session of the Legislature and beyond.
What are we proposing? First, we determined to not produce just another laundry list, but rather answer the question: "What is at the heart of the state's responsibility to provide a free, efficient public education for all children?"Four issues stand out: standards, accountability, capacity, and control.
Standards define the goals: "What should a high school graduate (and children at each grade level) know and be able to do?" Accountability defines the methods by which taxpayers know to what extent schools are reaching these goals and prescribes consequences that are appropriate to foster improvement. Capacity describes the resources, technical support, and policymaking structures and processes that the state provides so that schools can do what they have been asked to do. And control clarifies what decisions are made at the state level and what decisions are left to local school boards, schools, and parents.
We have made recommendations in these four areas, attempting to link them together in a coherent policy framework that balances standards with resources and accountability for results with local control. Our paper shows how all these elements must be aligned to promote high student achievement.
Specifically, we are recommending the following to make Texas schools the best in the nation:
Texas must establish college/workplace readiness as the standard for all high school graduates, with three diplomas and multiple curriculum paths within the recommended diploma.Texas high schools must recognize the varied interests of students and meet the needs of the workplace. However, all diplomas and curriculum paths must be rigorous and all high school graduates must be prepared for postsecondary success without remediation.
Legislators must adopt an accountability system with easily understood principles that fairly evaluates and promotes greater effectiveness in school districts and schools toward reaching high standards.The focus of the accountability system should be college and workplace readiness.
The statemust provide adequate resources to cover enrollment growth and inflation plus new funds for high-leverage investments as well as supportive state systems for policymaking, technical assistance, and information management.Standards are linked to capacity.High standards require commensurate resources, financial and other.
State policy should promote a shared partnership between the state and local districts in which the districts have the primary authority and responsibility for implementing the state's system of public education.State oversight must be balanced with local control.
Our paper examines these issues in some depth, but it is not a blueprint for legislation.It sets forth principles and strategies as a framework for dialogue.We hope that it will stimulate wide discussion among policymakers, educators, and citizens and that from this discussion a statewide consensus can be reached on next steps for building in Texas the best public school system in the nation.
Compromise is the essence of democracy.The future of Texas depends on education leaders working together to reach common ground.Students can't afford to have their education and future stymied by acrimonious fighting. We can deliver solutions for their futures by realizing the promise of our common ground.
Published December 20, 2008
-Patricia
Together We Can Create World-Class Schools for All Texas Children
By Sandy Kress, Don McAdams, Mike Moses, David Thompson, and Jim Windham
Many education leaders have lamented the lack of consensus and sharp disagreements that have characterized Texas education policy discussions in recent years. In December 2007, the five of us, though we have different views on significant policy issues and have shared in some of these sharp disagreements, agreed to begin the search for common ground and set a different tone for discussion.
Many meetings and many drafts later, we have reached consensus. We are now placing before state education leaders and all Texans interested in world-class public schools Common Ground: A Declaration of Principles and Strategies for Texas Education Policy. We hope our compromise document will serve as a starting point for conversations among a wide range of education leaders and that from these conversations Texans can reach common ground on core education policy issues for the next session of the Legislature and beyond.
What are we proposing? First, we determined to not produce just another laundry list, but rather answer the question: "What is at the heart of the state's responsibility to provide a free, efficient public education for all children?"Four issues stand out: standards, accountability, capacity, and control.
Standards define the goals: "What should a high school graduate (and children at each grade level) know and be able to do?" Accountability defines the methods by which taxpayers know to what extent schools are reaching these goals and prescribes consequences that are appropriate to foster improvement. Capacity describes the resources, technical support, and policymaking structures and processes that the state provides so that schools can do what they have been asked to do. And control clarifies what decisions are made at the state level and what decisions are left to local school boards, schools, and parents.
We have made recommendations in these four areas, attempting to link them together in a coherent policy framework that balances standards with resources and accountability for results with local control. Our paper shows how all these elements must be aligned to promote high student achievement.
Specifically, we are recommending the following to make Texas schools the best in the nation:
Texas must establish college/workplace readiness as the standard for all high school graduates, with three diplomas and multiple curriculum paths within the recommended diploma.Texas high schools must recognize the varied interests of students and meet the needs of the workplace. However, all diplomas and curriculum paths must be rigorous and all high school graduates must be prepared for postsecondary success without remediation.
Legislators must adopt an accountability system with easily understood principles that fairly evaluates and promotes greater effectiveness in school districts and schools toward reaching high standards.The focus of the accountability system should be college and workplace readiness.
The statemust provide adequate resources to cover enrollment growth and inflation plus new funds for high-leverage investments as well as supportive state systems for policymaking, technical assistance, and information management.Standards are linked to capacity.High standards require commensurate resources, financial and other.
State policy should promote a shared partnership between the state and local districts in which the districts have the primary authority and responsibility for implementing the state's system of public education.State oversight must be balanced with local control.
Our paper examines these issues in some depth, but it is not a blueprint for legislation.It sets forth principles and strategies as a framework for dialogue.We hope that it will stimulate wide discussion among policymakers, educators, and citizens and that from this discussion a statewide consensus can be reached on next steps for building in Texas the best public school system in the nation.
Compromise is the essence of democracy.The future of Texas depends on education leaders working together to reach common ground.Students can't afford to have their education and future stymied by acrimonious fighting. We can deliver solutions for their futures by realizing the promise of our common ground.
Published December 20, 2008
Campaign for High School Equity Statement on the Role of Education Reform in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act
WASHINGTON, Jan. 30 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- The Campaign for High School Equity (CHSE) acknowledges the necessity of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act and commends President Obama and Congress for moving quickly to address the nation's economic challenges. The civil rights coalition is pleased that the Act provides much-needed relief for states to help all students, including students of color and youth from low-income neighborhoods, stay on the path to high school graduation.
Notably, the House-passed and Senate committee-passed bills contain requirements that move toward holding schools, school districts and states accountable for student achievement. The provisions that require states to develop and use longitudinal data systems and improve assessments for English language learners (ELLs) and children with disabilities are important steps. We are pleased to see that the Senate bill included a provision to encourage states to align their state standards with college- and work-ready expectations. We are also pleased that both bills recognize the importance of ensuring that low-income and minority students are taught by effective teachers at the same rate as high-income students. However, the House-passed bill takes a stronger approach to solving this problem.
On their own these policies do not fully address America's education crisis. Of incoming ninth graders, only one-third will graduate with the skills they need to be successful in college and work.(i) Among high school graduates, students of color and low-income students are underrepresented, with some subgroups achieving a lower than 50 percent graduation rate. And as students of color and ELLs continue to grow as a proportion of the total student population, improving their educational outcomes must be a national priority.
CHSE is concerned that states will not target sufficient stimulus funds to the communities where help is needed most. The group is also "disappointed by the omission of funding for high schools, Title III, Title VII, TRIO, GEAR UP, and other programs that directly support students of color and ELLs," according to Michael Wotorson, CHSE's executive director. "To improve student outcomes," Wotorson continued, "we need long-term funding and policy solutions to ensure that all students have the support they need to succeed."
Even more dramatic improvements in federal support for education are needed to restore long-term economic viability. Too many American high schools fail to engage, educate and develop the young adults who should soon assume roles as business and community leaders. If we set ambitious goals for education and raise the graduation rates of students of color to the levels of white students by the year 2020, and if these new graduates go on to postsecondary education at similar rates, the potential increase in personal income would add more than $319 billion to the American economy.(ii)
Our nation's long-term economic health requires structural reforms to public education. U.S. education policy must change now, and a prime opportunity exists through the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act. A full NCLB reauthorization process during the 111th Congress is necessary to guarantee students of color and youth from low-income neighborhoods access to a high-quality high school education that prepares them for college and the workplace. It is critical that we maintain our focus on improving educational opportunities for all students, or we risk long-term economic decline and the creation of a permanent underclass.
CHSE is a coalition of leading civil rights organizations representing communities of color that is focused on high school education reform. Members include the National Urban League, National Council of La Raza, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Leadership Conference on Civil Rights Education Fund, Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, League of United Latin American Citizens, National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials Educational Fund, Alliance for Excellent Education, National Indian Education Association, and Southeast Asia Resource Action Center.
CHSE is a special project of Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors.
Notably, the House-passed and Senate committee-passed bills contain requirements that move toward holding schools, school districts and states accountable for student achievement. The provisions that require states to develop and use longitudinal data systems and improve assessments for English language learners (ELLs) and children with disabilities are important steps. We are pleased to see that the Senate bill included a provision to encourage states to align their state standards with college- and work-ready expectations. We are also pleased that both bills recognize the importance of ensuring that low-income and minority students are taught by effective teachers at the same rate as high-income students. However, the House-passed bill takes a stronger approach to solving this problem.
On their own these policies do not fully address America's education crisis. Of incoming ninth graders, only one-third will graduate with the skills they need to be successful in college and work.(i) Among high school graduates, students of color and low-income students are underrepresented, with some subgroups achieving a lower than 50 percent graduation rate. And as students of color and ELLs continue to grow as a proportion of the total student population, improving their educational outcomes must be a national priority.
CHSE is concerned that states will not target sufficient stimulus funds to the communities where help is needed most. The group is also "disappointed by the omission of funding for high schools, Title III, Title VII, TRIO, GEAR UP, and other programs that directly support students of color and ELLs," according to Michael Wotorson, CHSE's executive director. "To improve student outcomes," Wotorson continued, "we need long-term funding and policy solutions to ensure that all students have the support they need to succeed."
Even more dramatic improvements in federal support for education are needed to restore long-term economic viability. Too many American high schools fail to engage, educate and develop the young adults who should soon assume roles as business and community leaders. If we set ambitious goals for education and raise the graduation rates of students of color to the levels of white students by the year 2020, and if these new graduates go on to postsecondary education at similar rates, the potential increase in personal income would add more than $319 billion to the American economy.(ii)
Our nation's long-term economic health requires structural reforms to public education. U.S. education policy must change now, and a prime opportunity exists through the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act. A full NCLB reauthorization process during the 111th Congress is necessary to guarantee students of color and youth from low-income neighborhoods access to a high-quality high school education that prepares them for college and the workplace. It is critical that we maintain our focus on improving educational opportunities for all students, or we risk long-term economic decline and the creation of a permanent underclass.
CHSE is a coalition of leading civil rights organizations representing communities of color that is focused on high school education reform. Members include the National Urban League, National Council of La Raza, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Leadership Conference on Civil Rights Education Fund, Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, League of United Latin American Citizens, National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials Educational Fund, Alliance for Excellent Education, National Indian Education Association, and Southeast Asia Resource Action Center.
CHSE is a special project of Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors.
Saturday, February 14, 2009
Standardized testing leaves collateral damage
by John Young, WACO TRIBUNE-HERALD
Friday, February 13, 2009
It shouldn't take a Ph.D like David Berliner to tell us what's wrong with the way we do accountability in schools. He sees parallels in baseball, too, and he's no Joe Dimaggio.
Sporting analogy: When you put too much emphasis on home runs, he points out, you strike out more.
When you put too much emphasis on anything at the exclusion of other things, players adjust in ways that make them one-dimensional.
Berliner isn't an expert on baseball. A regents' professor at Arizona State University, he is an expert on education. With University of Texas-San Antonio professor Sharon Nichols, he wrote "Collateral Damage: How High-Stakes Testing Corrupts American Education."
