By KATHY MILLER | HOUSTON CHRONICLE
Jan. 22, 2010
During this month's State Board of Education debate over new social studies curriculum standards, sound scholarship once again took a back seat to politics and personal agendas.
At one point, for example, board members voted to delete Dolores Huerta from a standard because the co-founder of the United Farm Workers of America is a socialist. The same board members apparently didn't realize that Helen Keller, who remains in the same standard, was also a staunch socialist. Nor did they seem to know that W.E.B. Du Bois, who helped found the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, had joined the Communist Party the last year of his life. The board had added Du Bois to the standards the day before.
Of course, social studies students should learn about the contributions of all three of these important Americans, regardless of their political beliefs. But board members clearly looked misinformed as, over just two days, they made wholesale revisions to standards that teachers, scholars and other community members had spent nearly a year debating and drafting. And many of the changes were based simply on board members' personal beliefs or knowledge, however limited that was.
Teachers in the audience watched the board's votes with growing alarm. They wondered how in the world to teach ill-considered new standards or squeeze a long laundry list of added names into their limited class time. Board member Pat Hardy, R-Fort Worth, herself an award-winning former social studies teacher, begged her board colleagues to stop.
Many of the additions, Hardy explained, were not grade-appropriate or overloaded the standards with unnecessary detail. On occasion she pointedly asked whether board members actually knew much about a person or event they wanted to add. They often did not.
The board had set the stage for this farce by deciding in November to proceed on the standards revision without further guidance from teachers and academic experts. Then they voted to end a public hearing on the standards even though dozens of people, including veterans from the American GI Forum, hadn't yet spoken.
So with no outside input, board members worked late into the evening to rewrite history according to their own points of view. Of course, this is a terrible way to make education policy. And sure enough, the standards are beginning to look more like a political manifesto than a curriculum document.
For example, a revised high school U.S. history standard implies that Joseph McCarthy's political smear campaign in the 1950s was somehow justified. Another requires students to learn about Phyllis Schlafly, Moral Majority and other conservative icons — not because of their historical accomplishments but because of their role in promoting conservative philosophies. There is no similar standard asking students to study individuals or groups that simply promoted liberal philosophies.
One board member succeeded in deleting the concepts of justice and responsibility for the common good from a standard on citizenship. And the board is considering a standard that suggests the civil rights movement brought about “unrealistic expectations of equal outcomes.” That's a political belief — like many other revisions the board approved at the meeting — not a view backed by scholarship. Even so, some board members want to weaken another standard that has students learn how women and minorities worked to overcome obstacles to equality and civil rights.
Last spring the Texas Legislature refused to rein in the heavily politicized State Board of Education's authority over curriculum and textbook content. To understand how foolish that failure was, lawmakers need only to have watched what happened at the state board meeting this month.
Miller is president of the Texas Freedom Network, a nonpartisan organization that supports public education and religious freedom.
Saturday, February 06, 2010
One more time
Texas education board yet again promotes ideology over academics
HOUSTON CHRONICLE Editorial
Jan. 22, 2010
This is getting to be a familiar scenario: The Texas Board of Education, preparing to adopt new curriculum standards, makes our schoolchildren's textbooks a matter of highly partisan wrangling.
When the board met last week to discuss what to teach Texas' public school students in history, geography, government and economics, their preliminary druthers were heavily weighted in favor of the blatantly divisive and ideological views of the board's conservative majority.
As reported by the Chronicle's Gary Scharrer, conservative bastions like Moral Majority, the National Rifle Association and the Heritage Foundation are currently in, but civil rights groups and minorities are not faring as well.
This time a year ago, experts and conservatives were locking horns on standards for teaching evolution, as the conservative board majority — again dismissing a year's worth of studies by scientists and teachers — sought to insert language that would cast doubt on Darwinian evolution and support creationism. Similar battles had erupted the previous year over English language arts and reading.
In May 2009, reported Scharrer, an exasperated Leticia Van de Putte, Democratic senator from San Antonio, told the Senate that the board had become the “laughingstock of the nation” under the two-year leadership of Don McLeroy, a Bryan dentist who believes the Earth is about 6,000 years old.
Gov. Rick Perry, who had waited for the previous legislative session to end before unilaterally appointing McLeroy, promptly replaced him with another creationist, Gail Lowe. In previous years the creationist, socially conservative wing of the board was not strong enough to prevail, but there are now 10 Republicans on the 15-member board, seven of whom adhere reliably to socially conservative positions.
The board, which adjourned without finishing its reviews, postponed a preliminary vote until March. Curriculum standards will be presented at a public hearing in May, at which time final action will be taken.
One of the issues still to be addressed is how the influence of faith on the nation's founders will be presented in the new curriculum. A coalition of religious leaders and scholars has joined with the Texas Freedom Network, a nonpartisan organization that supports public education and religious freedom, to call on the board to see that religious freedoms are not undermined.
The Rev. Marcus McFaul of Austin's Highland Park Baptist Church said that while all acknowledge the role and influence of religion in American history, the teaching of religion is “the responsibility of parents and parishes, not public schools.”
What is the responsibility of public schools and the board of education is to give our children the best education possible, based not on personal ideology but on sound, accepted practices.
This pattern would be troublesome in any agency, but when it concerns the very foundation of what we teach our 4.8 million public school students, how we equip them to grow into functioning adults and to compete in a national and international market, it is untenable.
HOUSTON CHRONICLE Editorial
Jan. 22, 2010
This is getting to be a familiar scenario: The Texas Board of Education, preparing to adopt new curriculum standards, makes our schoolchildren's textbooks a matter of highly partisan wrangling.
When the board met last week to discuss what to teach Texas' public school students in history, geography, government and economics, their preliminary druthers were heavily weighted in favor of the blatantly divisive and ideological views of the board's conservative majority.
As reported by the Chronicle's Gary Scharrer, conservative bastions like Moral Majority, the National Rifle Association and the Heritage Foundation are currently in, but civil rights groups and minorities are not faring as well.
This time a year ago, experts and conservatives were locking horns on standards for teaching evolution, as the conservative board majority — again dismissing a year's worth of studies by scientists and teachers — sought to insert language that would cast doubt on Darwinian evolution and support creationism. Similar battles had erupted the previous year over English language arts and reading.
In May 2009, reported Scharrer, an exasperated Leticia Van de Putte, Democratic senator from San Antonio, told the Senate that the board had become the “laughingstock of the nation” under the two-year leadership of Don McLeroy, a Bryan dentist who believes the Earth is about 6,000 years old.
Gov. Rick Perry, who had waited for the previous legislative session to end before unilaterally appointing McLeroy, promptly replaced him with another creationist, Gail Lowe. In previous years the creationist, socially conservative wing of the board was not strong enough to prevail, but there are now 10 Republicans on the 15-member board, seven of whom adhere reliably to socially conservative positions.
The board, which adjourned without finishing its reviews, postponed a preliminary vote until March. Curriculum standards will be presented at a public hearing in May, at which time final action will be taken.
One of the issues still to be addressed is how the influence of faith on the nation's founders will be presented in the new curriculum. A coalition of religious leaders and scholars has joined with the Texas Freedom Network, a nonpartisan organization that supports public education and religious freedom, to call on the board to see that religious freedoms are not undermined.
The Rev. Marcus McFaul of Austin's Highland Park Baptist Church said that while all acknowledge the role and influence of religion in American history, the teaching of religion is “the responsibility of parents and parishes, not public schools.”
What is the responsibility of public schools and the board of education is to give our children the best education possible, based not on personal ideology but on sound, accepted practices.
This pattern would be troublesome in any agency, but when it concerns the very foundation of what we teach our 4.8 million public school students, how we equip them to grow into functioning adults and to compete in a national and international market, it is untenable.
Science Education Across Borders
Why academic globalization should be welcomed, not feared.
By: Ben Wildavsky | New York Academy of Sciences Magazine
January 13, 2010
For several years now—and not for the first time in our nation's history—CEOs, politicians, and education leaders have regularly decried the shortcomings of STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) education in America's elementary and secondary schools. And they have vigorously promoted a reform agenda aimed at tackling those problems.
But what about our colleges and universities? On the one hand, America's research universities are universally acknowledged as the world's leaders in science and engineering, unsurpassed since World War II in the sheer volume and excellence of the scholarship and innovation they generate. On the other, there are signs that the rest of the world is gaining on us fast—building new universities, improving existing ones, competing hard for the best students, and recruiting U.S.-trained PhDs to return home to work in university and industry labs. Should we be worried?
There is no question that the academic enterprise has become increasingly global, particularly in the sciences. Overall, nearly three million students now study outside their home nations—a 57 percent increase in the last decade. In the United States, by far the largest magnet for students from overseas, foreign students now dominate doctoral programs in STEM fields, constituting, for example, 65 percent, 64 percent, and 56 percent, respectively, of PhDs in computer science, engineering, and physics. Tsinghua and Peking universities together recently surpassed Berkeley as the top sources of students who go on to earn American PhD's.
Faculty are on the move, too: Half the world's top physicists no longer work in their native countries. And major institutions such as New York University and the University of Nottingham are creating branch campuses in the Middle East and Asia—there are now 162 satellite campuses worldwide, an increase of 43 percent in just the past three years. At the same time, growing numbers of traditional student "sender" nations, from South Korea, China, and Saudi Arabia to France and Germany, are trying to improve both the quantity and the quality of their own degrees, engaging in a fierce—and expensive—race to create world-class research universities.
Brain drain & competition
All this competition has led to considerable handwringing. During a 2008 campaign stop, for instance, then-candidate Barack Obama spoke in alarmed tones about the threat such academic competition poses to the United States. "If we want to keep on building the cars of the future here in America," he declared, "we can't afford to see the number of PhD's in engineering climbing in China, South Korea, and Japan even as it's dropped here in America."
Nor are such concerns limited to the U.S. Beyond anxious rhetoric, in a number of nations worries about brain drain and educational competition have led to outright academic protectionism. India and China are notorious for the legal and bureaucratic obstacles they erect to Western universities wishing to set up satellite campuses catering to local students. And some countries erect barriers to students who want to leave: The president of one of the prestigious Indian Institutes of Technology effectively banned undergraduates from taking academic or business internships overseas. Elsewhere, educators institute quotas on foreign students, as in Malaysia, which places a five percent cap on the number of foreign undergraduates who can attend the country's public universities (just as the University of Tennessee once placed a 20 percent cap on the percentage of foreign graduate students in each department). Perhaps the silliest example of this protectionist mentality can be found in Germany, which for years prevented holders of doctorates earned outside the European Union from using the title "Dr." Even a recent reform plan would extend that privilege only to holders of doctorates from 200 U.S. research universities and a limited number of universities in Australia, Israel, Japan, Canada, and Russia.
There are other impediments to global mobility, too, not always explicitly protectionist, but all having the de facto effect of discouraging or preventing open access to universities around the world. In the post-9/11 era, for example, legitimate security concerns led to enormous student visa delays and bureaucratic hassles for foreigners aspiring to study in Great Britain and the United States. As the problem was recognized and visa processing was streamlined, international student numbers rebounded and eventually increased.
By 2009, however, visa delays became common again, particularly for graduate and postdoctoral students in science and engineering, who form the backbone of many university-based research laboratories and thus serve as key players in the U.S. drive for scientific and technical innovation. Then there are severe limits on H-1B visas, which allow highly skilled foreigners, usually in science and engineering, to work temporarily in the United States and serve as an enticement for the best and brightest to study and perhaps remain here. With just 85,000 or so H-1B visas issued each year—and permanent-resident visas for skilled workers also scarce—waiting lists are long, which sends some talented students elsewhere.
Perhaps some of the anxiety over the new global academic enterprise is understandable, particularly in a period of massive economic uncertainty. But setting up protectionist obstacles is a big mistake. The globalization of higher education should be embraced, not feared—including in the U.S. In the near term, it's worth remembering that, despite the alarmism often heard about the global academic wars, U.S. dominance of the research world remains near-complete. A RAND report found that almost two-thirds of highly cited articles in science and technology come from the U.S. Seventy percent of Nobel Prize winners are employed by U.S. universities, which lead global college rankings. And Yale president Richard Levin notes that the U.S. accounts for 40 percent of global spending on higher education.
Free trade in minds
That said, it's quite true that other countries are scrambling to emulate the American model and to give us a run for our money. Yet there is every reason to believe that the worldwide competition for human talent, the race to produce innovative research, the push to extend university campuses to multiple countries, and the rush to produce talented graduates who can strengthen increasingly knowledge-based economies will be good for us as well. Why? First and foremost, because knowledge is not a zero-sum game. Intellectual gains by one country often benefit others. More PhD production and burgeoning research in China, for instance, doesn't take away from American's store of learning—it enhances what we know and can accomplish. In fact, Chinese research may well provide the building blocks for innovation by U.S. entrepreneurs—or those from other nations. "When new knowledge is created, it's a public good and can be used by many," RAND economist James Hosek told the Chronicle of Higher Education.
Indeed, the economic benefits of a global academic culture are significant. In a recent essay, Harvard economist Richard Freeman says these gains should accrue both to the U.S. and the rest of the world. The globalization of higher education, he writes, "by accelerating the rate of technological advance associated with science and engineering and by speeding the adoption of best practices around the world ... will lower the costs of production and prices of goods." Just as free trade in manufacturing or call-center support provides the lowest-cost goods and services, benefiting both consumers and the most efficient producers, global academic competition is making free movement of people and ideas, on the basis of merit, more and more the norm, with enormously positive consequences for individuals, for universities, and for nations. Today's swirling patterns of mobility and knowledge transmission constitute a new kind of free trade: free trade in minds.
Expanding global knowledge
Still, even if the new world of academic globalization brings economic benefits, won't it weaken American universities? Quite the contrary, says Freeman, who predicts that by educating top students, attracting some to stay, and "positioning the U.S. as an open hub of ideas and connections" for college graduates around the world, the nation can hold on to "excellence and leadership in the 'empire of the mind' and in the economic world more so than if it views the rapid increase in graduates overseas as a competitive threat." National borders simply don't have the symbolic or practical meaning they once did, which bodes well for academic quality on all sides. Already, the degree of international collaboration on scientific papers has risen substantially. And there is early evidence that the most influential scholars are particularly likely to have international research experience: Well over half the highly cited researchers based in Australia, Canada, Italy, and Switzerland have spent time outside their home countries at some point during their academic careers, according to a 2005 study.
The United States should respond to the globalization of higher education not with angst but with a sense of possibility. Neither a gradual erosion in the U.S. market share of students nor the emergence of ambitious new competitors in Asia, Europe, and the Middle East means that American universities are on some inevitable path to decline. There is nothing wrong with nations competing, trying to improve their citizens' human capital and to reap the economic benefits that come with more and better education. By eliminating protectionist barriers at home, by lobbying for their removal abroad, by continuing to recruit and welcome the best students in the world, by sending more students overseas, by fostering cross-national research collaboration, and by strengthening its own research universities in science, engineering, and other fields, the U.S. will not only sustain its own academic excellence but will continue to expand the sum total of global knowledge and prosperity.
By: Ben Wildavsky | New York Academy of Sciences Magazine
January 13, 2010
For several years now—and not for the first time in our nation's history—CEOs, politicians, and education leaders have regularly decried the shortcomings of STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) education in America's elementary and secondary schools. And they have vigorously promoted a reform agenda aimed at tackling those problems.
But what about our colleges and universities? On the one hand, America's research universities are universally acknowledged as the world's leaders in science and engineering, unsurpassed since World War II in the sheer volume and excellence of the scholarship and innovation they generate. On the other, there are signs that the rest of the world is gaining on us fast—building new universities, improving existing ones, competing hard for the best students, and recruiting U.S.-trained PhDs to return home to work in university and industry labs. Should we be worried?
There is no question that the academic enterprise has become increasingly global, particularly in the sciences. Overall, nearly three million students now study outside their home nations—a 57 percent increase in the last decade. In the United States, by far the largest magnet for students from overseas, foreign students now dominate doctoral programs in STEM fields, constituting, for example, 65 percent, 64 percent, and 56 percent, respectively, of PhDs in computer science, engineering, and physics. Tsinghua and Peking universities together recently surpassed Berkeley as the top sources of students who go on to earn American PhD's.
Faculty are on the move, too: Half the world's top physicists no longer work in their native countries. And major institutions such as New York University and the University of Nottingham are creating branch campuses in the Middle East and Asia—there are now 162 satellite campuses worldwide, an increase of 43 percent in just the past three years. At the same time, growing numbers of traditional student "sender" nations, from South Korea, China, and Saudi Arabia to France and Germany, are trying to improve both the quantity and the quality of their own degrees, engaging in a fierce—and expensive—race to create world-class research universities.
Brain drain & competition
All this competition has led to considerable handwringing. During a 2008 campaign stop, for instance, then-candidate Barack Obama spoke in alarmed tones about the threat such academic competition poses to the United States. "If we want to keep on building the cars of the future here in America," he declared, "we can't afford to see the number of PhD's in engineering climbing in China, South Korea, and Japan even as it's dropped here in America."
Nor are such concerns limited to the U.S. Beyond anxious rhetoric, in a number of nations worries about brain drain and educational competition have led to outright academic protectionism. India and China are notorious for the legal and bureaucratic obstacles they erect to Western universities wishing to set up satellite campuses catering to local students. And some countries erect barriers to students who want to leave: The president of one of the prestigious Indian Institutes of Technology effectively banned undergraduates from taking academic or business internships overseas. Elsewhere, educators institute quotas on foreign students, as in Malaysia, which places a five percent cap on the number of foreign undergraduates who can attend the country's public universities (just as the University of Tennessee once placed a 20 percent cap on the percentage of foreign graduate students in each department). Perhaps the silliest example of this protectionist mentality can be found in Germany, which for years prevented holders of doctorates earned outside the European Union from using the title "Dr." Even a recent reform plan would extend that privilege only to holders of doctorates from 200 U.S. research universities and a limited number of universities in Australia, Israel, Japan, Canada, and Russia.
There are other impediments to global mobility, too, not always explicitly protectionist, but all having the de facto effect of discouraging or preventing open access to universities around the world. In the post-9/11 era, for example, legitimate security concerns led to enormous student visa delays and bureaucratic hassles for foreigners aspiring to study in Great Britain and the United States. As the problem was recognized and visa processing was streamlined, international student numbers rebounded and eventually increased.
By 2009, however, visa delays became common again, particularly for graduate and postdoctoral students in science and engineering, who form the backbone of many university-based research laboratories and thus serve as key players in the U.S. drive for scientific and technical innovation. Then there are severe limits on H-1B visas, which allow highly skilled foreigners, usually in science and engineering, to work temporarily in the United States and serve as an enticement for the best and brightest to study and perhaps remain here. With just 85,000 or so H-1B visas issued each year—and permanent-resident visas for skilled workers also scarce—waiting lists are long, which sends some talented students elsewhere.
Perhaps some of the anxiety over the new global academic enterprise is understandable, particularly in a period of massive economic uncertainty. But setting up protectionist obstacles is a big mistake. The globalization of higher education should be embraced, not feared—including in the U.S. In the near term, it's worth remembering that, despite the alarmism often heard about the global academic wars, U.S. dominance of the research world remains near-complete. A RAND report found that almost two-thirds of highly cited articles in science and technology come from the U.S. Seventy percent of Nobel Prize winners are employed by U.S. universities, which lead global college rankings. And Yale president Richard Levin notes that the U.S. accounts for 40 percent of global spending on higher education.
Free trade in minds
That said, it's quite true that other countries are scrambling to emulate the American model and to give us a run for our money. Yet there is every reason to believe that the worldwide competition for human talent, the race to produce innovative research, the push to extend university campuses to multiple countries, and the rush to produce talented graduates who can strengthen increasingly knowledge-based economies will be good for us as well. Why? First and foremost, because knowledge is not a zero-sum game. Intellectual gains by one country often benefit others. More PhD production and burgeoning research in China, for instance, doesn't take away from American's store of learning—it enhances what we know and can accomplish. In fact, Chinese research may well provide the building blocks for innovation by U.S. entrepreneurs—or those from other nations. "When new knowledge is created, it's a public good and can be used by many," RAND economist James Hosek told the Chronicle of Higher Education.
Indeed, the economic benefits of a global academic culture are significant. In a recent essay, Harvard economist Richard Freeman says these gains should accrue both to the U.S. and the rest of the world. The globalization of higher education, he writes, "by accelerating the rate of technological advance associated with science and engineering and by speeding the adoption of best practices around the world ... will lower the costs of production and prices of goods." Just as free trade in manufacturing or call-center support provides the lowest-cost goods and services, benefiting both consumers and the most efficient producers, global academic competition is making free movement of people and ideas, on the basis of merit, more and more the norm, with enormously positive consequences for individuals, for universities, and for nations. Today's swirling patterns of mobility and knowledge transmission constitute a new kind of free trade: free trade in minds.
Expanding global knowledge
Still, even if the new world of academic globalization brings economic benefits, won't it weaken American universities? Quite the contrary, says Freeman, who predicts that by educating top students, attracting some to stay, and "positioning the U.S. as an open hub of ideas and connections" for college graduates around the world, the nation can hold on to "excellence and leadership in the 'empire of the mind' and in the economic world more so than if it views the rapid increase in graduates overseas as a competitive threat." National borders simply don't have the symbolic or practical meaning they once did, which bodes well for academic quality on all sides. Already, the degree of international collaboration on scientific papers has risen substantially. And there is early evidence that the most influential scholars are particularly likely to have international research experience: Well over half the highly cited researchers based in Australia, Canada, Italy, and Switzerland have spent time outside their home countries at some point during their academic careers, according to a 2005 study.
The United States should respond to the globalization of higher education not with angst but with a sense of possibility. Neither a gradual erosion in the U.S. market share of students nor the emergence of ambitious new competitors in Asia, Europe, and the Middle East means that American universities are on some inevitable path to decline. There is nothing wrong with nations competing, trying to improve their citizens' human capital and to reap the economic benefits that come with more and better education. By eliminating protectionist barriers at home, by lobbying for their removal abroad, by continuing to recruit and welcome the best students in the world, by sending more students overseas, by fostering cross-national research collaboration, and by strengthening its own research universities in science, engineering, and other fields, the U.S. will not only sustain its own academic excellence but will continue to expand the sum total of global knowledge and prosperity.
HISD moves ahead on dismissal policy
In the past, teachers were rarely let go over poor performance, data show
By ERICKA MELLON | HOUSTON CHRONICLE
Jan. 14, 2010
One of every 300 teachers in the Houston school district was fired for poor performance last year — a number likely to rise under a new policy to hold them more liable for student achievement.
The district's superintendent, Terry Grier, said there's no “magic number” of teachers who should be ousted in a given year, but suggested that the school district's rate seems low given some academic shortcomings.
Last school year, 36 teachers out of nearly 12,000 — about 0.3 percent — were fired for performance reasons, according to data from the Houston Independent School District.
“Quite frankly, if we were that good, why do 100,000 of our kids read below grade level?” Grier said.
The school board on Thursday gave initial approval to a policy that allows the district to dismiss teachers whose students consistently perform below expectations on standardized tests. The change represents a move to make personnel decisions based more on student learning instead of relying solely on principals' classroom observations of teachers.
Grier and school board members have emphasized that the district's goal is not to fire teachers but to help them improve. Teachers' job evaluations now will include their so-called value-added scores, a statistical measure of their effectiveness in helping students reach their potential on standardized exams.
Broad definition
Over the last five years, HISD has fired or declined to renew the contracts of 364 teachers, according to district data. Of those, 140 were ousted for performance reasons, a broad category that generally covers teachers not fulfilling their job duties.
HISD did not provide information on specific cases, but performance-related reasons listed in district policy include excessive absences, insubordination, a lack of student progress and poor discipline management.
The other 224 teachers dismissed since 2004 were fired mostly for criminal activity, sexual misconduct, drugs or alcohol abuse, using unreasonable force or job abandonment, or because their position was eliminated, district data show.
HISD's dismissal data does not include those who resigned or retired. District officials and union leaders agree that some poor-performing teachers will leave voluntarily, rather than wait to be fired.
Board member Harvin Moore said he expects more teachers to lose their jobs for poor performance in coming years, but said the district is not on a witch hunt.
“I expect the number to go up,” he said. “But this policy is not going to result in thousands of teachers losing their job. That is the fear being created by scare tactics. That's not what it is about. But we do have an obligation to our children to give them the very best teacher that we can.”
Recent research from the New Teacher Project, a New York-based nonprofit, shows that even teachers think some of their colleagues are ineffective. In Cincinnati, for example, more than one-third of teachers said a tenured colleague on their campus should be dismissed. And teachers in a large Midwestern district said that, on average, 7.5 percent of the tenured faculty delivered poor instruction.
Gayle Fallon, president of the Houston Federation of Teachers, acknowledges that not every teacher in HISD performs up to par.
“You're talking about a district that's got 11,000-plus employees,” she said. “I'd be a damn fool to say there isn't an ineffective one in the group.”
Fallon places blame on principals who don't identify weak teachers early in their careers. For their first three or four years on the job, public school teachers in Texas are on probationary contracts, making it easier for districts to dismiss them.
In Texas, getting rid of a teacher with more experience, however, can take up to seven months and cost thousands of dollars in legal fees.
“It's a long process,” said attorney David Thompson, who represents HISD and other Texas districts. “You can see why educators who don't deal with this every day find it daunting and why it can be discouraging.”
Reasons unclear
School districts across the country rarely fire teachers for performance reasons, said Dan Goldhaber, a research professor at the University of Washington who studies teacher quality and labor.
“It's not clear whether that's because it's difficult to do it or because it's just not the practice in the profession,” he said. “There's probably a lot of blame to go around.”
Grier, who has run nine school districts over 25 years, theorized: “I think some principals accept mediocrity because they don't want to go through the battle with the teachers union or through the process of aggressively recruiting others.”
By ERICKA MELLON | HOUSTON CHRONICLE
Jan. 14, 2010
One of every 300 teachers in the Houston school district was fired for poor performance last year — a number likely to rise under a new policy to hold them more liable for student achievement.
The district's superintendent, Terry Grier, said there's no “magic number” of teachers who should be ousted in a given year, but suggested that the school district's rate seems low given some academic shortcomings.
Last school year, 36 teachers out of nearly 12,000 — about 0.3 percent — were fired for performance reasons, according to data from the Houston Independent School District.
“Quite frankly, if we were that good, why do 100,000 of our kids read below grade level?” Grier said.
The school board on Thursday gave initial approval to a policy that allows the district to dismiss teachers whose students consistently perform below expectations on standardized tests. The change represents a move to make personnel decisions based more on student learning instead of relying solely on principals' classroom observations of teachers.
Grier and school board members have emphasized that the district's goal is not to fire teachers but to help them improve. Teachers' job evaluations now will include their so-called value-added scores, a statistical measure of their effectiveness in helping students reach their potential on standardized exams.
Broad definition
Over the last five years, HISD has fired or declined to renew the contracts of 364 teachers, according to district data. Of those, 140 were ousted for performance reasons, a broad category that generally covers teachers not fulfilling their job duties.
HISD did not provide information on specific cases, but performance-related reasons listed in district policy include excessive absences, insubordination, a lack of student progress and poor discipline management.
The other 224 teachers dismissed since 2004 were fired mostly for criminal activity, sexual misconduct, drugs or alcohol abuse, using unreasonable force or job abandonment, or because their position was eliminated, district data show.
HISD's dismissal data does not include those who resigned or retired. District officials and union leaders agree that some poor-performing teachers will leave voluntarily, rather than wait to be fired.
Board member Harvin Moore said he expects more teachers to lose their jobs for poor performance in coming years, but said the district is not on a witch hunt.
“I expect the number to go up,” he said. “But this policy is not going to result in thousands of teachers losing their job. That is the fear being created by scare tactics. That's not what it is about. But we do have an obligation to our children to give them the very best teacher that we can.”
Recent research from the New Teacher Project, a New York-based nonprofit, shows that even teachers think some of their colleagues are ineffective. In Cincinnati, for example, more than one-third of teachers said a tenured colleague on their campus should be dismissed. And teachers in a large Midwestern district said that, on average, 7.5 percent of the tenured faculty delivered poor instruction.