Berliner recently spoke at Baylor University, his theme being how high-stakes testing makes America less competitive.
"Any time you invest a lot of value in an outcome measure you get a corruption of the measure," said Berliner, in a true academician's phrasing.
Texas being a proving ground for high-stakes testing and the federal No Child Left Behind law, it's notable that its schools have become poster children for "gaming the system to lie," Berliner said.
This includes not just outright cheating, but any number of maneuvers to make sure low-achievers aren't tested.
Beyond that is the problem of "narrowing the curriculum" to meet the task of passing a test on core subjects.
In Texas and across the country, we've seen schools with low math scores become slaves to computation at the exclusion of everything else.
"If you are going to gauge a school based on a test, then you're going to prepare kids for the test," he said.
Yeah, we need a Ph.D. to tell us this. Even Berliner sees the absurdity therein.
"What you get is really boring curriculum heavily favoring reading and math, and a drop in (emphasis of) almost everything else" — recess, music, arts, social studies, science.
Berliner said this problem is most pronounced in urban schools with more than their share of poverty cases, and with low-low test scores.
For many students in those situations, education is drained of its Technicolor in favor of dry work sheets and test-based drills.
Once again, it shouldn't take a Ph.D. to tell us this, but:
"Anyone who looks at the future of the American work force knows it needs to be more adaptable than it is today. We're developing a curriculum that's very narrow, a one-size-fits all approach.
"Instead, we need a broad approach, one that's wide so we have lots people who can adjust quickly when (economic) shifts happen."
Success demands that schools emphasize such traits as creativity, collaboration and problem-solving, he said.
Back to Berliner's warning about a too-boring curriculum. Some traditionalists would consider that a weak complaint of the "touchy-feely" crowd that doesn't want to crack the whip.
Well, Berliner cites a study in which 47 percent of those who dropped out cited boredom as the reason. It wasn't that they couldn't do the work. It was that they didn't see any reason.
I know that the martial-law crowd can't understand this, but: You know, schools ought to give children a reason to want to learn — other than passing a test.
It doesn't take a graduate degree to see that we need to stop examining our measuring cups and examine what we're putting in them. One idea would be to treat teachers as educators and not as vessels.
What you emphasize you'll get, or at least lunging efforts at it. In the age of test-driven "accountability," we are getting training and conditioning, but not education.
jyoung@wacotrib.com
Friday, February 13, 2009
It shouldn't take a Ph.D like David Berliner to tell us what's wrong with the way we do accountability in schools. He sees parallels in baseball, too, and he's no Joe Dimaggio.
Sporting analogy: When you put too much emphasis on home runs, he points out, you strike out more.
When you put too much emphasis on anything at the exclusion of other things, players adjust in ways that make them one-dimensional.
Berliner isn't an expert on baseball. A regents' professor at Arizona State University, he is an expert on education. With University of Texas-San Antonio professor Sharon Nichols, he wrote "Collateral Damage: How High-Stakes Testing Corrupts American Education."
Berliner recently spoke at Baylor University, his theme being how high-stakes testing makes America less competitive.
"Any time you invest a lot of value in an outcome measure you get a corruption of the measure," said Berliner, in a true academician's phrasing.
Texas being a proving ground for high-stakes testing and the federal No Child Left Behind law, it's notable that its schools have become poster children for "gaming the system to lie," Berliner said.
This includes not just outright cheating, but any number of maneuvers to make sure low-achievers aren't tested.
Beyond that is the problem of "narrowing the curriculum" to meet the task of passing a test on core subjects.
In Texas and across the country, we've seen schools with low math scores become slaves to computation at the exclusion of everything else.
"If you are going to gauge a school based on a test, then you're going to prepare kids for the test," he said.
Yeah, we need a Ph.D. to tell us this. Even Berliner sees the absurdity therein.
"What you get is really boring curriculum heavily favoring reading and math, and a drop in (emphasis of) almost everything else" — recess, music, arts, social studies, science.
Berliner said this problem is most pronounced in urban schools with more than their share of poverty cases, and with low-low test scores.
For many students in those situations, education is drained of its Technicolor in favor of dry work sheets and test-based drills.
Once again, it shouldn't take a Ph.D. to tell us this, but:
"Anyone who looks at the future of the American work force knows it needs to be more adaptable than it is today. We're developing a curriculum that's very narrow, a one-size-fits all approach.
"Instead, we need a broad approach, one that's wide so we have lots people who can adjust quickly when (economic) shifts happen."
Success demands that schools emphasize such traits as creativity, collaboration and problem-solving, he said.
Back to Berliner's warning about a too-boring curriculum. Some traditionalists would consider that a weak complaint of the "touchy-feely" crowd that doesn't want to crack the whip.
Well, Berliner cites a study in which 47 percent of those who dropped out cited boredom as the reason. It wasn't that they couldn't do the work. It was that they didn't see any reason.
I know that the martial-law crowd can't understand this, but: You know, schools ought to give children a reason to want to learn — other than passing a test.
It doesn't take a graduate degree to see that we need to stop examining our measuring cups and examine what we're putting in them. One idea would be to treat teachers as educators and not as vessels.
What you emphasize you'll get, or at least lunging efforts at it. In the age of test-driven "accountability," we are getting training and conditioning, but not education.
jyoung@wacotrib.com
Thursday, February 12, 2009
The challenges of a “giant, young Hispanic population”
The challenges of a “giant, young Hispanic population”
By Juan Castillo | Tuesday, January 27, 2009, 12:00 PM
In sports, coaches are fond of saying that statistics are for losers. In government, numbers carry considerable weight, often driving policy-making decisions. Whether the wealth of data to emerge from City Demographer Ryan Robinson’s analysis of socioeconomic indicators for Hispanics in Austin will lead to new government policies remains to be seen. But even Robinson, who cranks out numbers for a living, thinks some of the findings are stunning. Like this one: Hispanic youths now comprise 50 percent of all persons younger than 18 in Austin. That Austin’s soaring Hispanic population is young has been known for some time, but the new census estimates that form the basis of Robinson’s analysis convey a greater sense of urgency. “If you have a giant, young Hispanic population here, you need to educate them, prepare them to be fully integrated into the workforce and to participate economically,” Robinson said. “If you don’t, you’re selling the city as a whole short.”
Robinson prepared his 35-page analysis for the city’s new Hispanic Quality of Life Initiative, which will explore whether socioeconomic gaps exist for Latinos in Austin, and what if anything the city can do.
http://alt.coxnewsweb.com/shared-blogs/austin/somosaustin/upload/2009/01/in_sports_coaches_are_fond/Hispanic_Quality_of_Life_Analysis.pdf
By Juan Castillo | Tuesday, January 27, 2009, 12:00 PM
In sports, coaches are fond of saying that statistics are for losers. In government, numbers carry considerable weight, often driving policy-making decisions. Whether the wealth of data to emerge from City Demographer Ryan Robinson’s analysis of socioeconomic indicators for Hispanics in Austin will lead to new government policies remains to be seen. But even Robinson, who cranks out numbers for a living, thinks some of the findings are stunning. Like this one: Hispanic youths now comprise 50 percent of all persons younger than 18 in Austin. That Austin’s soaring Hispanic population is young has been known for some time, but the new census estimates that form the basis of Robinson’s analysis convey a greater sense of urgency. “If you have a giant, young Hispanic population here, you need to educate them, prepare them to be fully integrated into the workforce and to participate economically,” Robinson said. “If you don’t, you’re selling the city as a whole short.”
Robinson prepared his 35-page analysis for the city’s new Hispanic Quality of Life Initiative, which will explore whether socioeconomic gaps exist for Latinos in Austin, and what if anything the city can do.
http://alt.coxnewsweb.com/shared-blogs/austin/somosaustin/upload/2009/01/in_sports_coaches_are_fond/Hispanic_Quality_of_Life_Analysis.pdf
Wednesday, February 11, 2009
Saavedra’s big regret? HISD’s dropout rate
By JENNIFER RADCLIFFE | Houston Chronicle
Feb. 8, 2009
The embarrassing high school dropout problem that HISD Superintendent Abelardo Saavedra inherited and that he fought to rectify will almost certainly be passed along to his successor, the outgoing schools chief acknowledges.
In a one-on-one interview after last week’s surprise announcement that he will step down by spring 2010, Saavedra claimed significant victories in raising test scores, narrowing the achievement gap and installing an aggressive performance pay system for teachers. But Saavedra also acknowledged that his inability to stem Houston’s dropout problem after nearly five years on the job is his biggest disappointment.
“We’ve saved a lot, but the flow is so great, we’re barely make a dent,” Saavedra said Friday, two days after he announced his plan to resign. “That’s probably the major regret I would have.”
Saavedra’s first major initiative as interim superintendent in 2004 aimed to coax dropouts back to campus. He spearheaded the now annual and highly publicized Reach Out to Dropouts Walk. He hired 10 specialists who work full time convincing students that they should stay in school.
Still, as many as 40 percent of Houston Independent School District freshmen don’t graduate on time.
School board President Larry Marshall agreed that HISD’s next superintendent needs to make major strides at its high schools.
“We have go to refocus at the secondary level,” he said. “We need a new vision for the district. He gave it a shot. He gave us five years, and five years is a long time.”
As he works until the school board finds his replacement, Saavedra said he will look for ways to help struggling students keep up with their peers.
The most common characteristic shared by HISD dropouts is that they’re older than their classmates by an average of 1.6 years. Rather than making fifth-graders who failed math repeat all subject areas, Saavedra suggested, HISD needs to offer such children extra help in math while promoting them to the next grade level with their peers.
The district’s push to create a college-bound culture may have impeded progress with dropouts, he said.
“It’s a question of so many hours in the day and what you can do,” said Saavedra, who admits to regularly clocking 14-hour workdays.
Saavedra contends that dropout prevention and college-readiness efforts compliment one another. He has emphasized programs that allow students to simultaneously earn high school and college credit and encouraged the creation of several unique high schools, including a campus for new immigrants and an international school.
“When you lift the ceiling, the floor comes up with it,” Saavedra said.
HISD leaders tout huge increases in the number of students who are considered college-ready based on their Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills scores.
In 2008, 38 percent of students scored high enough on both the reading and math tests to earn that designation, up from 17 percent in 2006.
Parents express thanks
In many cases, HISD’s black and Hispanic students pulled ahead of their peers statewide.
That progress hasn’t gone unnoticed by parents and community members.
“Dr. Saavedra and actually the school board of the last five or 10 years deserve thanks from the Houston community because of the academic achievement in HISD,” said West University parent Burt Ballanfant.
Saavedra aggressively expanded full-day prekindergarten and beefed up science instruction at elementary schools with an emphasis on teacher training and by installing science labs at every elementary school. He trimmed the district’s mid-level management and reorganized HISD’s career and technology department.
Like administrators across the nation, though, Saavedra has struggled with high school reform.
“From the ages of 4 to 11, over the last five years, the Houston Independent School District has not only held their own, but probably moved forward to be competitive with like districts,” said Scott Van Beck, a former Westside High School principal and regional superintendent who now heads a non-profit school reform group called Houston A+ Challenge. “From ages 12 and forward, I think that is for the next superintendent the big challenge.”