Gayle Fallon, president of the Houston Federation of Teachers, acknowledges that not every teacher in HISD performs up to par.
“You're talking about a district that's got 11,000-plus employees,” she said. “I'd be a damn fool to say there isn't an ineffective one in the group.”
Fallon places blame on principals who don't identify weak teachers early in their careers. For their first three or four years on the job, public school teachers in Texas are on probationary contracts, making it easier for districts to dismiss them.
In Texas, getting rid of a teacher with more experience, however, can take up to seven months and cost thousands of dollars in legal fees.
“It's a long process,” said attorney David Thompson, who represents HISD and other Texas districts. “You can see why educators who don't deal with this every day find it daunting and why it can be discouraging.”
Reasons unclear
School districts across the country rarely fire teachers for performance reasons, said Dan Goldhaber, a research professor at the University of Washington who studies teacher quality and labor.
“It's not clear whether that's because it's difficult to do it or because it's just not the practice in the profession,” he said. “There's probably a lot of blame to go around.”
Grier, who has run nine school districts over 25 years, theorized: “I think some principals accept mediocrity because they don't want to go through the battle with the teachers union or through the process of aggressively recruiting others.”
SC Latinos regroup for immigration reform
Advocacy groups step up efforts to rally support
By NOELLE PHILLIPS | The State
Jan. 25, 2010
In recent weeks, Latinos in South Carolina have gathered for food and conversation to discuss a strategy for immigration reform.
Energized by the election of President Barack Obama, they are trying to push the explosive issue back into the national conversation.
"It's going to come up," said the Rev. Sandy Jones, pastor of Spring of Life Lutheran Church, which has a predominantly Hispanic congregation. "I'm afraid this debate is going to be more vitriolic than health care was."
People attending these events want the federal government to create a way for illegal immigrants to become documented and stay in the United States.
Those opposed to that idea are gearing up for a fight, too.
Opponents of immigration reform shared the stage at an early January "tea party" on the State House steps with other groups who are frustrated with the federal government.
And when the Lexington County Republican Party censured U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., it listed his willingness to discuss immigration reform as one of the reasons.
The two sides disagree over how to handle the estimated 12 million illegal immigrants in the United States. South Carolina is home to more than 80,000 illegal immigrants, most of whom are Hispanic, according to the Pew Hispanic Center.
While a new immigration reform bill has been filed in Washington, political onlookers believe the issue will be on the back burner for a while.
That's because the health care debate has not been resolved, said Kevin Bishop, a spokesman for Graham.
"We don't know when health care will be finished," Bishop said. "The health care debate has dragged on much, much longer than they ever thought it would."
However, Latino advocacy groups are sponsoring public events to renew interest.
On Friday, about 60 leaders from the state's Hispanic community gathered in Columbia for a summit to share information about immigrants and their contributions in South Carolina .
A week earlier, more than 200 people attended a Friday night potluck at a Columbia church, where they listened to immigrants' stories, watched a documentary and signed letters to senators and congressmen.
Ivan Segura, a Columbia resident who is involved in several Hispanic groups in South Carolina, said Latinos are no longer going to wait on health care.
"We kept waiting and waiting and waiting on health reform," he said. "We can't wait forever."
In 2006, Hispanics across the country, including those in Columbia, gave a big push for immigration reform.
In April of that year, mass protests took place across the country. In Columbia, more than 3,000 people - many of them illegal Latino immigrants - marched from Finlay Park to the State House to demand change to U.S. immigration laws.
"We had a whole movement with marches and demonstrations," Segura said. "It got very big, and it went nowhere."
That widespread, public demonstration ignited a heated response from others who believe illegal immigrants should be deported and a wall built along the border between the United States and Mexico.
In response to their outcries, South Carolina's General Assembly in 2008 crafted an immigration law to crack down on businesses that hire undocumented workers. The intent was to drive illegal immigrants out of the state by taking away their job opportunities.
At the same time, immigration played well for Republican candidates seeking national and state offices in 2008.
Once the election was over and the state law went into effect, immigration slipped from the state's headlines.
Now, Segura and other Latino advocates are pushing it again. This time, though, they are using a different strategy.
They are using small, community gatherings and forums to explain their positions. They are asking people to write and call their congressmen. They've set up text-messaging networks.
They hope more personal contact helps people understand the plight of illegal immigrants.
GETTING PERSONAL
When organizers planned the recent potluck at St. Mary's Episcopal Church on St. Andrews Road, the expected to serve 200 people. But as more and more people piled into the church's fellowship hall with covered dishes in hand, they scrambled to set up extra tables.
Anna Walton, 22, and Cathy Hardin, 19, put aside Friday night parties with their college friends at USC to attend. Both are involved with a campus group called Amigos del Buen Samaritan, which focuses on health issues in the Latino community.
"A big part of seeing them is learning what they are going through," Hardin said. "It's not just their problem. It's our problem, too. They are part of us."
St. Mary's agreed to host the potluck because it has a large Hispanic congregation. Over the years, the Rev. Alfredo Gonzalez, who leads the congregation, said he has seen families suffer because of the nation's immigration laws.
For example, he counsels two young women in the congregation brought to the United States as small children. They graduated from local high schools but are not eligible to attend college or find jobs because they are not legal residents, he said.
Another church member recently was deported after someone reported him to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. He is back in Honduras, and his wife and two children, who are U.S. citizens, have moved to Florida, Gonzalez said.
"When you see these types of things, it just breaks your heart," he said. "You realize how unfair our law is right now."
But, those who see illegal immigration as a major problem are adamant in their opposition. They believe illegal immigrants threaten national security, take jobs from legal residents and sap resources from public agencies.
Michael Visnjic, S.C. state committee chairman for the Minutemen Civil Defense Corps, said illegal immigrants are stealing jobs in South Carolina, introducing gangs and generally breaking the law for being in the country in the first place.
Most people in South Carolina oppose laws that favor illegal immigrants, he said. There is only one solution for Visnjic and others who oppose change.
"The only correct or proper option on this is to remove or deport all of these illegal aliens," he said.
Thus far, groups such as the Minutemen have been the loudest in South Carolina.
Now, the other side is trying to make its voice heard.
Tammy Bersherse, an attorney for S.C. Appleseed Legal Justice Center, has spent years working as an advocate for the state's immigrant population.
While it can be frustrating work in such a conservative state, Bersherse has not given up. In the past month, she's been attending forums and potlucks to rally support.
"We have to do this," she said "I think we can change. We have enough people who are passionate about having basic human rights protected."
By NOELLE PHILLIPS | The State
Jan. 25, 2010
In recent weeks, Latinos in South Carolina have gathered for food and conversation to discuss a strategy for immigration reform.
Energized by the election of President Barack Obama, they are trying to push the explosive issue back into the national conversation.
"It's going to come up," said the Rev. Sandy Jones, pastor of Spring of Life Lutheran Church, which has a predominantly Hispanic congregation. "I'm afraid this debate is going to be more vitriolic than health care was."
People attending these events want the federal government to create a way for illegal immigrants to become documented and stay in the United States.
Those opposed to that idea are gearing up for a fight, too.
Opponents of immigration reform shared the stage at an early January "tea party" on the State House steps with other groups who are frustrated with the federal government.
And when the Lexington County Republican Party censured U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., it listed his willingness to discuss immigration reform as one of the reasons.
The two sides disagree over how to handle the estimated 12 million illegal immigrants in the United States. South Carolina is home to more than 80,000 illegal immigrants, most of whom are Hispanic, according to the Pew Hispanic Center.
While a new immigration reform bill has been filed in Washington, political onlookers believe the issue will be on the back burner for a while.
That's because the health care debate has not been resolved, said Kevin Bishop, a spokesman for Graham.
"We don't know when health care will be finished," Bishop said. "The health care debate has dragged on much, much longer than they ever thought it would."
However, Latino advocacy groups are sponsoring public events to renew interest.
On Friday, about 60 leaders from the state's Hispanic community gathered in Columbia for a summit to share information about immigrants and their contributions in South Carolina .
A week earlier, more than 200 people attended a Friday night potluck at a Columbia church, where they listened to immigrants' stories, watched a documentary and signed letters to senators and congressmen.
Ivan Segura, a Columbia resident who is involved in several Hispanic groups in South Carolina, said Latinos are no longer going to wait on health care.
"We kept waiting and waiting and waiting on health reform," he said. "We can't wait forever."
In 2006, Hispanics across the country, including those in Columbia, gave a big push for immigration reform.
In April of that year, mass protests took place across the country. In Columbia, more than 3,000 people - many of them illegal Latino immigrants - marched from Finlay Park to the State House to demand change to U.S. immigration laws.
"We had a whole movement with marches and demonstrations," Segura said. "It got very big, and it went nowhere."
That widespread, public demonstration ignited a heated response from others who believe illegal immigrants should be deported and a wall built along the border between the United States and Mexico.
In response to their outcries, South Carolina's General Assembly in 2008 crafted an immigration law to crack down on businesses that hire undocumented workers. The intent was to drive illegal immigrants out of the state by taking away their job opportunities.
At the same time, immigration played well for Republican candidates seeking national and state offices in 2008.
Once the election was over and the state law went into effect, immigration slipped from the state's headlines.
Now, Segura and other Latino advocates are pushing it again. This time, though, they are using a different strategy.
They are using small, community gatherings and forums to explain their positions. They are asking people to write and call their congressmen. They've set up text-messaging networks.
They hope more personal contact helps people understand the plight of illegal immigrants.
GETTING PERSONAL
When organizers planned the recent potluck at St. Mary's Episcopal Church on St. Andrews Road, the expected to serve 200 people. But as more and more people piled into the church's fellowship hall with covered dishes in hand, they scrambled to set up extra tables.
Anna Walton, 22, and Cathy Hardin, 19, put aside Friday night parties with their college friends at USC to attend. Both are involved with a campus group called Amigos del Buen Samaritan, which focuses on health issues in the Latino community.
"A big part of seeing them is learning what they are going through," Hardin said. "It's not just their problem. It's our problem, too. They are part of us."
St. Mary's agreed to host the potluck because it has a large Hispanic congregation. Over the years, the Rev. Alfredo Gonzalez, who leads the congregation, said he has seen families suffer because of the nation's immigration laws.
For example, he counsels two young women in the congregation brought to the United States as small children. They graduated from local high schools but are not eligible to attend college or find jobs because they are not legal residents, he said.
Another church member recently was deported after someone reported him to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. He is back in Honduras, and his wife and two children, who are U.S. citizens, have moved to Florida, Gonzalez said.
"When you see these types of things, it just breaks your heart," he said. "You realize how unfair our law is right now."
But, those who see illegal immigration as a major problem are adamant in their opposition. They believe illegal immigrants threaten national security, take jobs from legal residents and sap resources from public agencies.
Michael Visnjic, S.C. state committee chairman for the Minutemen Civil Defense Corps, said illegal immigrants are stealing jobs in South Carolina, introducing gangs and generally breaking the law for being in the country in the first place.
Most people in South Carolina oppose laws that favor illegal immigrants, he said. There is only one solution for Visnjic and others who oppose change.
"The only correct or proper option on this is to remove or deport all of these illegal aliens," he said.
Thus far, groups such as the Minutemen have been the loudest in South Carolina.
Now, the other side is trying to make its voice heard.
Tammy Bersherse, an attorney for S.C. Appleseed Legal Justice Center, has spent years working as an advocate for the state's immigrant population.
While it can be frustrating work in such a conservative state, Bersherse has not given up. In the past month, she's been attending forums and potlucks to rally support.
"We have to do this," she said "I think we can change. We have enough people who are passionate about having basic human rights protected."
Obama to Offer Aid for Families in State of the Union Address
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG | NY Times
January 24, 2010
WASHINGTON — President Obama will propose in his State of the Union address a package of modest initiatives intended to help middle-class families, including tax credits for child care, caps on some student loan payments and a requirement that companies let workers save automatically for retirement, senior administration officials said Sunday.
By focusing on what one White House official calls “the sandwich generation” — struggling families squeezed between sending their children to college and caring for elderly parents — Mr. Obama hopes to use his speech on Wednesday to demonstrate that he understands the economic pain of ordinary Americans. The proposals also include expanded tax credits for retirement savings and money for programs to help families care for elderly relatives.
The address is still being written, but one senior official, describing it on the condition of anonymity, said its main themes would include “creating good jobs, addressing the deficit, helping the middle class and changing Washington.”
With his poll numbers down and Democrats fearing disaster in this year’s midterm elections, Mr. Obama is at a particularly rocky point in his presidency and has been shifting his rhetoric lately to adopt a more populist tone. He heads into his first formal State of the Union speech in a radically reshaped political climate from even one week ago.
His top domestic priority, a health care overhaul, is in jeopardy after the Republican victory in last week’s Massachusetts Senate race — a setback that White House advisers interpret as a reflection of Americans’ deep anger and frustration over high unemployment and Wall Street bailouts.
One advantage of the president’s proposals is that they might appeal to people who are struggling financially without looking like the kind of broad expansion of the federal government that is making many Americans uneasy. They also would add little to the federal deficit at a time when Mr. Obama is pledging to reduce it.
Mr. Obama and Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. plan to outline the proposals on Monday when they meet with the White House task force that has spent the past year examining ways to help the middle class.
While Mr. Obama has been shifting his focus toward job creation in recent weeks, an official said the president also wanted to spotlight what the White House regards as “critical areas where middle-class families need a helping hand to get ahead,” like paying for college and saving for retirement.
For example, the president is calling on Congress to nearly double the child care tax credit for families earning less than $85,000 — a proposal that, if adopted, would lower by $900 the taxes such families owe to the government. But the credit would not be refundable, meaning that families who pay no income tax would not receive cash payments. The nonrefundable credits reduce the tax liability, and therefore may increase the refund, of households that do pay taxes.
Another of the president’s proposals, a cap on federal loan payments for recent college graduates at 10 percent of income above a basic living allowance, would cost taxpayers roughly $1 billion. The expanded financing to help families care for elderly relatives would cost $102.5 million — a pittance in a federal budget where programs are often measured in tens if not hundreds of billions of dollars. And the automatic paycheck deduction program would simply be a way to encourage workers to save, and would include tax credits to help companies with administrative costs.
Such programs are, notably, much less far-reaching than Mr. Obama’s expansive first-year agenda of passing an economic recovery package, bailing out the auto industry, overhauling the health care system, passing energy legislation and imposing tough new restrictions on banks. That agenda has left him vulnerable to criticism that he is using the government to remake every aspect of American society.
Top advisers to the president insist that Mr. Obama is not in retreat and are resisting any comparisons to the kind of small-bore initiatives that the last Democratic president, Bill Clinton, used to try to get his presidency back on track.
“In no way does this represent a trimming of the sails,” one adviser said on Sunday, referring to the package.
Instead, the White House wants to use Wednesday’s address to explain how initiatives like the health care overhaul fit into his broader plan for job creation and the economy. On Sunday, as senior administration officials fanned out on the television talk shows, David Axelrod, Mr. Obama’s senior adviser, insisted that the health care bill was not dead. But he did suggest that the administration was now more focused on changing insurance practices than on a broad expansion of coverage to the uninsured.
“There are so many elements of this — tax breaks for small business, extending the life of Medicare, more assistance for seniors with their prescription drugs, a cap on out-of-pocket expenses, help for people with pre-existing conditions — that are too important to walk away from,” Mr. Axelrod said on the ABC program “This Week.”
With House and Senate leaders trying to figure out how to proceed legislatively, Mr. Axelrod also issued a warning to Democrats who were reconsidering their support for the health care measure.
“As a political matter, the foolish thing to do would be for anybody else who supported this to walk away from it,” he said. He added, “The underlying elements of it are popular and important, and people will never know what’s in that bill until we pass it, the president signs it and they have a whole new range of protections they never had before.”
How Mr. Obama will address health care in the State of the Union speech, though, remains an open question. Officials on Capitol Hill and at the White House said their talks on how to proceed with the legislation might not be resolved by Wednesday. This could put Mr. Obama in the awkward position of talking about a measure that is on shaky ground.
Another open question is what the president will say about his program for job creation.
The House of Representatives has passed a $154 billion bill to encourage job creation, and during an appearance in Ohio on Friday, Mr. Obama called for a jobs bill that would include tax breaks for small businesses and for people who make their homes more energy efficient. White House officials have not said what Mr. Obama’s jobs bill would cost, and they did not say on Sunday if he would mention a specific amount in Wednesday’s address.
But they did try to hit hard on the jobs theme. And Mr. Axelrod, speaking on “State of the Union” on CNN, said Mr. Obama’s current predicament was no surprise.
“A year ago, I said to the president, ‘A year from now, your numbers are going to be much different than they are right now because of the economic forecast that we were hearing,’ ” he said. “And we knew that even as the economy started growing, it would take time for the jobs to follow.”
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: January 26, 2010
An article on Monday about President Obama’s planned State of the Union proposals intended to help middle-class families described incorrectly nonrefundable tax credits, like the expanded child care credit Mr. Obama is expected to propose for families earning less than $85,000. Nonrefundable credits are those that do not result in cash payments for people who pay no income tax. They reduce the tax liability, and therefore may increase the refund, of households that do pay taxes.
January 24, 2010
WASHINGTON — President Obama will propose in his State of the Union address a package of modest initiatives intended to help middle-class families, including tax credits for child care, caps on some student loan payments and a requirement that companies let workers save automatically for retirement, senior administration officials said Sunday.
By focusing on what one White House official calls “the sandwich generation” — struggling families squeezed between sending their children to college and caring for elderly parents — Mr. Obama hopes to use his speech on Wednesday to demonstrate that he understands the economic pain of ordinary Americans. The proposals also include expanded tax credits for retirement savings and money for programs to help families care for elderly relatives.
The address is still being written, but one senior official, describing it on the condition of anonymity, said its main themes would include “creating good jobs, addressing the deficit, helping the middle class and changing Washington.”
With his poll numbers down and Democrats fearing disaster in this year’s midterm elections, Mr. Obama is at a particularly rocky point in his presidency and has been shifting his rhetoric lately to adopt a more populist tone. He heads into his first formal State of the Union speech in a radically reshaped political climate from even one week ago.
His top domestic priority, a health care overhaul, is in jeopardy after the Republican victory in last week’s Massachusetts Senate race — a setback that White House advisers interpret as a reflection of Americans’ deep anger and frustration over high unemployment and Wall Street bailouts.
One advantage of the president’s proposals is that they might appeal to people who are struggling financially without looking like the kind of broad expansion of the federal government that is making many Americans uneasy. They also would add little to the federal deficit at a time when Mr. Obama is pledging to reduce it.
Mr. Obama and Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. plan to outline the proposals on Monday when they meet with the White House task force that has spent the past year examining ways to help the middle class.
While Mr. Obama has been shifting his focus toward job creation in recent weeks, an official said the president also wanted to spotlight what the White House regards as “critical areas where middle-class families need a helping hand to get ahead,” like paying for college and saving for retirement.
For example, the president is calling on Congress to nearly double the child care tax credit for families earning less than $85,000 — a proposal that, if adopted, would lower by $900 the taxes such families owe to the government. But the credit would not be refundable, meaning that families who pay no income tax would not receive cash payments. The nonrefundable credits reduce the tax liability, and therefore may increase the refund, of households that do pay taxes.
Another of the president’s proposals, a cap on federal loan payments for recent college graduates at 10 percent of income above a basic living allowance, would cost taxpayers roughly $1 billion. The expanded financing to help families care for elderly relatives would cost $102.5 million — a pittance in a federal budget where programs are often measured in tens if not hundreds of billions of dollars. And the automatic paycheck deduction program would simply be a way to encourage workers to save, and would include tax credits to help companies with administrative costs.
Such programs are, notably, much less far-reaching than Mr. Obama’s expansive first-year agenda of passing an economic recovery package, bailing out the auto industry, overhauling the health care system, passing energy legislation and imposing tough new restrictions on banks. That agenda has left him vulnerable to criticism that he is using the government to remake every aspect of American society.
Top advisers to the president insist that Mr. Obama is not in retreat and are resisting any comparisons to the kind of small-bore initiatives that the last Democratic president, Bill Clinton, used to try to get his presidency back on track.
“In no way does this represent a trimming of the sails,” one adviser said on Sunday, referring to the package.
Instead, the White House wants to use Wednesday’s address to explain how initiatives like the health care overhaul fit into his broader plan for job creation and the economy. On Sunday, as senior administration officials fanned out on the television talk shows, David Axelrod, Mr. Obama’s senior adviser, insisted that the health care bill was not dead. But he did suggest that the administration was now more focused on changing insurance practices than on a broad expansion of coverage to the uninsured.
“There are so many elements of this — tax breaks for small business, extending the life of Medicare, more assistance for seniors with their prescription drugs, a cap on out-of-pocket expenses, help for people with pre-existing conditions — that are too important to walk away from,” Mr. Axelrod said on the ABC program “This Week.”
With House and Senate leaders trying to figure out how to proceed legislatively, Mr. Axelrod also issued a warning to Democrats who were reconsidering their support for the health care measure.
“As a political matter, the foolish thing to do would be for anybody else who supported this to walk away from it,” he said. He added, “The underlying elements of it are popular and important, and people will never know what’s in that bill until we pass it, the president signs it and they have a whole new range of protections they never had before.”
How Mr. Obama will address health care in the State of the Union speech, though, remains an open question. Officials on Capitol Hill and at the White House said their talks on how to proceed with the legislation might not be resolved by Wednesday. This could put Mr. Obama in the awkward position of talking about a measure that is on shaky ground.
Another open question is what the president will say about his program for job creation.
The House of Representatives has passed a $154 billion bill to encourage job creation, and during an appearance in Ohio on Friday, Mr. Obama called for a jobs bill that would include tax breaks for small businesses and for people who make their homes more energy efficient. White House officials have not said what Mr. Obama’s jobs bill would cost, and they did not say on Sunday if he would mention a specific amount in Wednesday’s address.
But they did try to hit hard on the jobs theme. And Mr. Axelrod, speaking on “State of the Union” on CNN, said Mr. Obama’s current predicament was no surprise.
“A year ago, I said to the president, ‘A year from now, your numbers are going to be much different than they are right now because of the economic forecast that we were hearing,’ ” he said. “And we knew that even as the economy started growing, it would take time for the jobs to follow.”
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: January 26, 2010
An article on Monday about President Obama’s planned State of the Union proposals intended to help middle-class families described incorrectly nonrefundable tax credits, like the expanded child care credit Mr. Obama is expected to propose for families earning less than $85,000. Nonrefundable credits are those that do not result in cash payments for people who pay no income tax. They reduce the tax liability, and therefore may increase the refund, of households that do pay taxes.
ASU plans big change in teacher training
Given that research shows the significance of teacher-student relationships, and how teachers' capacities to build those relationships (especially among minority, and bilingual children) are crucial in facilitating learning, this approach seems to be void of this factor. Placing an overemphasis on content as a means for student success seems to make a very narrow assumption of how children and youth learn. What would Paulo Freire say!?
-Patricia
Less time on theory, more focus on subject
by Pat Kossan | The Arizona Republic
Jan. 25, 2010
In a quest to turn out better teachers, Arizona State University is shaking up its training program for K-12 educators, requiring students to take more courses in subjects they will teach and fewer on how to teach and understand children.
The university, one of the largest producers of teachers in the nation, plans to cut in half, to about 25 percent, the time its undergraduates spend on teaching theory and increase to about 75 percent the time spent learning math, science, history, English and other subjects. Students will get more time working with experienced teachers in K-12 classrooms.
ASU also will try to improve the quality of its students by incorporating some of the ways the national non-profit Teach for America recruits and trains its corps members. Teach for America is controversial in the education community for its crash-course approach to training talented college graduates and sending them on two-year missions to teach in struggling schools.
"What ASU is going to do is pretty profound," said Paul Koehler, education analyst for the research and policy group WestEd.
Changes to ASU's curriculum will take effect in fall 2011 at a time when business and education leaders are bemoaning the lack of math and science knowledge among American students - and the shortage of good teachers in those topics.
Mari Koerner, dean of ASU's College of Teacher Education and Leadership, also has a grand goal: "Parents will hopefully want more of their children to go into teaching and become teachers. They'll see it as an esteemed profession and a place where highly achieving students can go because it's such a wonderful life career."
Rebalancing act
Students entering ASU's teacher-training program can expect to be placed in a classroom at the same time they're taking foundation, or pedagogy, courses such as child development and classroom management. The credit hours spent in foundation courses will drop from 60 to as few as 30 hours by 2013.
A new curriculum will be tougher and will consist of more content courses, especially in mathematics. Education students must specialize in a content area, even if they are teaching in elementary school.
"We're talking about having a course in probability and statistics that elementary teachers will have to have because that's what they use in elementary school," Koerner said. "So you can't be a teacher if you're math-phobic."
Koerner is working with all of ASU's colleges to provide content courses that make it possible for education students to graduate with a dual degree. That means a student can get a degree in history, science or economics, in addition to a degree in education, within four years.
Koehler said the best part of this experiment is that ASU will collect data to determine its success as measured by teachers who graduate, stay in education and raise the academic achievement of their students. Depending on the evidence, it may help other education colleges, often far more bound to tradition, to make similar changes.
The spurs for change
The big changes to ASU's teacher training were prompted in part by new expectations from students, graduates, taxpayers and parents.
• Two years ago, ASU began tracking and surveying its teaching students and graduates. Based on that feedback, "we have changed the way we offer courses, we have changed the number of courses, and we have changed the content of courses," Koerner said.
It also has given the school a better understanding that students come to college with various levels of knowledge and experience. That led the school to provide flexibility in how students can earn degrees.
For example, ASU is doubling the number of its teaching programs, taught in person and through video conferences, at K-12 schools throughout the state.
• Public universities are expensive and more people are demanding accountability for the graduates they produce.
"We (currently) produce teachers (and) we say, 'Congratulations, we hope you do well in your career. We don't know if you're really going to stay in teaching, we don't know if you're going to be a good teacher by any measurement,' " Koerner said. Now, ASU will follow their graduates, mentoring them in the classroom and gauging the success of their curriculum. If evidence dictates, changes will be made.
• Koerner said her faculty's close relationships with principals and teachers make her understand that parents are looking for much more highly skilled teachers who can inspire their children, no matter what level the students are at, to obtain a college degree and good job in a globally competitive market.
Also, as part of its overhaul, ASU is adding to its faculty a winner of the Nobel Prize in medicine. Lee Hartwell, who won the 2001 prize for his work in cell division, is designing a course to help future teachers inspire elementary-school children to love science. He has agreed to teach at least one section of the course each semester and allow other professors to sit in and train to also teach the course.
Teach for America
ASU is accepting an $18.8 million private grant to examine the ways Teach for America recruits, trains and evaluates its members, then borrow what it likes to recruit and train its own students.
ASU already provides Teach for America recruits with ongoing training and supervision.
With the grant, ASU will help Teach for America track the success of its recruits, which is still up for debate among researchers. Teach for America will help ASU by sharing some of its secrets of success, such as its ability to recruit standout graduates and the way its recruits measure their students' success at the end of each teaching day.
"There will be people shocked at this all over the country," Koerner said. But "we want to look seriously at what they do, what's successful and what can be scaled up."
The University of Arizona's education dean, Ron Marx, gives ASU credit for "a lot of creative and innovative thinking," but he isn't convinced that teaming up with Teach for America will provide much insight into how to solve the problem of teacher quality.
"I believe teachers have special knowledge and that knowledge isn't created overnight," Marx said. "It takes time, and if programs are designed in the beginning only to have people in schools a short time, they're never going to have the skills set and knowledge that is required to ramp up the quality of education in the country."
-Patricia
Less time on theory, more focus on subject
by Pat Kossan | The Arizona Republic
Jan. 25, 2010
In a quest to turn out better teachers, Arizona State University is shaking up its training program for K-12 educators, requiring students to take more courses in subjects they will teach and fewer on how to teach and understand children.
The university, one of the largest producers of teachers in the nation, plans to cut in half, to about 25 percent, the time its undergraduates spend on teaching theory and increase to about 75 percent the time spent learning math, science, history, English and other subjects. Students will get more time working with experienced teachers in K-12 classrooms.