Legacy of bonus pay
Van Beck and others expect incentive pay to become Saavedra’s legacy. Last month, HISD paid out a record $31.4 million in bonuses, including awards of up to $8,580 to teachers who improved student test scores.
While HISD leaders credit incentive pay with increasing student achievement and fostering a college-bound culture, Van Beck said there is no definitive proof that scores wouldn’t have risen without such a pay plan in place.
Districts nationwide, however, are following HISD’s lead to reward teacher performance.
“It’s an incomplete puzzle,” Van Beck said. “But at least he has started that conversation. I think that’s where his legacy is going to be.”
University of Houston professor Augustina Reyes, a former HISD board member, credited Saavedra for taking the heat as details of the controversial performance pay plan were hammered out and as he championed an $805 million bond that was strongly opposed by the black community.
“This is probably the first superintendent that I know in Houston ISD who sees kids first,” she said. “He brought HISD out of the dark ages and out of the dark ages where all we did was play games with how you hide the scores, how you hide the dropout rates.”
When Saavedra took over, HISD was still reeling from a national embarrassment caused by the disclosure that previous administrators had manipulated figures to make the dropout rate appear much lower than it really was.
Saavedra said that aside from his lack of progress on the dropout rate, he has few regrets. He doubts he’d even change how he handled a number of proposals — including tax-rate increases, the bond, school closures and magnet school cuts — that upset trustees and community members.
“There is a balance in the urgency of change and better opportunities for kids with how long you take to get buy in,” he said. “I erred on the side of getting results as quickly as possible.”
Saavedra said he knows without a doubt that his next job will not be in politics. Meanwhile, he remains focused on the task at hand: lowering the dropout rate.
“Frankly, it’s not over,” he said. “I’ve got a year left. That will be one of the things I really will focus on.”
SAAVEDRA’S TRACK RECORD
Here are some of the highlights from Saavedra’s four years as superintendent:
SAT: The percentage of students taking the test increased from 65 percent in 2004 to 74 percent in 2007. The mean score increased from 934 to 953 in that span.
Community : $16.9 million was raised from community partners since 2004
Four-year high school completion rate: HISD’s rate fell from 75.8 percent in 2004 to 64.3 percent in 2007.
Sources: HISD and Texas Education Agency
Feb. 8, 2009
The embarrassing high school dropout problem that HISD Superintendent Abelardo Saavedra inherited and that he fought to rectify will almost certainly be passed along to his successor, the outgoing schools chief acknowledges.
In a one-on-one interview after last week’s surprise announcement that he will step down by spring 2010, Saavedra claimed significant victories in raising test scores, narrowing the achievement gap and installing an aggressive performance pay system for teachers. But Saavedra also acknowledged that his inability to stem Houston’s dropout problem after nearly five years on the job is his biggest disappointment.
“We’ve saved a lot, but the flow is so great, we’re barely make a dent,” Saavedra said Friday, two days after he announced his plan to resign. “That’s probably the major regret I would have.”
Saavedra’s first major initiative as interim superintendent in 2004 aimed to coax dropouts back to campus. He spearheaded the now annual and highly publicized Reach Out to Dropouts Walk. He hired 10 specialists who work full time convincing students that they should stay in school.
Still, as many as 40 percent of Houston Independent School District freshmen don’t graduate on time.
School board President Larry Marshall agreed that HISD’s next superintendent needs to make major strides at its high schools.
“We have go to refocus at the secondary level,” he said. “We need a new vision for the district. He gave it a shot. He gave us five years, and five years is a long time.”
As he works until the school board finds his replacement, Saavedra said he will look for ways to help struggling students keep up with their peers.
The most common characteristic shared by HISD dropouts is that they’re older than their classmates by an average of 1.6 years. Rather than making fifth-graders who failed math repeat all subject areas, Saavedra suggested, HISD needs to offer such children extra help in math while promoting them to the next grade level with their peers.
The district’s push to create a college-bound culture may have impeded progress with dropouts, he said.
“It’s a question of so many hours in the day and what you can do,” said Saavedra, who admits to regularly clocking 14-hour workdays.
Saavedra contends that dropout prevention and college-readiness efforts compliment one another. He has emphasized programs that allow students to simultaneously earn high school and college credit and encouraged the creation of several unique high schools, including a campus for new immigrants and an international school.
“When you lift the ceiling, the floor comes up with it,” Saavedra said.
HISD leaders tout huge increases in the number of students who are considered college-ready based on their Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills scores.
In 2008, 38 percent of students scored high enough on both the reading and math tests to earn that designation, up from 17 percent in 2006.
Parents express thanks
In many cases, HISD’s black and Hispanic students pulled ahead of their peers statewide.
That progress hasn’t gone unnoticed by parents and community members.
“Dr. Saavedra and actually the school board of the last five or 10 years deserve thanks from the Houston community because of the academic achievement in HISD,” said West University parent Burt Ballanfant.
Saavedra aggressively expanded full-day prekindergarten and beefed up science instruction at elementary schools with an emphasis on teacher training and by installing science labs at every elementary school. He trimmed the district’s mid-level management and reorganized HISD’s career and technology department.
Like administrators across the nation, though, Saavedra has struggled with high school reform.
“From the ages of 4 to 11, over the last five years, the Houston Independent School District has not only held their own, but probably moved forward to be competitive with like districts,” said Scott Van Beck, a former Westside High School principal and regional superintendent who now heads a non-profit school reform group called Houston A+ Challenge. “From ages 12 and forward, I think that is for the next superintendent the big challenge.”
Legacy of bonus pay
Van Beck and others expect incentive pay to become Saavedra’s legacy. Last month, HISD paid out a record $31.4 million in bonuses, including awards of up to $8,580 to teachers who improved student test scores.
While HISD leaders credit incentive pay with increasing student achievement and fostering a college-bound culture, Van Beck said there is no definitive proof that scores wouldn’t have risen without such a pay plan in place.
Districts nationwide, however, are following HISD’s lead to reward teacher performance.
“It’s an incomplete puzzle,” Van Beck said. “But at least he has started that conversation. I think that’s where his legacy is going to be.”
University of Houston professor Augustina Reyes, a former HISD board member, credited Saavedra for taking the heat as details of the controversial performance pay plan were hammered out and as he championed an $805 million bond that was strongly opposed by the black community.
“This is probably the first superintendent that I know in Houston ISD who sees kids first,” she said. “He brought HISD out of the dark ages and out of the dark ages where all we did was play games with how you hide the scores, how you hide the dropout rates.”
When Saavedra took over, HISD was still reeling from a national embarrassment caused by the disclosure that previous administrators had manipulated figures to make the dropout rate appear much lower than it really was.
Saavedra said that aside from his lack of progress on the dropout rate, he has few regrets. He doubts he’d even change how he handled a number of proposals — including tax-rate increases, the bond, school closures and magnet school cuts — that upset trustees and community members.
“There is a balance in the urgency of change and better opportunities for kids with how long you take to get buy in,” he said. “I erred on the side of getting results as quickly as possible.”
Saavedra said he knows without a doubt that his next job will not be in politics. Meanwhile, he remains focused on the task at hand: lowering the dropout rate.
“Frankly, it’s not over,” he said. “I’ve got a year left. That will be one of the things I really will focus on.”
SAAVEDRA’S TRACK RECORD
Here are some of the highlights from Saavedra’s four years as superintendent:
SAT: The percentage of students taking the test increased from 65 percent in 2004 to 74 percent in 2007. The mean score increased from 934 to 953 in that span.
Community : $16.9 million was raised from community partners since 2004
Four-year high school completion rate: HISD’s rate fell from 75.8 percent in 2004 to 64.3 percent in 2007.
Sources: HISD and Texas Education Agency
Monday, February 09, 2009
UT pick good news for excluded groups
I think that what this piece demonstrates is how arguments for inclusion are made. There's always a degree of mystery of how this happens from the outside looking in. One might be tempted to think that opportunities simply trickle down. The history of minority-majority relations demonstrates something else. On the one hand, you need good, qualified candidates. On the other, you need good politics that additionally may include (though certainly not always), persons from within who can do the advocating and make the arguments and in so doing, structure the outcomes they and others seek. Welcome to UT, Dr. Cigarroa.
-Angela
Web Posted: 12/20/2008
UT pick good news for excluded groups
by Carlos Guerra - Carlos Guerra
The Obama team has provided three weeks of great news for women and minorities, who have long complained about being systematically excluded from top leadership posts. In the next administration's highest levels will be five women, four blacks, three Hispanics and two Asian Americans.
Closer to home, the great news is that Francisco Cigarroa will be the next chancellor of the University of Texas System.
In a sense, the globally recognized pediatric and transplant surgeon has been preparing for this for most of his adult life.
But some doors didn't start opening for him — and others like him — until 2000, when the UT regents were looking for a new president of the UT Health Science Center in San Antonio. When Laredo businessman Tony Sánchez — one of two Latino UT regents at the time — learned about who was on the search committee, he said, “I became very alarmed.”
In a letter he fired off to the board's then-Chairman Don Evans, he detailed his concerns: “One glance at the makeup of the Presidential Search Advisory Committee ... convinced me that this institution, founded as the medical school of South Texas, will never — of its own accord — provide the opportunity for a Hispanic to become (its) president,” he wrote.
“In addition to the flagrant personal prejudice, (a) more subtle and effective institutional discrimination prevents inclusiveness through ... policies, guidelines, job descriptions and committee assignments.
“After almost 30 years, no Hispanic has earned a permanent seat on the UTHSCSA Executive Committee and none of the school deans are Hispanic,” he continued. “No qualified Hispanic has been found to head a department, and even non-health related executive positions seem barred to Hispanics (who) comprise 70 percent of the (center's) service area and over 90 percent of the population of its outreach efforts in the (border region).”
The regents' rules, he pointed out, dictated that the search committee be made up of two regents, two community leaders of the regents' choosing, two students, two presidents of other UT health science centers, three faculty members, one administrator, one alumnus and one “classified employee.”
As a result, the 14-person committee included only two Hispanics — the alumnus and the classified employee.
Shamed after the letter became public, Evans added more Latinos to the committee. And Cigarroa went from being a midlevel med school faculty member (where he had been denied several promotions) to becoming the nation's first Hispanic to head a medical school.
He wasn't exactly unqualified. The third-generation surgeon graduated from Yale and the UT Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, where he began to build his stellar credentials in the operating room. At Harvard's primary teaching hospital, he was chief surgery resident, and he became a fellow at Baltimore's Johns Hopkins Hospital.
But questions arose about Cigarroa's lack of administrative experience. These were answered after he took the helm in San Antonio and started overhauling the center's institutional culture with such changes as conducting deans meetings while making hospital rounds, expanding the center's reach into underserved border areas, and emphasizing academic medicine and original research.
For those who recall whenall Texas medical schools admitted fewer than a dozen Latinos students each year, it is encouraging that Cigarroa will now head a UT System where minorities are still significantly underrepresented among the 194,000 students and 81,000 employees. And his promotion is a hopeful sign that our state will better prepare a wider array of young Texans for the 21st-century challenges they will face.
And there are two lessons in Cigarroa's long journey: One is that nothing will change until people speak up. And the other is that there is no substitute for sterling qualifications.
cguerra@express-news.net
© 2009 San Antonio Express-News.