ASU also will try to improve the quality of its students by incorporating some of the ways the national non-profit Teach for America recruits and trains its corps members. Teach for America is controversial in the education community for its crash-course approach to training talented college graduates and sending them on two-year missions to teach in struggling schools.
"What ASU is going to do is pretty profound," said Paul Koehler, education analyst for the research and policy group WestEd.
Changes to ASU's curriculum will take effect in fall 2011 at a time when business and education leaders are bemoaning the lack of math and science knowledge among American students - and the shortage of good teachers in those topics.
Mari Koerner, dean of ASU's College of Teacher Education and Leadership, also has a grand goal: "Parents will hopefully want more of their children to go into teaching and become teachers. They'll see it as an esteemed profession and a place where highly achieving students can go because it's such a wonderful life career."
Rebalancing act
Students entering ASU's teacher-training program can expect to be placed in a classroom at the same time they're taking foundation, or pedagogy, courses such as child development and classroom management. The credit hours spent in foundation courses will drop from 60 to as few as 30 hours by 2013.
A new curriculum will be tougher and will consist of more content courses, especially in mathematics. Education students must specialize in a content area, even if they are teaching in elementary school.
"We're talking about having a course in probability and statistics that elementary teachers will have to have because that's what they use in elementary school," Koerner said. "So you can't be a teacher if you're math-phobic."
Koerner is working with all of ASU's colleges to provide content courses that make it possible for education students to graduate with a dual degree. That means a student can get a degree in history, science or economics, in addition to a degree in education, within four years.
Koehler said the best part of this experiment is that ASU will collect data to determine its success as measured by teachers who graduate, stay in education and raise the academic achievement of their students. Depending on the evidence, it may help other education colleges, often far more bound to tradition, to make similar changes.
The spurs for change
The big changes to ASU's teacher training were prompted in part by new expectations from students, graduates, taxpayers and parents.
• Two years ago, ASU began tracking and surveying its teaching students and graduates. Based on that feedback, "we have changed the way we offer courses, we have changed the number of courses, and we have changed the content of courses," Koerner said.
It also has given the school a better understanding that students come to college with various levels of knowledge and experience. That led the school to provide flexibility in how students can earn degrees.
For example, ASU is doubling the number of its teaching programs, taught in person and through video conferences, at K-12 schools throughout the state.
• Public universities are expensive and more people are demanding accountability for the graduates they produce.
"We (currently) produce teachers (and) we say, 'Congratulations, we hope you do well in your career. We don't know if you're really going to stay in teaching, we don't know if you're going to be a good teacher by any measurement,' " Koerner said. Now, ASU will follow their graduates, mentoring them in the classroom and gauging the success of their curriculum. If evidence dictates, changes will be made.
• Koerner said her faculty's close relationships with principals and teachers make her understand that parents are looking for much more highly skilled teachers who can inspire their children, no matter what level the students are at, to obtain a college degree and good job in a globally competitive market.
Also, as part of its overhaul, ASU is adding to its faculty a winner of the Nobel Prize in medicine. Lee Hartwell, who won the 2001 prize for his work in cell division, is designing a course to help future teachers inspire elementary-school children to love science. He has agreed to teach at least one section of the course each semester and allow other professors to sit in and train to also teach the course.
Teach for America
ASU is accepting an $18.8 million private grant to examine the ways Teach for America recruits, trains and evaluates its members, then borrow what it likes to recruit and train its own students.
ASU already provides Teach for America recruits with ongoing training and supervision.
With the grant, ASU will help Teach for America track the success of its recruits, which is still up for debate among researchers. Teach for America will help ASU by sharing some of its secrets of success, such as its ability to recruit standout graduates and the way its recruits measure their students' success at the end of each teaching day.
"There will be people shocked at this all over the country," Koerner said. But "we want to look seriously at what they do, what's successful and what can be scaled up."
The University of Arizona's education dean, Ron Marx, gives ASU credit for "a lot of creative and innovative thinking," but he isn't convinced that teaming up with Teach for America will provide much insight into how to solve the problem of teacher quality.
"I believe teachers have special knowledge and that knowledge isn't created overnight," Marx said. "It takes time, and if programs are designed in the beginning only to have people in schools a short time, they're never going to have the skills set and knowledge that is required to ramp up the quality of education in the country."
The Emerging Hispanic-Serving Institution
David Moltz | Inside Higher Ed
February 5, 2010
WASHINGTON – The number of institutions officially recognized by the federal government as “Hispanic serving” is set to rise dramatically in the coming years, according to a comprehensive study of Latino enrollment in higher education.
In the 1980s, the designation Hispanic-serving institution (HSI) was created by the federal government to directfunding to nonprofit colleges where at least 25 percent of the full-time-equivalent students are Latino. On Thursday,Excelencia in Education, an advocacy group for Latino students, released a report identifying the growing number of institutions that do not meet the HSI enrollment threshold of 25 percent but that fit its definition of “emerging HSIs” – meaning that they “are within the critical mass range of 15-24 percent and have the potential to become HSIs in the next few years.”
“Emerging” HSIs were located in 20 states. The highest concentration of these institutions was in California, which had 52, followed by Texas, which had 42. Still, Deborah Santiago, the report's author and vice president for policy and research at Excelencia, said at a discussion accompanying the report’s release on Capitol Hill that these institutions are “not just in those places where we expect to see Latinos.” For instance, Arkansas, Indiana, Kansas, Oregon and Utah are among the states that had one such institution.
The largest share -- 44 percent -- of the “emerging” HSIs were public community colleges. Private colleges and universities represented the second largest sector, with 31 percent. Public four-year institutions represented 20 percent, and private two-year institutions represented 5 percent.
“Call me parochial here, but I found it surprising that so many private colleges are emerging HSIs,” said Luis Torres, deputy provost for academic affairs at Metropolitan State College of Denver, an emerging HSI featured in the report. “When one thinks of a rather stereotypical view of Hispanics, it’s that we are in the public colleges. I found it very surprising and telling and interesting. That gives us a lot of opportunities.”
Among the prominent private institutions on the list are Loyola Marymount University, in Los Angeles, with 19.7 percent Latino enrollment, and the University of Miami with 22.1 percent. A significant number of the privates are religiously affiliated institutions, primarily (but not entirely) Roman Catholic.
In the public sector, a number of flagship institutions are also nearing HSI status. The University of California at Los Angeles, for example, has 15 percent Latino enrollment, and the University of Texas at Austin has 17.2 percent.
Some of the “emerging” HSIs identified in the report may already have reached the 25 percent threshold, due to the significant numbers of students who choose not to self-identify as Latino. At Palm Beach Community College’s Lake Worth campus, for instance, the report notes that administrators were certain that the college was well beyond the 25 percent threshold, even though it had an official Latino enrollment of 16.5 percent.
“A high percentage of students chose not to provide information about their ethnicity, and as administrators reviewed student rosters, it was clear that many of these students were potentially Latino (inferred from their last names),” the report reads. “In the college’s internal analysis, staff attributed this phenomenon to a potential stigma of identifying as Hispanic, being undocumented, and/or the institutional requirement that a student whose first language was not English must be tested for language fluency.”
Santiago estimated that at least 15 of the 67 institutions that had Latino enrollments between 20 and 24 percent “could be an HSI today” if their students properly self-identified without fear.
Still, Santiago and others at the discussion argued that institutions should not wait until they reach the 25 percent threshold to start serving the needs of Hispanic students. Torres, for example, noted that Metro State has publicly stated its ambition of becoming an HSI by 2015. It created a task force in 2007, when its percentage of Latino students was 13 percent, to recommend how the college could reach out and appeal to Hispanics in the area.
Torres said he would like to see Congress pass legislation that would give “emerging” HSIs planning grants so that they could intentionally grow into HSIs with ease.
Juan Sepulveda, director of the White House Initiative for Excellence in Hispanic Education, said the Department of Education is “open to the idea” but that it would need some time to consider the merits of awarding such grants. Still, he acknowledged the importance of supporting HSIs, especially if there is hope of reaching President Obama’s goal of the United States having the highest proportion of college graduates in the world by 2020.
“The president is a very smart person,” Sepulveda said. “Secretary Arne Duncan is a really smart person. Undersecretary Martha Kanter…. They can all count. They know it’s impossible for us to reach this goal without the Hispanic community really bumping up attainment-wise.”
February 5, 2010
WASHINGTON – The number of institutions officially recognized by the federal government as “Hispanic serving” is set to rise dramatically in the coming years, according to a comprehensive study of Latino enrollment in higher education.
In the 1980s, the designation Hispanic-serving institution (HSI) was created by the federal government to directfunding to nonprofit colleges where at least 25 percent of the full-time-equivalent students are Latino. On Thursday,Excelencia in Education, an advocacy group for Latino students, released a report identifying the growing number of institutions that do not meet the HSI enrollment threshold of 25 percent but that fit its definition of “emerging HSIs” – meaning that they “are within the critical mass range of 15-24 percent and have the potential to become HSIs in the next few years.”
“Emerging” HSIs were located in 20 states. The highest concentration of these institutions was in California, which had 52, followed by Texas, which had 42. Still, Deborah Santiago, the report's author and vice president for policy and research at Excelencia, said at a discussion accompanying the report’s release on Capitol Hill that these institutions are “not just in those places where we expect to see Latinos.” For instance, Arkansas, Indiana, Kansas, Oregon and Utah are among the states that had one such institution.
The largest share -- 44 percent -- of the “emerging” HSIs were public community colleges. Private colleges and universities represented the second largest sector, with 31 percent. Public four-year institutions represented 20 percent, and private two-year institutions represented 5 percent.
“Call me parochial here, but I found it surprising that so many private colleges are emerging HSIs,” said Luis Torres, deputy provost for academic affairs at Metropolitan State College of Denver, an emerging HSI featured in the report. “When one thinks of a rather stereotypical view of Hispanics, it’s that we are in the public colleges. I found it very surprising and telling and interesting. That gives us a lot of opportunities.”
Among the prominent private institutions on the list are Loyola Marymount University, in Los Angeles, with 19.7 percent Latino enrollment, and the University of Miami with 22.1 percent. A significant number of the privates are religiously affiliated institutions, primarily (but not entirely) Roman Catholic.
In the public sector, a number of flagship institutions are also nearing HSI status. The University of California at Los Angeles, for example, has 15 percent Latino enrollment, and the University of Texas at Austin has 17.2 percent.
Some of the “emerging” HSIs identified in the report may already have reached the 25 percent threshold, due to the significant numbers of students who choose not to self-identify as Latino. At Palm Beach Community College’s Lake Worth campus, for instance, the report notes that administrators were certain that the college was well beyond the 25 percent threshold, even though it had an official Latino enrollment of 16.5 percent.
“A high percentage of students chose not to provide information about their ethnicity, and as administrators reviewed student rosters, it was clear that many of these students were potentially Latino (inferred from their last names),” the report reads. “In the college’s internal analysis, staff attributed this phenomenon to a potential stigma of identifying as Hispanic, being undocumented, and/or the institutional requirement that a student whose first language was not English must be tested for language fluency.”
Santiago estimated that at least 15 of the 67 institutions that had Latino enrollments between 20 and 24 percent “could be an HSI today” if their students properly self-identified without fear.
Still, Santiago and others at the discussion argued that institutions should not wait until they reach the 25 percent threshold to start serving the needs of Hispanic students. Torres, for example, noted that Metro State has publicly stated its ambition of becoming an HSI by 2015. It created a task force in 2007, when its percentage of Latino students was 13 percent, to recommend how the college could reach out and appeal to Hispanics in the area.
Torres said he would like to see Congress pass legislation that would give “emerging” HSIs planning grants so that they could intentionally grow into HSIs with ease.
Juan Sepulveda, director of the White House Initiative for Excellence in Hispanic Education, said the Department of Education is “open to the idea” but that it would need some time to consider the merits of awarding such grants. Still, he acknowledged the importance of supporting HSIs, especially if there is hope of reaching President Obama’s goal of the United States having the highest proportion of college graduates in the world by 2020.
“The president is a very smart person,” Sepulveda said. “Secretary Arne Duncan is a really smart person. Undersecretary Martha Kanter…. They can all count. They know it’s impossible for us to reach this goal without the Hispanic community really bumping up attainment-wise.”
Friday, February 05, 2010
"Avatar," Race, and Epistemology
by
Angela Valenzuela
February 4, 2010
Listen to my analysis of "Avatar" with Maria Hinojosa on latinousa.kut.org or by going directly to http://latinousa.kut.org/wp-content/lusaaudio/LUSA_webcast_100205.mp3
In reviewing New York Times columnist's David Brooks' review of the epic film "Avatar" titled, "The Messiah Complex," I agree that this movie reinscribes the White messiah complex and I am glad that it is encouraging this very kind of discussion of white privilege and power. Hopefully, it is raising an awareness of this complex to begin with and offers a critical realization that this is what is so wrong and horrible about so many Hollywood movies—or for that matter, all movies that are born out of an imperialist, self-serving view of the world. So this is undoubtedly true.
I connect with the movie in quite another way that I think lays beneath the admittedly problematic Pocahontas frame as portrayed by Walt Disney.
"Avatar" is solidly about ways of knowing that we as social scientists have been talking about for decades.
That is, the question I have about the movie is not so much why this protagonist is a white male but rather why he was "chosen" to carry out this redeeming mission? (I complicate this notion of "being chosen" below). Why Jake Sully (played by Sam Worthington) and not someone else? Why wasn’t it the scientist, Dr. Grace Augustine (played by Sigourney Weaver)? After all, she was a teacher and Neytiri (played by Zoe Saldaña) was her student on planet Pandora. For reasons that are only hinted at but never made clear, consider that the tribe closed down the school. And they also closed down the hospital.
Dr. Grace Augustine was as sensitive as pretty much any one could get in that context but her problem was her epistemology, her lens, her way of knowing. As much as she felt that she knew about and cared for the native people, she could never stop seeing “them” or their planet as “samples,” as an object of study rather than as a group with whom to authentically embrace in a spirit of relation and a shared sense of destiny. She and her assistants understood their value system with their minds but not their hearts. They were quick to accumulate knowledge about the Na'vi but slow see their physiological, cultural, and spiritual distinctiveness in a respectful, affirming way.