-Angela
Web Posted: 12/20/2008
UT pick good news for excluded groups
by Carlos Guerra - Carlos Guerra
The Obama team has provided three weeks of great news for women and minorities, who have long complained about being systematically excluded from top leadership posts. In the next administration's highest levels will be five women, four blacks, three Hispanics and two Asian Americans.
Closer to home, the great news is that Francisco Cigarroa will be the next chancellor of the University of Texas System.
In a sense, the globally recognized pediatric and transplant surgeon has been preparing for this for most of his adult life.
But some doors didn't start opening for him — and others like him — until 2000, when the UT regents were looking for a new president of the UT Health Science Center in San Antonio. When Laredo businessman Tony Sánchez — one of two Latino UT regents at the time — learned about who was on the search committee, he said, “I became very alarmed.”
In a letter he fired off to the board's then-Chairman Don Evans, he detailed his concerns: “One glance at the makeup of the Presidential Search Advisory Committee ... convinced me that this institution, founded as the medical school of South Texas, will never — of its own accord — provide the opportunity for a Hispanic to become (its) president,” he wrote.
“In addition to the flagrant personal prejudice, (a) more subtle and effective institutional discrimination prevents inclusiveness through ... policies, guidelines, job descriptions and committee assignments.
“After almost 30 years, no Hispanic has earned a permanent seat on the UTHSCSA Executive Committee and none of the school deans are Hispanic,” he continued. “No qualified Hispanic has been found to head a department, and even non-health related executive positions seem barred to Hispanics (who) comprise 70 percent of the (center's) service area and over 90 percent of the population of its outreach efforts in the (border region).”
The regents' rules, he pointed out, dictated that the search committee be made up of two regents, two community leaders of the regents' choosing, two students, two presidents of other UT health science centers, three faculty members, one administrator, one alumnus and one “classified employee.”
As a result, the 14-person committee included only two Hispanics — the alumnus and the classified employee.
Shamed after the letter became public, Evans added more Latinos to the committee. And Cigarroa went from being a midlevel med school faculty member (where he had been denied several promotions) to becoming the nation's first Hispanic to head a medical school.
He wasn't exactly unqualified. The third-generation surgeon graduated from Yale and the UT Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, where he began to build his stellar credentials in the operating room. At Harvard's primary teaching hospital, he was chief surgery resident, and he became a fellow at Baltimore's Johns Hopkins Hospital.
But questions arose about Cigarroa's lack of administrative experience. These were answered after he took the helm in San Antonio and started overhauling the center's institutional culture with such changes as conducting deans meetings while making hospital rounds, expanding the center's reach into underserved border areas, and emphasizing academic medicine and original research.
For those who recall whenall Texas medical schools admitted fewer than a dozen Latinos students each year, it is encouraging that Cigarroa will now head a UT System where minorities are still significantly underrepresented among the 194,000 students and 81,000 employees. And his promotion is a hopeful sign that our state will better prepare a wider array of young Texans for the 21st-century challenges they will face.
And there are two lessons in Cigarroa's long journey: One is that nothing will change until people speak up. And the other is that there is no substitute for sterling qualifications.
cguerra@express-news.net
© 2009 San Antonio Express-News.
Sunday, February 08, 2009
Proposed Changes to Texas' Accountability System by Former Sen. Bill Ratliff and the Raise Your Hand Intitiative
The Texas Star System: An Improvement Model For Public School Accountability, was presented to the Select Committee on Public School Accountability by Raise Your Hand Texas in Dallas on June 16, 2008.
http://www.raiseyourhandtexas.org/site/PageServer?pagename=program_starsystem
Download here [pdf] a report titled, "The Texas Star System: An Improvement Model For Public School Accountability.
http://www.raiseyourhandtexas.org/site/PageServer?pagename=program_starsystem
Download here [pdf] a report titled, "The Texas Star System: An Improvement Model For Public School Accountability.
Saturday, February 07, 2009
Response by Stephen Krashen to "What Arne Duncan thinks of NCLB"
Posted on US News website by Professor Emeritus Stephen Krashen in response to "What Arne Duncan thinks of
No Child Left Behind" Feb. 6:
Arne Duncan's view of what needs to be done (better tests, better
tracking systems, rigorous and uniform standards, earlier start,
better teachers) is based on the assumption that there is something
seriously wrong with American education.
The only thing wrong is poverty. When you control for the effects of
poverty, American children do quite well compared to children in other
countries. US schools with fewer than 25% of children in poverty
outscore all countries in the world in Math and Science (see Gerald
Bracey's column on the Huffington Post, July 22, 2007). US children
only fall below the international average when 75% of more of the
students in a school are children of poverty.
The obvious solution is to reduce poverty. When all children have
proper diets, are surrounded by good reading material, and have the
other advantages that children from high-income families have, our
schools will be considered the best in the world.
For a description of the devastating (but often reversible) effects
of hunger, see Gerald Coles: "Hunger, academic success, and the hard
bigotry of indifference" Rethinking Schools, vol 23, 2, 2008/2009.
Available at:
http://www.rethinkingschools.org/archive/23_02/hung232.shtml
No Child Left Behind" Feb. 6:
Arne Duncan's view of what needs to be done (better tests, better
tracking systems, rigorous and uniform standards, earlier start,
better teachers) is based on the assumption that there is something
seriously wrong with American education.
The only thing wrong is poverty. When you control for the effects of
poverty, American children do quite well compared to children in other
countries. US schools with fewer than 25% of children in poverty
outscore all countries in the world in Math and Science (see Gerald
Bracey's column on the Huffington Post, July 22, 2007). US children
only fall below the international average when 75% of more of the
students in a school are children of poverty.
The obvious solution is to reduce poverty. When all children have
proper diets, are surrounded by good reading material, and have the
other advantages that children from high-income families have, our
schools will be considered the best in the world.
For a description of the devastating (but often reversible) effects
of hunger, see Gerald Coles: "Hunger, academic success, and the hard
bigotry of indifference" Rethinking Schools, vol 23, 2, 2008/2009.
Available at:
http://www.rethinkingschools.org/archive/23_02/hung232.shtml
Study links children's lead levels, SAT scores
This is scary and unfortunate.
Angela
Study links children's lead levels, SAT scores
By Greg Toppo, USA TODAY
Could a decades-long drop in the concentration of lead in children's blood help explain rising SAT scores?
A Virginia economist who pored over years of national data says there's an "incredibly strong" correlation, which adds to a growing body of research on lead's harmful effects.
TOXIC SCHOOLS: Health risks stack up for students
DATABASE: Search for air quality at your school
The findings, to be published this winter in the journal Environmental Research, suggest that from 1953 to 2003, the fall and rise of the average SAT math and verbal score has tracked the rise and fall of blood lead levels so closely that half of the change in scores over 50 years, and possibly more, probably is the result of lead, says economist Rick Nevin.
He controlled for rising numbers of students taking SAT prep courses and for rising numbers of students who speak a foreign language at home — that would depress verbal scores.
Nevin estimates that lead explains 45% of the historic variation in verbal scores and 65% in math scores.
His analysis compared national snapshots of children's blood-lead test results with SAT scores 17 years later. As lead levels dropped, scores rose — and vice versa.
He also found that over a 56-year time frame, the drop in lead levels tracked consistently with decreases in mental retardation 12 years later.
The average amount of lead in children's blood dropped sharply in the 1970s and later, mostly because of a phaseout of leaded gasoline in the 1970s; at the same time, paint manufacturers phased out lead house paint.
Nevin made a splash a few years back with another provocative thesis: He found that unleaded gas probably did more to reduce crime in the 1990s than did any crime prevention strategy, such as higher concentrations of police on city streets.
Over 30 years, a large body of evidence has shown that lead is a potent neurotoxin, affecting IQ, impulsivity and other factors that determine academic achievement. Nevin's study is the first to tie lead to national SAT scores.
Bob Schaeffer of FairTest, a non-profit watchdog that tracks testing, says Nevin's study "makes a very strong case" for the role lead plays — and suggests how non-school factors affect poor kids' achievement.
"It shows that these kids are mentally handicapped from the start," and criticizing the kids and their teachers isn't going to solve the problem, Schaeffer says.
The study, which is planned for an upcoming Environmental Research issue, is available here.
Copyright 2008 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Co. Inc.
Angela
Study links children's lead levels, SAT scores
By Greg Toppo, USA TODAY
Could a decades-long drop in the concentration of lead in children's blood help explain rising SAT scores?
A Virginia economist who pored over years of national data says there's an "incredibly strong" correlation, which adds to a growing body of research on lead's harmful effects.
TOXIC SCHOOLS: Health risks stack up for students
DATABASE: Search for air quality at your school
The findings, to be published this winter in the journal Environmental Research, suggest that from 1953 to 2003, the fall and rise of the average SAT math and verbal score has tracked the rise and fall of blood lead levels so closely that half of the change in scores over 50 years, and possibly more, probably is the result of lead, says economist Rick Nevin.
He controlled for rising numbers of students taking SAT prep courses and for rising numbers of students who speak a foreign language at home — that would depress verbal scores.
Nevin estimates that lead explains 45% of the historic variation in verbal scores and 65% in math scores.
His analysis compared national snapshots of children's blood-lead test results with SAT scores 17 years later. As lead levels dropped, scores rose — and vice versa.
He also found that over a 56-year time frame, the drop in lead levels tracked consistently with decreases in mental retardation 12 years later.
The average amount of lead in children's blood dropped sharply in the 1970s and later, mostly because of a phaseout of leaded gasoline in the 1970s; at the same time, paint manufacturers phased out lead house paint.
Nevin made a splash a few years back with another provocative thesis: He found that unleaded gas probably did more to reduce crime in the 1990s than did any crime prevention strategy, such as higher concentrations of police on city streets.
Over 30 years, a large body of evidence has shown that lead is a potent neurotoxin, affecting IQ, impulsivity and other factors that determine academic achievement. Nevin's study is the first to tie lead to national SAT scores.
Bob Schaeffer of FairTest, a non-profit watchdog that tracks testing, says Nevin's study "makes a very strong case" for the role lead plays — and suggests how non-school factors affect poor kids' achievement.
"It shows that these kids are mentally handicapped from the start," and criticizing the kids and their teachers isn't going to solve the problem, Schaeffer says.
The study, which is planned for an upcoming Environmental Research issue, is available here.
Copyright 2008 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Co. Inc.
High school diplomas should prepare students for future - which may or may not include college
Here's an editorial piece from today's Statesman. Pretty concerning if you ask me...
-Patricia
For me, a concern here is whether developing the other tracks will equate to large investments by the state of Texas producing resource-rich tracks. It also seems that it doesn't have to be mutually exclusive. You could have Voc-Tech tracks that also prepare students for college. Finally, stratification by race, class, and gender will be another hardly trivial consideration that should be taken into account should this move forward.
Plus generally, how many students really know at age 14 what they want to do for the rest of their lives? Very likely only a small minority. Lots and lots of children are late bloomers and so it's good to prepare for this type of student in a non-restrictive manner, and ideally, in a way that exposes them to a range of opportunities.
-Angela
High school diplomas should prepare students for future - which may or may not include college.
Thursday, February 05, 2009
Former Lt. Gov. Bill Ratliff asked this question during a recent discussion with us about public schools: Which is more difficult to find, a doctor or an electrician?
With that, Ratliff pointed out a glaring deficiency in Texas public education. Public schools aim at preparing all children for college and university courses that lead to careers in white-collar professions such as medicine, engineering, business, teaching, law, science, politics or high tech.