Incidentally, the insufferable Colonel Miles Quaritch is the only character in the movie to actually mention "race" when he rebukes Jake Sully saying, "How does it feel to betray your own race?" The viewer is encouraged to see how the Western mindset constructs difference more like a threat than a promise—and rarely as a site where at least some answers to the mess we have created in our world may be found.
In the end, Grace's way of knowing was ultimately decided by the community as not being of the community. Not only did the education system lack soul, but it was also likely dismissive toward, if not entirely hostile to, the indigenous ways of knowing. To add yet another layer that probably explains why the American school was shut down, the cultural chauvinism of the curriculum was probably invisible to the well-meaning personnel that designed and operated the school.
This educational opportunity nevertheless created the possibility for Neytiri and others to be bilingual so that they could more easily negotiate the threat to which they were to be subjected. Seen this way, Neytiri and her clan are also chosen. Indeed, all of creation is enlisted in this battle against this private army to play an essential role in this larger drama of community restitution.
The community's role, however, is different from Jake's. Jake Sully's challenge—enabled by his less complicated angle of vision in comparison to all the other major characters in the film—was to actually "see" the Na'vi in a respectful way and to walk humbly and prayerfully in a world and universe where the "Great Heavenly Consulate" reduces no one to that of an "alien" (in this vein, hear ballad singer Ricardo Arjona's song, "El Mojado" ["The Wetback"]). It had to be real and he had to demonstrate this through an emotional, spiritual, and psychic commitment not to the Na'vi but to the Creator and to himself in his personal journey to enlightenment.
So the natives unquestionably exercise agency by correctly seeing Sully as having potential and by consciously deciding as a tribe to educate him in their ways and to not kill him when they discover that he is a double agent for the army. Brooks' "white-Messiah frame" denies the Navi people of their agency when they are far from being, or behaving like, helpless pawns in a war of aggression.
The hospital shared the same fate. The arrogant intruders wanted to coerce their way of knowing onto these people that defied their own culturally and experientially anchored ways of healing. So the hospital became yet another tool of imperial designs that sought to colonize a people whose ways of knowing and healing were not in need of rehabilitation—at least not in any way that was either obvious to them or that could be digested when coming from a self-possessed, presumptuous power. If anything, the opposite was true. The invaders, despite their superior military might, were so willfully ignorant of the knowledge and wisdom that resided not in any single person or thing but rather that existed in its totality in a living, breathing way.
The tree was both a real and symbolic representation of a society that was relatively in tact for the length of its existence. This allowed for an accumulation of knowledge, wisdom, and yes, technological know-how that was readily available (or “downloadable,” as the scientist had conveyed in her defense of the tribe) to all its members. Austin performer, Natalie Goodnow masterfully communicates through theater—specifically in "Muntu" (a Kikongo, Bantu language word that means both "tree" and "person")—this notion of a sense of solidarity with nature that extends one's sense of self and belonging in a way that transcends fences, walls, borders, discrimination, and time itself. This is a rootedness in identity that stands in stark contrast to the eviscerating character of an oppressive, domineering culture that abandons us to a reduced sense of self, agency, and identity.
By technology, I refer in small part to the avatars' arrows "dipped in a neurotoxin that can stop your heart in one minute," but primarily to their lemur-like tails that established a technologically advanced, telepathic link to nature. The U.S. military's culturally-derived, evaluative frame that constructed the Na'vi as a primitive race, however, blinded them to their abled adversaries' technological capacity that was at least as highly evolved, if not superior to their own. To be sure, any ecologist or biologist would love to have such faculties within their reach. To suggest that James Cameron or the Na'vi resort unimaginatively to a deus ex machina in order for them (Cameron and the Na'vi) to accomplish their desired end, namely, triumph over the military, is to negate any other construction of technology that exists outside of our known experience, our cultural lens.
For the Na'vi, nature was thus understood, appreciated, and respected in its complexity and its depth in contrast to the oppressive monoculture that a regime premised on the coveted ore under the earth presaged. So what war, conquest, and colonization do—among so many other horrific things—is tear down those structures and ways of knowing that allow the colonizer to subdue and extract profit from it.
Clearly, a brief history with this group unearthed their “uncolonizeability,” if you will, leaving the military-industrial complex with few options but to attempt to annihilate it.
One cannot help but draw a connection to the conquest, colonization, and genocidal experiences of native people in this hemisphere where minorities, by definition, are not seen as full members of society despite a genetic and cultural inheritance that pre-dates Columbus' "discovery" of America. Against this larger backdrop of history, it is hugely ironic that Mexican and Latino immigrants—particularly the more darkly hued—and their languages, get constructed as "foreign," "alien," and "illegal" as an artifact of the relatively recent historical construct of the nation state that brought boundaries and borders into existence.
Stated differently, today's minorities are the cultural hybrids of comparable, Pandora-like narratives of family trees and family forests that in far too many instances were reduced to kindling. With all the natural and human-made disasters that the poor and the dispossessed, in particular, experience, it is truly amazing that any of us has, or holds on to, a sense of cultural integrity and self worth.
So why was the white male “chosen?” I’ve already pretty much answered this. He was chosen because his vision was not occluded by the objectifying filters of his peers. He is actually, at most, an accidental messiah. More accurately, he's a grunt who stumbles into this situation with no real expectations and a different lens that was not given a chance to fully cultivate (indoctrinate). This openness allows him to acculturate toward indigenous ways, paralleling his growing disenchantment with the empire's ways. In time, he is able to see the natives not with the imperialist gaze, but rather as they see themselves, in their own terms. It is only when he sees that he was chosen that he fully grasps his obligation to confess his misdeeds and come clean, even at a risk to his own life.
Comparable to its usage among the Zulu of South Africa, the Na'vi tribe’s salutation reflects this very value system. Their word for “hello” means “I see you,” meaning that they value seeing each other as they really are—seeing past the superficial and straight to the heart. This way of seeing goes far beyond most contemporary treatments of multiculturalism that call for tolerance and the teaching of it. We must instead allow ourselves to get de-centered in order to apprehend the "other's" reality. At the end of her life, the scientist arrives at this understanding. That is, Grace finally “sees.” Everything she understood with her mind, she now understands and sees with her heart. At least in death was Grace ultimately redeemed.
For those of us who address these profound questions of epistemology and how it connects to power and identity, I think that Avatar is a useful, illustrative tool. But you have to get beyond the distractions of the messiah motif, the beautiful bodies, the love affair, and the romantic caricature of nature to see its deeper message. That is, we need to consider that our very way of knowing has equated and will continue to equate—if we continue to fail to truly see the "other"—to our own demise as people and a planet.
Submitted to the Texas Observer ©
Secretary Duncan and Assistant Secretary Melendez Address the National Association for Bilingual Education
Check out Dr. Thelma Melendez de Santa Ana's speech to the National Association for Bilingual Education.
In addition to what's mentioned in the summary below Melendez stresses the importance of biliteracy; high expectations, great teaching, and access to and success in higher education; the need for states in develop English Language Proficiency (ELP) standards; the importance of fostering leadership that understands the "diversity within the English language learner population so that they can truly tailor instruction to specific needs and strengths"; the need to monitor the progress of ELLs and those who have transitioned out of ELL-serving programs to ensure that they don't fall through the cracks; seek to turn around schools by incorporating "the best approaches for serving our bilingual students" (through appropriately trained teachers, research-based curricula, and ELL supports).
Another statement that we don't hear enough is that "In most countries, bilingualism or multilingualism is the norm — it is just expected" -- at a time when experts with a national platform are touting the success of other nations' education systems this comment by Melendez does not come up enough, if at all. We need to put this message front and center. Perhaps that will help us to begin placing value on the assets that 1 in 10 of all students bring with them as emerging bilingual (and multilingual) youth.
-Patricia
On February 3, following a video message from Secretary Duncan, Assistant Secretary for Elementary and Secretary Education Thelma Melendez spoke to members of the National Association for Bilingual Education (NABE) in Denver, Colorado. Roughly 2,300 of NABE’s members — from teachers, parents, and students to policymakers and business leaders — gathered to celebrate the organization’s 40-year history of working to ensure high-quality teaching and learning for English learners (ELs).
In his greeting, the Secretary emphasized that access to an excellent education for bilingual students is a civil rights issue. In her remarks, Dr. Melendez explained why the success of this diverse and fast-growing student group is so vital to this nation’s prosperity. She noted that roughly one in ten students in the United States is an EL, that 78% of ELs are born in the U.S., and that these students speak over 400 languages. The Assistant Secretary also recounted her own experience as an English learner. Her parents came to California from Mexico, and the family spoke Spanish at home. A supportive kindergarten teacher started her on the road to English proficiency.
Dr. Melendez highlighted a request totaling $800 million for the English Learning Education program in the President’s fiscal year 2011 budget. The funds would help to increase students’ English language proficiency, promote academic success, and encourage bi-literacy in order to strengthen America’s global competitiveness. Dr. Melendez also discussed the upcoming reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act.
In addition to what's mentioned in the summary below Melendez stresses the importance of biliteracy; high expectations, great teaching, and access to and success in higher education; the need for states in develop English Language Proficiency (ELP) standards; the importance of fostering leadership that understands the "diversity within the English language learner population so that they can truly tailor instruction to specific needs and strengths"; the need to monitor the progress of ELLs and those who have transitioned out of ELL-serving programs to ensure that they don't fall through the cracks; seek to turn around schools by incorporating "the best approaches for serving our bilingual students" (through appropriately trained teachers, research-based curricula, and ELL supports).
Another statement that we don't hear enough is that "In most countries, bilingualism or multilingualism is the norm — it is just expected" -- at a time when experts with a national platform are touting the success of other nations' education systems this comment by Melendez does not come up enough, if at all. We need to put this message front and center. Perhaps that will help us to begin placing value on the assets that 1 in 10 of all students bring with them as emerging bilingual (and multilingual) youth.
-Patricia
On February 3, following a video message from Secretary Duncan, Assistant Secretary for Elementary and Secretary Education Thelma Melendez spoke to members of the National Association for Bilingual Education (NABE) in Denver, Colorado. Roughly 2,300 of NABE’s members — from teachers, parents, and students to policymakers and business leaders — gathered to celebrate the organization’s 40-year history of working to ensure high-quality teaching and learning for English learners (ELs).
In his greeting, the Secretary emphasized that access to an excellent education for bilingual students is a civil rights issue. In her remarks, Dr. Melendez explained why the success of this diverse and fast-growing student group is so vital to this nation’s prosperity. She noted that roughly one in ten students in the United States is an EL, that 78% of ELs are born in the U.S., and that these students speak over 400 languages. The Assistant Secretary also recounted her own experience as an English learner. Her parents came to California from Mexico, and the family spoke Spanish at home. A supportive kindergarten teacher started her on the road to English proficiency.
Dr. Melendez highlighted a request totaling $800 million for the English Learning Education program in the President’s fiscal year 2011 budget. The funds would help to increase students’ English language proficiency, promote academic success, and encourage bi-literacy in order to strengthen America’s global competitiveness. Dr. Melendez also discussed the upcoming reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act.
The Big Picture on School Performance
This is a great piece by Sam. I would encourage you all to read his latest book: American Schools: The Art of Creating a Democratic Learning Community. Here's a short review and commentary from Kenneth Bernstein.
Also, check out the work being done by the Forum for Education and Democracy in general -- included are videos of their recent capitol briefings; one of which includes our own, Dr. Angela Valenzuela.
-Patricia
Sam Chaltain, National Director of the Forum for Education and Democracy
Huffington Post
February 3, 2010
On Feb. 1, President Obama vowed to toss out the nation's current school accountability system and replace it with a more balanced scorecard of school performance that looks at student growth and school progress.
I love the idea. Mr. Obama and education secretary Arne Duncan have repeatedly criticized the No Child Left Behind Act for keeping the "goals loose but the steps tight." On their watch, both men aspire to introduce a new law that keeps the "goals tight but the steps loose."
With that more flexible standard in mind, I have a scorecard to propose: the ABC's of School Success. It provides both structure and freedom by identifying five universal measurement categories -- Achievement, Balance, Climate, Democratic Practices and Equity -- and letting individual schools chose which data points to track under each category.
1. ACHIEVEMENT
If there is a bottom line in schools today, it's that educators must do whatever it takes to help close the achievement gap and improve student learning. To do so effectively and fully, schools must expand their measures for determining student achievement. After all, "achievement" isn't only about student test scores; it's also about other factors. The following are all critical to achievement:
• Teachers and administrators are skilled in their use of data to improve student learning and engagement.
• The school has identified aspirational "habits of mind and being" for students, and adopted assessment measures to track student development of these habits over time.
• The school uses assessments that require students to conduct research and scientific investigations, solve complex real-world problems in mathematics, and defend their ideas orally and in writing.
• The school provides learning support programs that address individual student needs and ensure that all students succeed.
• The school has developed a curriculum that is challenging, experiential, accessible, well-rounded, and relevant to a diverse student population.
If each school identified between three and 10 different data points (including, but not limited to, test scores) to assess their overall learning environment, we might start to see "achievement" as a broader set of measures, and evaluate the full extent to which we are supporting the young people we serve.
2. BALANCE
We all seek balance in our lives. The search for it is a fundamental part of the human condition. Imagine how much more enjoyable -- and effective -- our schools would be if we assessed them, in part, through this prism?
As part of its Whole Child Initiative, ASCD promotes the development of children who are healthy, safe, engaged, supported and challenged. Additionally, I would urge schools to consider the extent to which:
• Students have sufficient opportunities for enrichment activities like dance, art, physical education, etc.
• Effective vehicles are in place to help the school routinely communicate with its parents and the larger community.
• Effective vehicles are in place to help parents and the larger community routinely communicate with the school.
• Teachers from different disciplines communicate with, work together and support each other's professional practice on a regular basis.
• Teachers, on average, spend no more than 20 percent of their time providing lecture-driven instruction.
• Teachers incorporate both formative (instructional) and summative (evaluative) assessments into their evaluations of student progress.
• Teachers routinely solicit, listen to, reflect upon, and integrate student feedback into their work.
The measures in this category would probably lean heavily on attitudinal surveys, although other existing data points could be useful as well, such as staff absenteeism rates (healthy schools have high faculty attendance), time in the schedule allocated for faculty planning time, etc. The point is not to dictate the individual measures, but to observe what schools discover as they start to experiment with the scorecard.