There is no doubt that public schools must prepare students for college. We live in an information age in which ideas and innovation are our most valuable commodities. Texas public schools are conveyor belts that move high school students into college preparatory diploma programs.
But that approach leaves very little room for fine arts, electives or any other field of study. And it ignores the need for workers to fill good-paying jobs as electricians, auto mechanics, plumbers, medical technicians, firefighters, police officers, carpenters and more recently, jobs in an emerging green energy sector.
Ratliff and former Texas Education Commissioner Mike Moses are lobbying the Legislature on behalf of Raise Your Hand Texas to secure changes for public schools that are relevant to today's job market. Should high school students pursuing a fine arts program be required to pass calculus? Or is that best suited for students pursuing science and math programs? What is best for students headed for community college or jobs directly after high school?
Relevancy is the driving force behind the Raise Your Hand proposal, which would create three paths to earning high school diplomas. It is a realistic approach the Legislature should adopt.
Under the proposal, students could choose a traditional college preparatory curriculum that includes four years of math, science, English and social studies (including history and economics). That would be similar to the current Recommended High School Program that requires students to pass upper-level math courses, including precalculus or calculus, physics and advanced science courses, and economics.
Currently, all incoming ninth-graders are steered to that curriculum no matter what their future plans. If Ratliff and Moses are successful, there would be two other pathways to earn a diploma in Texas public schools. One would be a college preparatory curriculum that emphasizes fine arts. The third would be a career and technical curriculum that would prepare students for community college or jobs upon graduation.
The proposal offers flexibility, and all programs would be rigorous. Parents and students would select the diploma program best for them. The cost to change the current high school diploma program would be minimal. However, the cost of not changing it could be enormous in two years when high school dropouts are counted.
The unwise decision to steer all students to the Recommended High School Program (with some exceptions) won't be fully felt for another two years, when those students are seniors. Texas should brace for a potentially huge spike in the number of students who drop out of school because they fail to pass calculus and advanced science courses.
Also, many students who do stay in school might be denied diplomas because they fail to pass advanced math or science exit-level exams. Certainly it is sensible and beneficial for students seeking careers in medicine and engineering to undergo such preparation. But for students who want a career in politics or those who want to become electricians, such courses are superfluous.
Multiple diploma pathways that are relevant to students as well as the job market make sense. The Legislature can — and should — lead in making that a reality.
-Patricia
For me, a concern here is whether developing the other tracks will equate to large investments by the state of Texas producing resource-rich tracks. It also seems that it doesn't have to be mutually exclusive. You could have Voc-Tech tracks that also prepare students for college. Finally, stratification by race, class, and gender will be another hardly trivial consideration that should be taken into account should this move forward.
Plus generally, how many students really know at age 14 what they want to do for the rest of their lives? Very likely only a small minority. Lots and lots of children are late bloomers and so it's good to prepare for this type of student in a non-restrictive manner, and ideally, in a way that exposes them to a range of opportunities.
-Angela
High school diplomas should prepare students for future - which may or may not include college.
Thursday, February 05, 2009
Former Lt. Gov. Bill Ratliff asked this question during a recent discussion with us about public schools: Which is more difficult to find, a doctor or an electrician?
With that, Ratliff pointed out a glaring deficiency in Texas public education. Public schools aim at preparing all children for college and university courses that lead to careers in white-collar professions such as medicine, engineering, business, teaching, law, science, politics or high tech.
There is no doubt that public schools must prepare students for college. We live in an information age in which ideas and innovation are our most valuable commodities. Texas public schools are conveyor belts that move high school students into college preparatory diploma programs.
But that approach leaves very little room for fine arts, electives or any other field of study. And it ignores the need for workers to fill good-paying jobs as electricians, auto mechanics, plumbers, medical technicians, firefighters, police officers, carpenters and more recently, jobs in an emerging green energy sector.
Ratliff and former Texas Education Commissioner Mike Moses are lobbying the Legislature on behalf of Raise Your Hand Texas to secure changes for public schools that are relevant to today's job market. Should high school students pursuing a fine arts program be required to pass calculus? Or is that best suited for students pursuing science and math programs? What is best for students headed for community college or jobs directly after high school?
Relevancy is the driving force behind the Raise Your Hand proposal, which would create three paths to earning high school diplomas. It is a realistic approach the Legislature should adopt.
Under the proposal, students could choose a traditional college preparatory curriculum that includes four years of math, science, English and social studies (including history and economics). That would be similar to the current Recommended High School Program that requires students to pass upper-level math courses, including precalculus or calculus, physics and advanced science courses, and economics.
Currently, all incoming ninth-graders are steered to that curriculum no matter what their future plans. If Ratliff and Moses are successful, there would be two other pathways to earn a diploma in Texas public schools. One would be a college preparatory curriculum that emphasizes fine arts. The third would be a career and technical curriculum that would prepare students for community college or jobs upon graduation.
The proposal offers flexibility, and all programs would be rigorous. Parents and students would select the diploma program best for them. The cost to change the current high school diploma program would be minimal. However, the cost of not changing it could be enormous in two years when high school dropouts are counted.
The unwise decision to steer all students to the Recommended High School Program (with some exceptions) won't be fully felt for another two years, when those students are seniors. Texas should brace for a potentially huge spike in the number of students who drop out of school because they fail to pass calculus and advanced science courses.
Also, many students who do stay in school might be denied diplomas because they fail to pass advanced math or science exit-level exams. Certainly it is sensible and beneficial for students seeking careers in medicine and engineering to undergo such preparation. But for students who want a career in politics or those who want to become electricians, such courses are superfluous.
Multiple diploma pathways that are relevant to students as well as the job market make sense. The Legislature can — and should — lead in making that a reality.
Friday, February 06, 2009
School vouchers for all under GOP bill
Parents would get $5,000, also could switch to different public institution. Democrats call idea a bait and switch.
By Laura Diamond, Mary Lou Pickel
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Tuesday, February 03, 2009
Georgia would be the first state to offer vouchers to all public school students under a Republican plan introduced in the state Senate on Monday.
The bill from Sen. Eric Johnson (R-Savannah) would allot parents about $5,000 in taxpayer money to use toward private school tuition. Senate Bill 90 also would allow parents to switch their children from one public school to another.
Georgia’s education ranking is “near the bottom,” Johnson said. While the bill is not a “silver bullet,” he said, “Georgia is a conservative state that understands the free market.”
Voucher supporters say parents have the right to choose where their children attend class and that competition from private schools will make public schools stronger.
But public school groups have fought vouchers, saying lawmakers should fix struggling public schools rather than send taxpayer money to private schools.
Democrats quickly attacked Johnson’s bill and described it as a threat to public schools.
“Basically, it’s a bait and switch,” state Senate Minority Leader Robert Brown (D-Macon) said. “It really doesn’t address the problems in public schools. What you have to do is fund them more adequately.”
Under Johnson’s proposal, students who want to switch schools would have to qualify for admission at the new campus first and their parents would have to provide transportation, he said. Johnson estimated about 5 percent of parents would use the vouchers.
Johnson sponsored another voucher bill last year to allow children who attend failing public schools to go to other schools, but the measure stalled. He was more successful with a bill passed in 2007 to provide vouchers for students with disabilities.
Some public school advocates said the new voucher bill is unreasonable considering school systems face about $275 million in cuts next year.
“It is ludicrous to be trying to divert resources from our public schools,” said Tim Callahan, spokesman for the Professional Association of Georgia Educators, an advocacy group with about 75,000 members. “How much more battered down and beaten can they get?”
Nine states, including Georgia, offer vouchers, but those programs focus on low-income students or children with disabilities. Voters in Utah defeated a universal voucher referendum in 2007.
Johnson says Georgia has a chance of passing such a measure now because the state’s public education record is abysmal and people are sick of it. “We’re at the bottom year, after year, after year,” he said.
By Laura Diamond, Mary Lou Pickel
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Tuesday, February 03, 2009
Georgia would be the first state to offer vouchers to all public school students under a Republican plan introduced in the state Senate on Monday.
The bill from Sen. Eric Johnson (R-Savannah) would allot parents about $5,000 in taxpayer money to use toward private school tuition. Senate Bill 90 also would allow parents to switch their children from one public school to another.
Georgia’s education ranking is “near the bottom,” Johnson said. While the bill is not a “silver bullet,” he said, “Georgia is a conservative state that understands the free market.”
Voucher supporters say parents have the right to choose where their children attend class and that competition from private schools will make public schools stronger.
But public school groups have fought vouchers, saying lawmakers should fix struggling public schools rather than send taxpayer money to private schools.
Democrats quickly attacked Johnson’s bill and described it as a threat to public schools.
“Basically, it’s a bait and switch,” state Senate Minority Leader Robert Brown (D-Macon) said. “It really doesn’t address the problems in public schools. What you have to do is fund them more adequately.”
Under Johnson’s proposal, students who want to switch schools would have to qualify for admission at the new campus first and their parents would have to provide transportation, he said. Johnson estimated about 5 percent of parents would use the vouchers.
Johnson sponsored another voucher bill last year to allow children who attend failing public schools to go to other schools, but the measure stalled. He was more successful with a bill passed in 2007 to provide vouchers for students with disabilities.
Some public school advocates said the new voucher bill is unreasonable considering school systems face about $275 million in cuts next year.
“It is ludicrous to be trying to divert resources from our public schools,” said Tim Callahan, spokesman for the Professional Association of Georgia Educators, an advocacy group with about 75,000 members. “How much more battered down and beaten can they get?”
Nine states, including Georgia, offer vouchers, but those programs focus on low-income students or children with disabilities. Voters in Utah defeated a universal voucher referendum in 2007.
Johnson says Georgia has a chance of passing such a measure now because the state’s public education record is abysmal and people are sick of it. “We’re at the bottom year, after year, after year,” he said.
'Capturing Kids Hearts' is goal of more West Michigan school districts
Sometimes the most basic things can make the biggest impacts.
-Patricia
by Beth Loechler | The Grand Rapids Press
Monday February 02, 2009
Bobbie Fletcher, a science teacher at Chandler Woods Charter Academy in Belmont, is part of a growing trend at area districts where teachers and other school staff put an emphasis on "Capturing Kids' Hearts."
Fletcher greets each student at the door of her seventh-grade classroom. A smile. Eye contact. A firm handshake.
"Hey, Nicole."
"How ya doin', Trevor?"
"Megan, you have your hair pulled back. It almost threw me off."
Mostly, they respond with a handshake and a few words of their own.
"I'm noticing when they get haircuts or new outfits," Fletcher said. "If they are having a really bad day, you can see it on their little faces."
Fletcher believes that even the greatest teachers won't get through to students unless they establish a personal connection with each and every one.
"It's not just what we teach, it's how we teach," she said.
Ditto in Kentwood, where every teacher, bus driver, paraprofessional, administrator and board of education member has been similarly trained in "Capturing Kids' Hearts."
The Texas-based program also is used by teachers in Jenison, Thornapple Kellogg, several National Heritage Academy charters and other area schools.
"I think we were falsely under the impression that if I'm just a master of my subject matter I'm a good teacher," said Kentwood Superintendent Scott Palczewski. "You need buy-in from students. If you have a relationship and know someone cares about you, you work harder. You don't want to disappoint them."