3. CLIMATE
"For almost a hundred years," explains Jonathan Cohen, director of the Center for Social & Emotional Education (CSEE), "educators have appreciated the importance of school climate -- the quality or character of school life. We can all remember childhood moments when we felt particularly safe (or unsafe) in school, when we felt particularly connected to a caring adult (or frighteningly alone), when we felt particularly engaged in meaningful learning (or not). However, school climate is larger than any one person's experience. When people work together, a group process emerges that is bigger than any one person's actions."
Clearly, a school's overall climate is an essential indicator of its overall health. So let's start insisting that all schools measure it. One possibility would be to use the Comprehensive School Climate Inventory (CSCI), a research-based needs assessment that provides immediate feedback on how students, parents and school personnel perceive their school's overall environment for learning. Other useful measures would clearly emerge over time as well. And then in this and the other categories, an ongoing role of the federal government would be to share insights about measurement and the use of the scorecard across states and communities, so information could be funneled back throughout the system and create a reciprocal flow of information that improves the quality of all schools.
4. DEMOCRATIC PRACTICES
In a school setting, cultivating democratic practices doesn't mean turning the asylum over to the inmates. To create a climate where people feel both empowered and protected, you don't start by just telling everyone that they're free. You do, however, make helping people learn how to exercise freedom responsibly a foundational goal.
Before that vision can become a reality, we must encourage educators to ensure that the central elements of our social covenant are also in place in our schools: a clear sense of structure and shared identity on one hand, and an unwavering commitment to individual freedom on the other.
To help create such environments, we should gauge the extent to which our schools are equipping young people with the understanding, motivation and skills they need to become active, visible contributors to the common good.
Schools can do so by measuring the extent to which:
• Administrators have established structures and/or accorded meaningful roles in decision-making to students, parents, staff and community members.
• Students are routinely encouraged throughout the curriculum to agree and disagree honestly and respectfully.
• The school encourages people to model democratic principles, practices and policies in their daily work and interactions with others.
• The school's mission statement clearly addresses the democratic purposes of education.
• The community is committed to ensuring that religious liberty rights are protected for persons of all faiths and none.
• Students understand how to participate in the political process and institutions that shape public policy.
• Students take public action on personally meaningful issues and concerns.
Some may say this issue is not worthy of its own category. And yet our public school system is the only institution we have that is guaranteed to reach 90 percent of every succeeding generation, that is governed by public authority, and that was founded with the explicit mission of preparing young people to be active and responsible citizens in a democracy. Isn't it time we started evaluating the extent to which our schools are fulfilling their civic mission?
5. EQUITY
To ensure greater equity - by which I mean reducing the predictive value sociocultural and economic characteristics have on student achievement - we must improve the performance of our public schools and strengthen the effectiveness of our civic activism at the same time.
These challenges are interdependent, and will remain so. Indeed, the poorest and least fortunate in our country are not just the least likely to succeed academically -- they are also the most disenfranchised from our political process.
Therefore, to measure their commitment to equity (of resources and opportunity), school leaders should consider tracking the extent to which:
• The aspirations, strengths and weaknesses of each student are known by at least one member of the school staff.
• The school actively collaborates with its students' families as partners in the students' education.
• The school's pupil nondiscrimination policies and complaint procedures are comprehensive and effective.
• Staff and students are aware of these policies and complaint procedures and act in accordance with them.
• Teachers know and can use a rich variety of strategies to identify and accommodate individual learning styles and strengthen each student's ability to learn in diverse ways.
• The school provides its students with equal access to well-qualified teachers; strong curriculum opportunities; books, materials, and equipment (including science labs and computers); and adequate facilities.
• The school believes passionately in empowering students, families and community members to be contributing participants in their education, their community and the diverse society in which we live.
Fifty-five years ago, the United States Supreme Court's unanimous ruling in Brown v. Board of Education captured the most hopeful strains of the American narrative: working within a system of laws to extend the promise of freedom, more fairly and fully, to each succeeding generation. "In the field of public education," the unanimous Court wrote, "the doctrine of 'separate but equal' has no place," and the opportunity to learn "is a right which must be made available to all on equal terms."
I believe President Obama is sincerely committed to fulfilling the decades-old promise of the Brown decision. He can't do anything, however, until we as a nation invest in a clear, flexible and balanced system for evaluating and improving our nation's schools.
I think this scorecard would be a great place to start. What do you think?
Also, check out the work being done by the Forum for Education and Democracy in general -- included are videos of their recent capitol briefings; one of which includes our own, Dr. Angela Valenzuela.
-Patricia
Sam Chaltain, National Director of the Forum for Education and Democracy
Huffington Post
February 3, 2010
On Feb. 1, President Obama vowed to toss out the nation's current school accountability system and replace it with a more balanced scorecard of school performance that looks at student growth and school progress.
I love the idea. Mr. Obama and education secretary Arne Duncan have repeatedly criticized the No Child Left Behind Act for keeping the "goals loose but the steps tight." On their watch, both men aspire to introduce a new law that keeps the "goals tight but the steps loose."
With that more flexible standard in mind, I have a scorecard to propose: the ABC's of School Success. It provides both structure and freedom by identifying five universal measurement categories -- Achievement, Balance, Climate, Democratic Practices and Equity -- and letting individual schools chose which data points to track under each category.
1. ACHIEVEMENT
If there is a bottom line in schools today, it's that educators must do whatever it takes to help close the achievement gap and improve student learning. To do so effectively and fully, schools must expand their measures for determining student achievement. After all, "achievement" isn't only about student test scores; it's also about other factors. The following are all critical to achievement:
• Teachers and administrators are skilled in their use of data to improve student learning and engagement.
• The school has identified aspirational "habits of mind and being" for students, and adopted assessment measures to track student development of these habits over time.
• The school uses assessments that require students to conduct research and scientific investigations, solve complex real-world problems in mathematics, and defend their ideas orally and in writing.
• The school provides learning support programs that address individual student needs and ensure that all students succeed.
• The school has developed a curriculum that is challenging, experiential, accessible, well-rounded, and relevant to a diverse student population.
If each school identified between three and 10 different data points (including, but not limited to, test scores) to assess their overall learning environment, we might start to see "achievement" as a broader set of measures, and evaluate the full extent to which we are supporting the young people we serve.
2. BALANCE
We all seek balance in our lives. The search for it is a fundamental part of the human condition. Imagine how much more enjoyable -- and effective -- our schools would be if we assessed them, in part, through this prism?
As part of its Whole Child Initiative, ASCD promotes the development of children who are healthy, safe, engaged, supported and challenged. Additionally, I would urge schools to consider the extent to which:
• Students have sufficient opportunities for enrichment activities like dance, art, physical education, etc.
• Effective vehicles are in place to help the school routinely communicate with its parents and the larger community.
• Effective vehicles are in place to help parents and the larger community routinely communicate with the school.
• Teachers from different disciplines communicate with, work together and support each other's professional practice on a regular basis.
• Teachers, on average, spend no more than 20 percent of their time providing lecture-driven instruction.
• Teachers incorporate both formative (instructional) and summative (evaluative) assessments into their evaluations of student progress.
• Teachers routinely solicit, listen to, reflect upon, and integrate student feedback into their work.
The measures in this category would probably lean heavily on attitudinal surveys, although other existing data points could be useful as well, such as staff absenteeism rates (healthy schools have high faculty attendance), time in the schedule allocated for faculty planning time, etc. The point is not to dictate the individual measures, but to observe what schools discover as they start to experiment with the scorecard.
3. CLIMATE
"For almost a hundred years," explains Jonathan Cohen, director of the Center for Social & Emotional Education (CSEE), "educators have appreciated the importance of school climate -- the quality or character of school life. We can all remember childhood moments when we felt particularly safe (or unsafe) in school, when we felt particularly connected to a caring adult (or frighteningly alone), when we felt particularly engaged in meaningful learning (or not). However, school climate is larger than any one person's experience. When people work together, a group process emerges that is bigger than any one person's actions."
Clearly, a school's overall climate is an essential indicator of its overall health. So let's start insisting that all schools measure it. One possibility would be to use the Comprehensive School Climate Inventory (CSCI), a research-based needs assessment that provides immediate feedback on how students, parents and school personnel perceive their school's overall environment for learning. Other useful measures would clearly emerge over time as well. And then in this and the other categories, an ongoing role of the federal government would be to share insights about measurement and the use of the scorecard across states and communities, so information could be funneled back throughout the system and create a reciprocal flow of information that improves the quality of all schools.
4. DEMOCRATIC PRACTICES
In a school setting, cultivating democratic practices doesn't mean turning the asylum over to the inmates. To create a climate where people feel both empowered and protected, you don't start by just telling everyone that they're free. You do, however, make helping people learn how to exercise freedom responsibly a foundational goal.
Before that vision can become a reality, we must encourage educators to ensure that the central elements of our social covenant are also in place in our schools: a clear sense of structure and shared identity on one hand, and an unwavering commitment to individual freedom on the other.
To help create such environments, we should gauge the extent to which our schools are equipping young people with the understanding, motivation and skills they need to become active, visible contributors to the common good.
Schools can do so by measuring the extent to which:
• Administrators have established structures and/or accorded meaningful roles in decision-making to students, parents, staff and community members.
• Students are routinely encouraged throughout the curriculum to agree and disagree honestly and respectfully.
• The school encourages people to model democratic principles, practices and policies in their daily work and interactions with others.
• The school's mission statement clearly addresses the democratic purposes of education.
• The community is committed to ensuring that religious liberty rights are protected for persons of all faiths and none.
• Students understand how to participate in the political process and institutions that shape public policy.
• Students take public action on personally meaningful issues and concerns.
Some may say this issue is not worthy of its own category. And yet our public school system is the only institution we have that is guaranteed to reach 90 percent of every succeeding generation, that is governed by public authority, and that was founded with the explicit mission of preparing young people to be active and responsible citizens in a democracy. Isn't it time we started evaluating the extent to which our schools are fulfilling their civic mission?
5. EQUITY
To ensure greater equity - by which I mean reducing the predictive value sociocultural and economic characteristics have on student achievement - we must improve the performance of our public schools and strengthen the effectiveness of our civic activism at the same time.
These challenges are interdependent, and will remain so. Indeed, the poorest and least fortunate in our country are not just the least likely to succeed academically -- they are also the most disenfranchised from our political process.
Therefore, to measure their commitment to equity (of resources and opportunity), school leaders should consider tracking the extent to which:
• The aspirations, strengths and weaknesses of each student are known by at least one member of the school staff.
• The school actively collaborates with its students' families as partners in the students' education.
• The school's pupil nondiscrimination policies and complaint procedures are comprehensive and effective.
• Staff and students are aware of these policies and complaint procedures and act in accordance with them.
• Teachers know and can use a rich variety of strategies to identify and accommodate individual learning styles and strengthen each student's ability to learn in diverse ways.
• The school provides its students with equal access to well-qualified teachers; strong curriculum opportunities; books, materials, and equipment (including science labs and computers); and adequate facilities.
• The school believes passionately in empowering students, families and community members to be contributing participants in their education, their community and the diverse society in which we live.
Fifty-five years ago, the United States Supreme Court's unanimous ruling in Brown v. Board of Education captured the most hopeful strains of the American narrative: working within a system of laws to extend the promise of freedom, more fairly and fully, to each succeeding generation. "In the field of public education," the unanimous Court wrote, "the doctrine of 'separate but equal' has no place," and the opportunity to learn "is a right which must be made available to all on equal terms."
I believe President Obama is sincerely committed to fulfilling the decades-old promise of the Brown decision. He can't do anything, however, until we as a nation invest in a clear, flexible and balanced system for evaluating and improving our nation's schools.
I think this scorecard would be a great place to start. What do you think?
Tuesday, February 02, 2010
Chocolate’s biographer reveals its tasty secrets
I'm really glad to have found out about Kara Briggs' American Indian News Service. Here's is a cool piece about the history of chocolate, a theme that has interested me since living in Mexico during the 2007-08 year.
Angela
Angela
STAAR to replace TAKS
STAAR to replace TAKS
AUSTIN – Commissioner of Education Robert Scott announced today that the next generation of student tests will be called the State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness or STAAR.
STAAR will replace the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills (TAKS), which is the criterion-reference assessment program that has been in place since 2003.
The STAAR name, pronounced the same as star, will be used for the 12 end-of-course assessments mandated by SB 1031 in 2007 and the new grade 3-8 assessments mandated by HB 3 in the 2009 legislative session.
The new tests will be used beginning in the 2011-2012 school year. Students in the graduating Class of 2015, who are currently in seventh grade, will be the first students who must meet the end-of-course testing requirements, as well as pass their classes, in order to earn a diploma.
The new tests will be significantly more rigorous than previous tests and will measure a child’s performance, as well as academic growth.
The grade 3-8 STAAR tests in reading and mathematics, by law, must be linked from grade to grade to performance expectations for the English III and Algebra II end-of-course assessments.
During a speech at the Texas Association of School Administrators’ Midwinter Conference in Austin, Scott also said the last TAKS-based school accountability ratings will be issued in 2011. Ratings will be suspended in 2012 while a new accountability system is developed.
The new state rating system will debut in 2013.
History of the Texas testing program
Texas Assessment of Basic Skills (TABS)– First state-mandated test, in use from 1980-1985, administered to students in grades 3, 5 and 9 in reading, mathematics and writing.
Texas Educational Assessment of Minimum Skills (TEAMS) – In use from 1986-1990, tested reading, mathematics and writing in grades 1, 3, 5, 7, 9 and 11; first state test students were required to pass to earn a diploma.
Texas Assessment of Academic Skills (TAAS) – In use from 1990-2002, tested reading, mathematics and writing, ultimately given to students in grades 3-8 and 10, additionally science and social studies tested at eighth grade, Spanish-language tests available for students in grades 3-6, four end-of-course exams provide optional method for meeting graduation requirements.
Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills (TAKS) – In use from 2003 to present, assesses mathematics, reading, writing, English language arts, science and social studies, students tested in grades 3-11; promotion tied to test results for students in grades 3, 5 and 8; graduation requirements expanded to include English language arts, mathematics, science and social studies.