Teachers and students share good news at the beginning of each class period and then, when the bell rings again, they exit with a high-five or some words of inspiration.
In addition to the connections made through one-on-one contact, students sign "social contracts" vowing to treat each other with respect. They learn to "self-manage" their behavior and remind their friends to do the same, Fletcher said.
Put down a classmate and you'll quite likely be "fouled," which means you'll have to say two nice things for every negative one uttered. If a friend flashes you a thumbs-up signal, that means you're not following directions and need to get back on track.
"We check each other so the teacher doesn't have to tell us," said Kevin Nguyen, a seventh grader at Chandler Woods. "It makes our class more bonded," added classmate Abby Carlson.
The difference has been dramatic at Townline Elementary in Kentwood, where teachers were trained last summer, said Principal Karen Friberg. She has seen an 85 percent reduction in the number of suspensions and detentions
"We're fostering stronger relationships, teacher to teacher, teacher to student and home to school," she said. "As a teacher you know these things, but we do them now as part of a daily routine. Then the children embrace it and start doing it with one another."
The cost of the three-day training is about $500 per teacher, according to the Capturing Kids' Hearts Web site. Districts have funded it both through grants and general fund dollars set aside for teacher training.
"In the beginning, it takes a lot of time, there's a lot of stopping," Fletcher recalled her introduction to the philosophy three years ago. "But after a while it starts to run smoother because students are checking and self-managing each other."
All this managing of behavior and boosting of self-esteem doesn't automatically make kids better learners, Palczewski said, but it does create a better environment for learning.
"If teachers aren't dealing with students in the hallway or referring them to the office, they can devote more time and energy to what they do best, which is teaching kids," he said.
-Patricia
by Beth Loechler | The Grand Rapids Press
Monday February 02, 2009
Bobbie Fletcher, a science teacher at Chandler Woods Charter Academy in Belmont, is part of a growing trend at area districts where teachers and other school staff put an emphasis on "Capturing Kids' Hearts."
Fletcher greets each student at the door of her seventh-grade classroom. A smile. Eye contact. A firm handshake.
"Hey, Nicole."
"How ya doin', Trevor?"
"Megan, you have your hair pulled back. It almost threw me off."
Mostly, they respond with a handshake and a few words of their own.
"I'm noticing when they get haircuts or new outfits," Fletcher said. "If they are having a really bad day, you can see it on their little faces."
Fletcher believes that even the greatest teachers won't get through to students unless they establish a personal connection with each and every one.
"It's not just what we teach, it's how we teach," she said.
Ditto in Kentwood, where every teacher, bus driver, paraprofessional, administrator and board of education member has been similarly trained in "Capturing Kids' Hearts."
The Texas-based program also is used by teachers in Jenison, Thornapple Kellogg, several National Heritage Academy charters and other area schools.
"I think we were falsely under the impression that if I'm just a master of my subject matter I'm a good teacher," said Kentwood Superintendent Scott Palczewski. "You need buy-in from students. If you have a relationship and know someone cares about you, you work harder. You don't want to disappoint them."
Teachers and students share good news at the beginning of each class period and then, when the bell rings again, they exit with a high-five or some words of inspiration.
In addition to the connections made through one-on-one contact, students sign "social contracts" vowing to treat each other with respect. They learn to "self-manage" their behavior and remind their friends to do the same, Fletcher said.
Put down a classmate and you'll quite likely be "fouled," which means you'll have to say two nice things for every negative one uttered. If a friend flashes you a thumbs-up signal, that means you're not following directions and need to get back on track.
"We check each other so the teacher doesn't have to tell us," said Kevin Nguyen, a seventh grader at Chandler Woods. "It makes our class more bonded," added classmate Abby Carlson.
The difference has been dramatic at Townline Elementary in Kentwood, where teachers were trained last summer, said Principal Karen Friberg. She has seen an 85 percent reduction in the number of suspensions and detentions
"We're fostering stronger relationships, teacher to teacher, teacher to student and home to school," she said. "As a teacher you know these things, but we do them now as part of a daily routine. Then the children embrace it and start doing it with one another."
The cost of the three-day training is about $500 per teacher, according to the Capturing Kids' Hearts Web site. Districts have funded it both through grants and general fund dollars set aside for teacher training.
"In the beginning, it takes a lot of time, there's a lot of stopping," Fletcher recalled her introduction to the philosophy three years ago. "But after a while it starts to run smoother because students are checking and self-managing each other."
All this managing of behavior and boosting of self-esteem doesn't automatically make kids better learners, Palczewski said, but it does create a better environment for learning.
"If teachers aren't dealing with students in the hallway or referring them to the office, they can devote more time and energy to what they do best, which is teaching kids," he said.
Overhaul of bilingual education system delayed
The Associated Press
Feb. 5, 2009
McALLEN, Texas — A federal appeals court has delayed an overhaul of bilingual and English-as-a-second-language programs in Texas schools.
Last year, U.S. District Judge William Wayne Justice had ruled that Texas schools had failed middle and high school students with limited English. He ordered Texas to submit proposals for a new way of tracking and educating those students by Jan. 31.
But the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans, responding to a requested delay from the state, ruled last week that "a wide variety of concerns including funding, personnel changes and legislative authority" must be addressed first.
"This gives the Legislature a chance to take a look at any laws they might want to pass to address the issue before we're forced to make decisions," Texas Education Agency spokeswoman Suzanne Marchman told The McAllen Monitor.
Originally, the new system of educating the estimated 140,000 students was supposed to be implemented for the 2009-2010 school year.
But the appellate panel said, "If (the state's) failure is as severe as the district court has described, (it) will need to create a new plan for monitoring over 1,000 school districts in Texas and a new language program for secondary students in those districts."
The delay disappointed David Hinojosa, an attorney whose lawsuit against the state spurred the original court order.
"Texas has a monitoring issue that allows thousands and thousands of failing students to fall through the cracks," Hinojosa said. "Unless things change, they'll continue to be lost in a system that fails them."
Texas students receive bilingual education through sixth grade then switch to ESL classes, but the state lacks clear standards to evaluating the ESL programs.
State Sen. Judith Zaffirini, D-Laredo has filed a bill that would require the state to produce data on ESL students at a campus level, reporting high school and middle school dropout rates separately. It would also require school districts with consistently underperforming limited-English students to submit a detailed improvement plan.
Feb. 5, 2009
McALLEN, Texas — A federal appeals court has delayed an overhaul of bilingual and English-as-a-second-language programs in Texas schools.
Last year, U.S. District Judge William Wayne Justice had ruled that Texas schools had failed middle and high school students with limited English. He ordered Texas to submit proposals for a new way of tracking and educating those students by Jan. 31.
But the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans, responding to a requested delay from the state, ruled last week that "a wide variety of concerns including funding, personnel changes and legislative authority" must be addressed first.
"This gives the Legislature a chance to take a look at any laws they might want to pass to address the issue before we're forced to make decisions," Texas Education Agency spokeswoman Suzanne Marchman told The McAllen Monitor.
Originally, the new system of educating the estimated 140,000 students was supposed to be implemented for the 2009-2010 school year.
But the appellate panel said, "If (the state's) failure is as severe as the district court has described, (it) will need to create a new plan for monitoring over 1,000 school districts in Texas and a new language program for secondary students in those districts."
The delay disappointed David Hinojosa, an attorney whose lawsuit against the state spurred the original court order.
"Texas has a monitoring issue that allows thousands and thousands of failing students to fall through the cracks," Hinojosa said. "Unless things change, they'll continue to be lost in a system that fails them."
Texas students receive bilingual education through sixth grade then switch to ESL classes, but the state lacks clear standards to evaluating the ESL programs.
State Sen. Judith Zaffirini, D-Laredo has filed a bill that would require the state to produce data on ESL students at a campus level, reporting high school and middle school dropout rates separately. It would also require school districts with consistently underperforming limited-English students to submit a detailed improvement plan.
Immigration Reform Debate Must Regain a Moral Compass
New America Media, Commentary,
Roberto Lovato
Jan 15, 2009
NEW YORK-The buzz filling Blackberrys, busy halls and spacious deal-making rooms in Washington appears to signal that spring arrived early this year for immigrants. In the last week alone, several prominent figures-outgoing President Bush, incoming President Obama, Mexican President Calderón, Los Angeles Cardinal Mahoney, to name a few-have discussed the possibility of comprehensive immigration reform. And, as in the previous failed attempts at reform in 2006 and 2007, legalization for the more than 12 million undocumented among us occupies the center of forums, speeches and other public statements of Democratic and civic leaders in the beltway.
"Immigrants must be brought out of the shadows so they can fully contribute to our nation's future economic and social well-being," declared Archbishop Mahoney during a recent teleconference.
While laudable in its intent, the legalization-centered approach of Mahoney and others may not be the best way to deal with the tragic legacy of failed immigration reform: spikes in anti-immigrant, anti-Latino hate crimes, deaths in decrepit immigrant prisons, thousands of families separated, children and families terrorized by heavily armed Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents raiding their homes.
These efforts are inadequate because, contrary to the new Washington consensus on immigration, the greatest single need in immigration reform is not legalization. Rather, what is most needed is moral imagination.
The predominance of the "practical" considerations - "immigrants are good for the economy," "we need tough and smart enforcement," etc.- framing the arguments in favor of comprehensive reform should be balanced by a simple, but now elusive fact that smashes any of the discursive frames prevailing on either side of the immigration debate: undocumented immigrants are first and foremost human beings whose lives are as sacred as that of any other being.
Although all advocates surely believe this, not all voice it as much as they used to.
Thankfully, the possibilities of the political moment reflected in the election of Barack Obama and a new, more Democratic Congress offer us the best opportunity to return morality to the center of an immigration debate that has reached dangerous levels of absurdity, if the spate of murders of immigrants here in "liberal" New York and other cities are any indicator.
Although Mahoney, Bush and other backers of immigration reform have included some moral arguments as part of their case, the Washington, D.C., realpolitik of the past decade has pushed moral considerations into the shadow of the legalization-centered approach. Consider, for example, how Mahoney, Bush and other backers of the failed McCain-Kennedy immigration reform package of 2006 to 2007, were willing to "trade off" the more than 700 pages of punitive immigration policy-increased incarceration, deportation, militarization of the border-for less than 100 pages of punitive approaches to legalization contained in the bill.
While morality cannot be legislated, moral considerations can and must be part of immigration legislation. This is the way it was before the mid-1990s, the period when Washington decided to de-emphasize moral arguments in favor of the realpolitikal legalization approach provided by high-powered pollsters and public relations consultants. This was when the now familiar immigration reform jargon-"smart and tough," "practical" and "comprehensive"-entered our national discourse on immigration reform. I still remember how uncomfortable I felt during teleconferences organized by the National Council of La Raza (NCLR), the National Immigration Forum (NIF) and other Washington groups at the time. Hearing pollsters and advocates tell us, "Moral arguments don't work with the voters," made me nervous. Hearing them then call for "necessary tradeoffs" (code for accepting even more punitive immigration policies in exchange for legalization) as part of "comprehensive immigration reform" scared me.
Then-after the failure of immigration reform in 2006 and 2007-NCLR, NIF and other members of the Coalition for Comprehensive Immigration Reform produced a confidential report, "Winning The Immigration Debate," in January 2008 advising Democratic candidates to adopt a "get tough" immigration message. This message made me wonder if some were blind to the anti-immigrant violence infecting the cultural climate like a virus. The report calls for a message that "places the focus where voters want it, on what's best for the United States, not what we can/should do for illegal immigrants."
It made me realize how far we had strayed from the halcyon days when moral frames of the immigration debate prevailed among most advocates.
While the responsibility for the surge in anti-immigrant hatred, violence and even murder goes to the GOP, right-leaning Democrats, right-wing media personalities and well-funded hate groups like the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) and NumbersUSA, many of us in the advocate community must come to grips with a disconcerting fact: We allowed the humanizing and protective shield of morality to be eviscerated from the discussion about human beings who happen to be immigrants.
There's no malicious intent behind the political strategy of the "get tough and smart" approach to immigration reform. But it is problematic that, with few exceptions, none of the high-profile advocates of immigration reform has publicly admitted any errors of judgment with regard to either accepting punitive policies or enabling the evisceration of the moral frame from the immigration debate.
Rather than point fingers after the fact, it is best to put political energy and resources into doing for detention, raids and other immigration policies what many advocates are already doing around detention and torture in Guantanamo: reigniting the moral imagination that must inform the debate.
Such an approach to immigration reform will do much to address what is now a deep cultural problem in a country that has come dangerously close to normalizing hatred of immigrants in its media, in its legislatures and in its streets. If we have learned anything from the civil rights struggle we are about to commemorate on Martin Luther King, Jr. day, it is that sometimes we have to go against what pundits and pollsters say and simply do what is right.
--
Roberto Lovato
Jan 15, 2009
NEW YORK-The buzz filling Blackberrys, busy halls and spacious deal-making rooms in Washington appears to signal that spring arrived early this year for immigrants. In the last week alone, several prominent figures-outgoing President Bush, incoming President Obama, Mexican President Calderón, Los Angeles Cardinal Mahoney, to name a few-have discussed the possibility of comprehensive immigration reform. And, as in the previous failed attempts at reform in 2006 and 2007, legalization for the more than 12 million undocumented among us occupies the center of forums, speeches and other public statements of Democratic and civic leaders in the beltway.
"Immigrants must be brought out of the shadows so they can fully contribute to our nation's future economic and social well-being," declared Archbishop Mahoney during a recent teleconference.
While laudable in its intent, the legalization-centered approach of Mahoney and others may not be the best way to deal with the tragic legacy of failed immigration reform: spikes in anti-immigrant, anti-Latino hate crimes, deaths in decrepit immigrant prisons, thousands of families separated, children and families terrorized by heavily armed Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents raiding their homes.
These efforts are inadequate because, contrary to the new Washington consensus on immigration, the greatest single need in immigration reform is not legalization. Rather, what is most needed is moral imagination.
The predominance of the "practical" considerations - "immigrants are good for the economy," "we need tough and smart enforcement," etc.- framing the arguments in favor of comprehensive reform should be balanced by a simple, but now elusive fact that smashes any of the discursive frames prevailing on either side of the immigration debate: undocumented immigrants are first and foremost human beings whose lives are as sacred as that of any other being.
Although all advocates surely believe this, not all voice it as much as they used to.
Thankfully, the possibilities of the political moment reflected in the election of Barack Obama and a new, more Democratic Congress offer us the best opportunity to return morality to the center of an immigration debate that has reached dangerous levels of absurdity, if the spate of murders of immigrants here in "liberal" New York and other cities are any indicator.
Although Mahoney, Bush and other backers of immigration reform have included some moral arguments as part of their case, the Washington, D.C., realpolitik of the past decade has pushed moral considerations into the shadow of the legalization-centered approach. Consider, for example, how Mahoney, Bush and other backers of the failed McCain-Kennedy immigration reform package of 2006 to 2007, were willing to "trade off" the more than 700 pages of punitive immigration policy-increased incarceration, deportation, militarization of the border-for less than 100 pages of punitive approaches to legalization contained in the bill.
While morality cannot be legislated, moral considerations can and must be part of immigration legislation. This is the way it was before the mid-1990s, the period when Washington decided to de-emphasize moral arguments in favor of the realpolitikal legalization approach provided by high-powered pollsters and public relations consultants. This was when the now familiar immigration reform jargon-"smart and tough," "practical" and "comprehensive"-entered our national discourse on immigration reform. I still remember how uncomfortable I felt during teleconferences organized by the National Council of La Raza (NCLR), the National Immigration Forum (NIF) and other Washington groups at the time. Hearing pollsters and advocates tell us, "Moral arguments don't work with the voters," made me nervous. Hearing them then call for "necessary tradeoffs" (code for accepting even more punitive immigration policies in exchange for legalization) as part of "comprehensive immigration reform" scared me.
Then-after the failure of immigration reform in 2006 and 2007-NCLR, NIF and other members of the Coalition for Comprehensive Immigration Reform produced a confidential report, "Winning The Immigration Debate," in January 2008 advising Democratic candidates to adopt a "get tough" immigration message. This message made me wonder if some were blind to the anti-immigrant violence infecting the cultural climate like a virus. The report calls for a message that "places the focus where voters want it, on what's best for the United States, not what we can/should do for illegal immigrants."
It made me realize how far we had strayed from the halcyon days when moral frames of the immigration debate prevailed among most advocates.
While the responsibility for the surge in anti-immigrant hatred, violence and even murder goes to the GOP, right-leaning Democrats, right-wing media personalities and well-funded hate groups like the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) and NumbersUSA, many of us in the advocate community must come to grips with a disconcerting fact: We allowed the humanizing and protective shield of morality to be eviscerated from the discussion about human beings who happen to be immigrants.
There's no malicious intent behind the political strategy of the "get tough and smart" approach to immigration reform. But it is problematic that, with few exceptions, none of the high-profile advocates of immigration reform has publicly admitted any errors of judgment with regard to either accepting punitive policies or enabling the evisceration of the moral frame from the immigration debate.
Rather than point fingers after the fact, it is best to put political energy and resources into doing for detention, raids and other immigration policies what many advocates are already doing around detention and torture in Guantanamo: reigniting the moral imagination that must inform the debate.
Such an approach to immigration reform will do much to address what is now a deep cultural problem in a country that has come dangerously close to normalizing hatred of immigrants in its media, in its legislatures and in its streets. If we have learned anything from the civil rights struggle we are about to commemorate on Martin Luther King, Jr. day, it is that sometimes we have to go against what pundits and pollsters say and simply do what is right.
--
U.S. school segregation on the rise: report
Check out the full report "Reviving the Goal of an Integrated Society: A 21st Century Challenge" by the CRP.
-Patricia
Wed Jan 14, 2009
By Matthew Bigg
ATLANTA (Reuters) - Black and Latino students are educated in U.S. schools that are increasingly segregated, said a report Wednesday that undercuts optimism about race in America surrounding the presidency of Barack Obama.
Blacks and Hispanics are more separate from white students than at any time since the civil rights movement and many of the schools they attend are struggling, said the report by the Civil Rights Project at the University of California.
A 2007 Supreme Court decision on voluntary desegregation is likely to intensify the trend because it reduces pressure on local authorities to promote school desegregation, said the report, which called on Obama to address the issue.
Obama, who will take the oath of office Tuesday, will be the county's first black president.
"It would be a tragedy if the country assumed from the Obama election that the problems of race have been solved, when many inequalities are actually deepening," said Gary Orfield, co-director of the Civil Rights Project.
Orfield said these trends were "the result of a systematic neglect of civil rights policy and related educational and community reforms for decades."
Part of the reason is demographic. As the percentage of white students shrinks -- they now make up 56 percent of the school population -- they are more integrated with students who are nonwhite.
Another factor is that residential segregation, on the rise in many parts of the country, increasingly determines the racial composition in schools in the absence of measures by education authorities to create and maintain integrated schools, Orfield said.
At the same time, Orfield said little had been done in recent years to prosecute violations of the Fair Housing Act, which forbids discrimination in the allocation of housing and was set up to foster equality in the housing market.
As a result of the trend, 39 percent of black students and 40 percent of students from the fast-growing Latino minority are increasingly isolated in schools in which there is little racial mixing, the report said.
Evidence that U.S. schools are becoming less racially integrated is politically charged because school integration was a basic goal of the civil rights movement led by Martin Luther King in the 1950s and 1960s.
That movement was in part triggered by a landmark Supreme Court decision in 1954 that decreed school segregation in the South was inherently unequal, did irreversible harm to black students and violated the constitution.
The report also found that the average black and Latino student is now in a school that has nearly 60 percent of students from families who are near or below the poverty line.
Schools marked by racial segregation and poverty tend to have weaker teaching forces, more student instability and a higher percentage of students from homes where English is not spoken -- factors that militate against academic achievement.
-Patricia
Wed Jan 14, 2009
By Matthew Bigg
ATLANTA (Reuters) - Black and Latino students are educated in U.S. schools that are increasingly segregated, said a report Wednesday that undercuts optimism about race in America surrounding the presidency of Barack Obama.
Blacks and Hispanics are more separate from white students than at any time since the civil rights movement and many of the schools they attend are struggling, said the report by the Civil Rights Project at the University of California.
A 2007 Supreme Court decision on voluntary desegregation is likely to intensify the trend because it reduces pressure on local authorities to promote school desegregation, said the report, which called on Obama to address the issue.
Obama, who will take the oath of office Tuesday, will be the county's first black president.
"It would be a tragedy if the country assumed from the Obama election that the problems of race have been solved, when many inequalities are actually deepening," said Gary Orfield, co-director of the Civil Rights Project.
Orfield said these trends were "the result of a systematic neglect of civil rights policy and related educational and community reforms for decades."
Part of the reason is demographic. As the percentage of white students shrinks -- they now make up 56 percent of the school population -- they are more integrated with students who are nonwhite.
Another factor is that residential segregation, on the rise in many parts of the country, increasingly determines the racial composition in schools in the absence of measures by education authorities to create and maintain integrated schools, Orfield said.
At the same time, Orfield said little had been done in recent years to prosecute violations of the Fair Housing Act, which forbids discrimination in the allocation of housing and was set up to foster equality in the housing market.
As a result of the trend, 39 percent of black students and 40 percent of students from the fast-growing Latino minority are increasingly isolated in schools in which there is little racial mixing, the report said.
Evidence that U.S. schools are becoming less racially integrated is politically charged because school integration was a basic goal of the civil rights movement led by Martin Luther King in the 1950s and 1960s.
That movement was in part triggered by a landmark Supreme Court decision in 1954 that decreed school segregation in the South was inherently unequal, did irreversible harm to black students and violated the constitution.
The report also found that the average black and Latino student is now in a school that has nearly 60 percent of students from families who are near or below the poverty line.
Schools marked by racial segregation and poverty tend to have weaker teaching forces, more student instability and a higher percentage of students from homes where English is not spoken -- factors that militate against academic achievement.
The Failures of Our Immigration Detention System
New York Times
Published: February 5, 2009
Letter to the Editor:
“Another Jail Death, and Mounting Questions” (news article, Jan. 28) reports yet another detainee death in a facility that contracts with the federal government to hold immigrants facing deportation.
On Jan. 16, you reported that Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials had ordered an end to their contract with a Rhode Island detention facility where Hiu Lui Ng, a computer engineer from China, died last year.
The circumstances of these deaths reflect a pervasive problem within the American immigration detention system. A federal investigation into Mr. Ng’s death uncovered a system in which lack of oversight, combined with negligence and hostility toward noncitizens, led to deadly consequences.
This investigation echoes the stories of the more than 80 other immigrants whose deaths have been documented in the last year. Immigrant advocates have long recognized that the system is dysfunctional and dangerous. The National Immigrant Justice Center routinely responds to detainee complaints of lack of access to health care.
It is clear that the failures of the current immigration detention system are widespread and not merely isolated incidents. Congress and the Obama administration must make reform of this broken detention system a priority.
Mary Meg McCarthy
Executive Director
Heartland Alliance’s National Immigrant Justice Center
Chicago, Jan. 28, 2009
Published: February 5, 2009
Letter to the Editor:
“Another Jail Death, and Mounting Questions” (news article, Jan. 28) reports yet another detainee death in a facility that contracts with the federal government to hold immigrants facing deportation.
On Jan. 16, you reported that Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials had ordered an end to their contract with a Rhode Island detention facility where Hiu Lui Ng, a computer engineer from China, died last year.
The circumstances of these deaths reflect a pervasive problem within the American immigration detention system. A federal investigation into Mr. Ng’s death uncovered a system in which lack of oversight, combined with negligence and hostility toward noncitizens, led to deadly consequences.
This investigation echoes the stories of the more than 80 other immigrants whose deaths have been documented in the last year. Immigrant advocates have long recognized that the system is dysfunctional and dangerous. The National Immigrant Justice Center routinely responds to detainee complaints of lack of access to health care.
It is clear that the failures of the current immigration detention system are widespread and not merely isolated incidents. Congress and the Obama administration must make reform of this broken detention system a priority.
Mary Meg McCarthy
Executive Director
Heartland Alliance’s National Immigrant Justice Center
Chicago, Jan. 28, 2009
UC regents OK admissions overhaul
Patricia Yollin | SF Chronicle Staff Writer
Friday, February 6, 2009
A lot more young people will have a shot at getting into the University of California under new eligibility rules, approved by the UC Board of Regents today, that represent the most sweeping changes in admission standards in almost 50 years.
"The bottom line is that it will be more diverse and more fair," said UC President Mark Yudof.
The board approved these changes today:
-- SAT subject tests will no longer be necessary.
-- The pool of applicants who will be considered will widen, but the number guaranteed entry into one of the university's nine undergraduate campuses will shrink.
-- The top 9 percent of high school graduates statewide will be ensured entry, compared with 12.5 percent previously, as well as those in the top 9 percent of their graduating class - up from 4 percent in the past.
Taken together, the two groups will constitute 10.1 percent of California's graduating class, based on projections by the university.
The revised requirements will affect the freshman class of 2012.
The changes will allow students to be considered - and granted a full review of their application - who complete by the end of junior year at least 11 of 15 college prep courses required by UC, achieve a weighted 3.0 grade-point average, and take either the ACT with Writing or SAT Reasoning Examination.
UC was the only public education system in the country that made students take two SAT subject tests. The result: 22,000 high school graduates in California were disqualified in 2007 from applying to the university who otherwise would have been eligible.
Members of the UC Academic Senate, who spent almost four years putting together the eligibility proposal, based this estimate on 2007 data from the California Postsecondary Education Commission.
That data also made them conclude that 21.7 percent of high school graduates in the state would have been entitled to a comprehensive review of their applications in 2007, compared with the 13.4 percent who were actually eligible for UC in that period.
On Wednesday, the issue of eligibility was thoroughly discussed at the regents' meeting before the Committee on Educational Policy approved the changes.
"This proposal will give us a chance to look at those (kinds of) lost students," said Regent Eddie Island . "They might not get in, but we'll look at them as individuals."
The promise of UC admission to the top 12.5 percent of graduates goes back to the 1960 Master Plan for Higher Education. A few regents worried about deviating from such a venerable road map.
"I feel like I got out my lantern like Diogenes looking for the master plan," Yudof said.
He emphasized that he had talked to legislators, California State University chief Charles Reed and community college leaders.
"They were all simpatico with this," Yudof said.
To avoid a perception that the university was lowering its standards, Yudof had asked the creators of the proposal to raise the required GPA to a weighted 3.0 instead of an unweighted 2.8. That change was reflected in the plan the regents' committee voted for on Wednesday.
Although eligibility changes had been discussed in four earlier regents' meetings, there was still much confusion.
"Now I can see why I was not UC eligible," said Regent Norman Pattiz. "How are we going to get this in a little pamphlet and hand it to parents to see what it takes?"
Some people saw the shift - endorsed by the University of California Student Association - as a way to get around Proposition 209, which was approved by voters in 1996 and ended race- and gender-based anti-discrimination programs in state, county and city hiring, contracting and school admissions.
Yudof said he supported affirmative action but would obey Prop. 209 because it was the law of the land. He was sure the new rules would increase diversity, but said it was too early to know the specific impact.
"We want to change the behavior of applicants and admissions officers," he said.
And by looking at the "whole file," as he put it, colleges can find out if a student did volunteer work or overcame a hardship or wrote the Great American Novel or climbed Mount Everest.
Although the changes dominated the meeting Wednesday, few members of the public addressed them. Most, instead, were angry about having to contribute to their retirement fund - a change approved by the regents today - without being represented on the pension board.
"We won't pay without a say," they chanted.
One protester was Ellie Corley, 72, an administrative assistant in the UC controller's office who has worked at the university for 33 years and makes $35,000 a year.
She got laid off in January and will leave in March.
"The university talks about equity and inclusion," Corley said. "I've never seen it."
Friday, February 6, 2009
A lot more young people will have a shot at getting into the University of California under new eligibility rules, approved by the UC Board of Regents today, that represent the most sweeping changes in admission standards in almost 50 years.
"The bottom line is that it will be more diverse and more fair," said UC President Mark Yudof.
The board approved these changes today:
-- SAT subject tests will no longer be necessary.
-- The pool of applicants who will be considered will widen, but the number guaranteed entry into one of the university's nine undergraduate campuses will shrink.
-- The top 9 percent of high school graduates statewide will be ensured entry, compared with 12.5 percent previously, as well as those in the top 9 percent of their graduating class - up from 4 percent in the past.
Taken together, the two groups will constitute 10.1 percent of California's graduating class, based on projections by the university.
The revised requirements will affect the freshman class of 2012.
The changes will allow students to be considered - and granted a full review of their application - who complete by the end of junior year at least 11 of 15 college prep courses required by UC, achieve a weighted 3.0 grade-point average, and take either the ACT with Writing or SAT Reasoning Examination.
UC was the only public education system in the country that made students take two SAT subject tests. The result: 22,000 high school graduates in California were disqualified in 2007 from applying to the university who otherwise would have been eligible.
Members of the UC Academic Senate, who spent almost four years putting together the eligibility proposal, based this estimate on 2007 data from the California Postsecondary Education Commission.
That data also made them conclude that 21.7 percent of high school graduates in the state would have been entitled to a comprehensive review of their applications in 2007, compared with the 13.4 percent who were actually eligible for UC in that period.
On Wednesday, the issue of eligibility was thoroughly discussed at the regents' meeting before the Committee on Educational Policy approved the changes.
"This proposal will give us a chance to look at those (kinds of) lost students," said Regent Eddie Island . "They might not get in, but we'll look at them as individuals."
The promise of UC admission to the top 12.5 percent of graduates goes back to the 1960 Master Plan for Higher Education. A few regents worried about deviating from such a venerable road map.
"I feel like I got out my lantern like Diogenes looking for the master plan," Yudof said.
He emphasized that he had talked to legislators, California State University chief Charles Reed and community college leaders.
"They were all simpatico with this," Yudof said.
To avoid a perception that the university was lowering its standards, Yudof had asked the creators of the proposal to raise the required GPA to a weighted 3.0 instead of an unweighted 2.8. That change was reflected in the plan the regents' committee voted for on Wednesday.
Although eligibility changes had been discussed in four earlier regents' meetings, there was still much confusion.
"Now I can see why I was not UC eligible," said Regent Norman Pattiz. "How are we going to get this in a little pamphlet and hand it to parents to see what it takes?"
Some people saw the shift - endorsed by the University of California Student Association - as a way to get around Proposition 209, which was approved by voters in 1996 and ended race- and gender-based anti-discrimination programs in state, county and city hiring, contracting and school admissions.
Yudof said he supported affirmative action but would obey Prop. 209 because it was the law of the land. He was sure the new rules would increase diversity, but said it was too early to know the specific impact.
"We want to change the behavior of applicants and admissions officers," he said.
And by looking at the "whole file," as he put it, colleges can find out if a student did volunteer work or overcame a hardship or wrote the Great American Novel or climbed Mount Everest.
Although the changes dominated the meeting Wednesday, few members of the public addressed them. Most, instead, were angry about having to contribute to their retirement fund - a change approved by the regents today - without being represented on the pension board.
"We won't pay without a say," they chanted.
One protester was Ellie Corley, 72, an administrative assistant in the UC controller's office who has worked at the university for 33 years and makes $35,000 a year.
She got laid off in January and will leave in March.
"The university talks about equity and inclusion," Corley said. "I've never seen it."
Thursday, February 05, 2009
Immigration Detention Centers Hazardous to Women's Health?
These detention centers are a total violation of human rights! Here's the full report of the study:"Unseen Prisoners: A Report on Women in Immigration Detention Facilities in Arizona"
-Patricia
We wouldn’t expect life at immigration detention centers to be rosy, but it turns out that these centers may be hazardous to women’s health.
A new study by the Southwest Institute of Research on Women and the James E. Rogers College of Law, both at the University of Arizona, says about 300 women held at such centers in Arizona face dangerous delays in health care and widespread mistreatment – including lack of prenatal care, cancer treatment and treatment of ovarian cysts.
Federal immigration officials say the study is unsubstantiated, too narrow and that the complaints can’t be corroborated, but nonetheless, the study shows that among the 3,000 women being held nationwide awaiting deportation hearings, many are living in conditions far from acceptable.
"We were pretty shocked to learn about all the ways in which life is made endlessly difficult for these women," especially those who were pregnant or had recently given birth, the director of border research for the Institute on Women, Nina Rabin, told The New York Times.
This is just the latest report blasting conditions at federal immigration centers. Here’s hoping that, if the allegations are true, these women end up places where they can receive proper care.
-Patricia
We wouldn’t expect life at immigration detention centers to be rosy, but it turns out that these centers may be hazardous to women’s health.
A new study by the Southwest Institute of Research on Women and the James E. Rogers College of Law, both at the University of Arizona, says about 300 women held at such centers in Arizona face dangerous delays in health care and widespread mistreatment – including lack of prenatal care, cancer treatment and treatment of ovarian cysts.
Federal immigration officials say the study is unsubstantiated, too narrow and that the complaints can’t be corroborated, but nonetheless, the study shows that among the 3,000 women being held nationwide awaiting deportation hearings, many are living in conditions far from acceptable.
"We were pretty shocked to learn about all the ways in which life is made endlessly difficult for these women," especially those who were pregnant or had recently given birth, the director of border research for the Institute on Women, Nina Rabin, told The New York Times.
This is just the latest report blasting conditions at federal immigration centers. Here’s hoping that, if the allegations are true, these women end up places where they can receive proper care.
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