AUSTIN – Commissioner of Education Robert Scott announced today that the next generation of student tests will be called the State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness or STAAR.
STAAR will replace the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills (TAKS), which is the criterion-reference assessment program that has been in place since 2003.
The STAAR name, pronounced the same as star, will be used for the 12 end-of-course assessments mandated by SB 1031 in 2007 and the new grade 3-8 assessments mandated by HB 3 in the 2009 legislative session.
The new tests will be used beginning in the 2011-2012 school year. Students in the graduating Class of 2015, who are currently in seventh grade, will be the first students who must meet the end-of-course testing requirements, as well as pass their classes, in order to earn a diploma.
The new tests will be significantly more rigorous than previous tests and will measure a child’s performance, as well as academic growth.
The grade 3-8 STAAR tests in reading and mathematics, by law, must be linked from grade to grade to performance expectations for the English III and Algebra II end-of-course assessments.
During a speech at the Texas Association of School Administrators’ Midwinter Conference in Austin, Scott also said the last TAKS-based school accountability ratings will be issued in 2011. Ratings will be suspended in 2012 while a new accountability system is developed.
The new state rating system will debut in 2013.
History of the Texas testing program
Texas Assessment of Basic Skills (TABS)– First state-mandated test, in use from 1980-1985, administered to students in grades 3, 5 and 9 in reading, mathematics and writing.
Texas Educational Assessment of Minimum Skills (TEAMS) – In use from 1986-1990, tested reading, mathematics and writing in grades 1, 3, 5, 7, 9 and 11; first state test students were required to pass to earn a diploma.
Texas Assessment of Academic Skills (TAAS) – In use from 1990-2002, tested reading, mathematics and writing, ultimately given to students in grades 3-8 and 10, additionally science and social studies tested at eighth grade, Spanish-language tests available for students in grades 3-6, four end-of-course exams provide optional method for meeting graduation requirements.
Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills (TAKS) – In use from 2003 to present, assesses mathematics, reading, writing, English language arts, science and social studies, students tested in grades 3-11; promotion tied to test results for students in grades 3, 5 and 8; graduation requirements expanded to include English language arts, mathematics, science and social studies.
Good News! Education Blog Ranking and Resources
Hi,
We posted an article, "50 Best Blogs for Education Leaders” (http://www.onlineuniversities.com/blog/2010/02/50-best-blogs-for-education-leaders/), and I thought that you or your readers might find it appealing.
I am happy to let you know that your site has been included in this list.
Thanks for your time!
Carol Brown
We posted an article, "50 Best Blogs for Education Leaders” (http://www.onlineuniversities.com/blog/2010/02/50-best-blogs-for-education-leaders/), and I thought that you or your readers might find it appealing.
I am happy to let you know that your site has been included in this list.
Thanks for your time!
Carol Brown
Monday, February 01, 2010
Obama to Seek Sweeping Change in ‘No Child’ Law
February 1, 2010
Obama to Seek Sweeping Change in ‘No Child’ Law
By SAM DILLON
The Obama administration is proposing a sweeping overhaul of President Bush’s signature education law, No Child Left Behind, and will call for broad changes in how schools are judged to be succeeding or failing, as well as for the elimination of the law’s 2014 deadline for bringing every American child to academic proficiency.
Educators who have been briefed by administration officials said the proposals for changes in the main law governing the federal role in public schools would eliminate or rework many of the provisions that teachers’ unions, associations of principals, school boards and other groups have found most objectionable.
Yet the administration is not planning to abandon the law’s commitments to closing the achievement gap between minority and white students and to encouraging teacher quality.
Significantly, said those who have been briefed, the White House wants to change federal financing formulas so that a portion of the money is awarded based on academic progress, rather than by formulas that apportion money to districts according to their numbers of students, especially poor students. The well-worn formulas for distributing tens of billions of dollars in federal aid have, for decades, been a mainstay of the annual budgeting process in the nation’s 14,000 school districts.
Peter Cunningham, a Department of Education spokesman, acknowledged that the administration was planning to ask Congress for broad changes to the education law, but declined to describe the changes specifically.
He said that although the administration had developed various proposals, it would solicit input from Congressional leaders of both parties in coming weeks to create legislative language that can attract bipartisan support. Some details of the president’s proposals are expected to be made public on Monday, when the president outlines his $3.8 trillion budget for the 2011 fiscal year.
The changes would have to be approved by Congress, which has been at a stalemate for years over how to change the policy.
Currently the education law requires the nation’s 98,000 public schools to make “adequate yearly progress” as measured by student test scores. Schools that miss their targets in reading and math must offer students the opportunity to transfer to other schools and free after-school tutoring. Schools that repeatedly miss targets face harsher sanctions, which can include staff dismissals and closings. All students are required to be proficient by 2014.
Educators have complained loudly in the eight years since the law was signed that it was branding tens of thousands of schools as failing but not forcing them to change.
The secretary of education, Arne Duncan, foreshadowed the elimination of the 2014 deadline in a September speech, referring to it as a “utopian goal,” and administration officials have since made clear that they want the deadline eliminated. In recent meetings with representatives of education groups, Department of Education officials have said they also want to eliminate the school ratings system built on making “adequate yearly progress” on student test scores.
“They were very clear with us that they would change the metric, dropping adequate yearly progress and basing a new system on another picture of performance based on judging schools in a more nuanced way,” said Bruce Hunter, director of public policy for the American Association of School Administrators, who attended one of the meetings.
The current system issues the equivalent of a pass-fail report card for every school each year, an evaluation that administration officials say fails to differentiate among chaotic schools in chronic failure, schools that are helping low-scoring students improve and high-performing suburban schools that nonetheless appear to be neglecting some low-scoring students.
Instead, under the administration’s proposals, a new accountability system would divide schools into more categories, offering recognition to those that are succeeding and providing large new amounts of money to help improve or close failing schools.
A new goal, which would replace the 2014 universal proficiency deadline, would be for all students to leave high school “college or career ready.” Currently more than 40 states are collaborating, in an effort coordinated by the National Governors Association and encouraged by the administration, to write common standards defining what it means to be a graduate from high school ready for college or a career.
The new standards will also define what students need to learn in earlier grades to advance successfully toward high school graduation.
The administration has already made its mark on education through Race to the Top, a federal grant program in which 40 states are competing for $4 billion in education money included in last year’s federal stimulus bill. In his State of the Union address, Mr. Obama hailed the results so far of that competition, which has persuaded states from Rhode Island to California to make changes in their education laws. States that prohibit the use of test scores in teacher evaluations, for example, are not eligible for the funds. The competition has also encouraged states to open the door to more charter schools, which receive public money but are run by independent groups.
Now the administration hopes to apply similar conditions to the distribution of the billions of dollars that the Department of Education hands out to states and districts as part of its annual budget.
“They want to recast the law so that it is as close to Race to the Top as they can get it, making the money conditional on districts’ taking action to improve schools,” said Jack Jennings, president of the Center on Education Policy, who attended a recent meeting at which administration officials outlined their plans in broad strokes. “Right now most federal money goes out in formulas, so schools know how much they’ll get, and then use it to provide services for poor children. The department thinks that’s become too much of an entitlement. They want to upend that scheme by making states and districts pledge to take actions the administration considers reform, before they get the money.”
One section of the current Bush-era law has required states to certify that all teachers are highly qualified, based on their college coursework and state-issued credentials. In the Race to the Top competition, the administration has required participating states to develop the capability to evaluate teachers based on student test data, at least in part, and on whether teachers are successful in raising student achievement.
Educators who have talked to the administration said the officials appeared to be considering inserting similar provisions into the main education law, by requiring the use of student data in teacher evaluation systems as a condition for receiving federal education money. Mr. Duncan has publicly endorsed such an approach, Mr. Cunningham said.
The education law has been praised for focusing attention on achievement gaps, but it has also generated tremendous opposition, especially from educators, who contend that it sets impossible goals for students and schools and humiliates students and educators when they fall short. The law has, to date, labeled some 30,000 schools as “in need of improvement,” a euphemism for failing, but states and districts have done little to change them.
The last serious attempt to rewrite the law was in 2007. That effort collapsed, partly because teachers’ unions and other educator groups opposed an effort to incorporate merit pay provisions into a rewritten law. Earlier this month, Mr. Duncan and more than a dozen other administration officials took steps toward organizing a new rewrite, meeting with the Democratic chairmen and ranking Republican members of the education committees in both houses of Congress.
Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company
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Obama to Seek Sweeping Change in ‘No Child’ Law
By SAM DILLON
The Obama administration is proposing a sweeping overhaul of President Bush’s signature education law, No Child Left Behind, and will call for broad changes in how schools are judged to be succeeding or failing, as well as for the elimination of the law’s 2014 deadline for bringing every American child to academic proficiency.
Educators who have been briefed by administration officials said the proposals for changes in the main law governing the federal role in public schools would eliminate or rework many of the provisions that teachers’ unions, associations of principals, school boards and other groups have found most objectionable.
Yet the administration is not planning to abandon the law’s commitments to closing the achievement gap between minority and white students and to encouraging teacher quality.
Significantly, said those who have been briefed, the White House wants to change federal financing formulas so that a portion of the money is awarded based on academic progress, rather than by formulas that apportion money to districts according to their numbers of students, especially poor students. The well-worn formulas for distributing tens of billions of dollars in federal aid have, for decades, been a mainstay of the annual budgeting process in the nation’s 14,000 school districts.
Peter Cunningham, a Department of Education spokesman, acknowledged that the administration was planning to ask Congress for broad changes to the education law, but declined to describe the changes specifically.
He said that although the administration had developed various proposals, it would solicit input from Congressional leaders of both parties in coming weeks to create legislative language that can attract bipartisan support. Some details of the president’s proposals are expected to be made public on Monday, when the president outlines his $3.8 trillion budget for the 2011 fiscal year.
The changes would have to be approved by Congress, which has been at a stalemate for years over how to change the policy.
Currently the education law requires the nation’s 98,000 public schools to make “adequate yearly progress” as measured by student test scores. Schools that miss their targets in reading and math must offer students the opportunity to transfer to other schools and free after-school tutoring. Schools that repeatedly miss targets face harsher sanctions, which can include staff dismissals and closings. All students are required to be proficient by 2014.
Educators have complained loudly in the eight years since the law was signed that it was branding tens of thousands of schools as failing but not forcing them to change.
The secretary of education, Arne Duncan, foreshadowed the elimination of the 2014 deadline in a September speech, referring to it as a “utopian goal,” and administration officials have since made clear that they want the deadline eliminated. In recent meetings with representatives of education groups, Department of Education officials have said they also want to eliminate the school ratings system built on making “adequate yearly progress” on student test scores.
“They were very clear with us that they would change the metric, dropping adequate yearly progress and basing a new system on another picture of performance based on judging schools in a more nuanced way,” said Bruce Hunter, director of public policy for the American Association of School Administrators, who attended one of the meetings.
The current system issues the equivalent of a pass-fail report card for every school each year, an evaluation that administration officials say fails to differentiate among chaotic schools in chronic failure, schools that are helping low-scoring students improve and high-performing suburban schools that nonetheless appear to be neglecting some low-scoring students.
Instead, under the administration’s proposals, a new accountability system would divide schools into more categories, offering recognition to those that are succeeding and providing large new amounts of money to help improve or close failing schools.
A new goal, which would replace the 2014 universal proficiency deadline, would be for all students to leave high school “college or career ready.” Currently more than 40 states are collaborating, in an effort coordinated by the National Governors Association and encouraged by the administration, to write common standards defining what it means to be a graduate from high school ready for college or a career.
The new standards will also define what students need to learn in earlier grades to advance successfully toward high school graduation.
The administration has already made its mark on education through Race to the Top, a federal grant program in which 40 states are competing for $4 billion in education money included in last year’s federal stimulus bill. In his State of the Union address, Mr. Obama hailed the results so far of that competition, which has persuaded states from Rhode Island to California to make changes in their education laws. States that prohibit the use of test scores in teacher evaluations, for example, are not eligible for the funds. The competition has also encouraged states to open the door to more charter schools, which receive public money but are run by independent groups.
Now the administration hopes to apply similar conditions to the distribution of the billions of dollars that the Department of Education hands out to states and districts as part of its annual budget.
“They want to recast the law so that it is as close to Race to the Top as they can get it, making the money conditional on districts’ taking action to improve schools,” said Jack Jennings, president of the Center on Education Policy, who attended a recent meeting at which administration officials outlined their plans in broad strokes. “Right now most federal money goes out in formulas, so schools know how much they’ll get, and then use it to provide services for poor children. The department thinks that’s become too much of an entitlement. They want to upend that scheme by making states and districts pledge to take actions the administration considers reform, before they get the money.”
One section of the current Bush-era law has required states to certify that all teachers are highly qualified, based on their college coursework and state-issued credentials. In the Race to the Top competition, the administration has required participating states to develop the capability to evaluate teachers based on student test data, at least in part, and on whether teachers are successful in raising student achievement.
Educators who have talked to the administration said the officials appeared to be considering inserting similar provisions into the main education law, by requiring the use of student data in teacher evaluation systems as a condition for receiving federal education money. Mr. Duncan has publicly endorsed such an approach, Mr. Cunningham said.
The education law has been praised for focusing attention on achievement gaps, but it has also generated tremendous opposition, especially from educators, who contend that it sets impossible goals for students and schools and humiliates students and educators when they fall short. The law has, to date, labeled some 30,000 schools as “in need of improvement,” a euphemism for failing, but states and districts have done little to change them.
The last serious attempt to rewrite the law was in 2007. That effort collapsed, partly because teachers’ unions and other educator groups opposed an effort to incorporate merit pay provisions into a rewritten law. Earlier this month, Mr. Duncan and more than a dozen other administration officials took steps toward organizing a new rewrite, meeting with the Democratic chairmen and ranking Republican members of the education committees in both houses of Congress.
Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company
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The sit-ins that changed America
latimes.com
Opinion
The sit-ins that changed America
The civil rights movement was energized by these '60s-era protests.
By Andrew B. Lewis
January 31, 2010
The "sixties" were born on Feb. 1, 1960, 50 years ago this week, when four African American college students staged the first sit-in at a segregated lunch counter in Greensboro, N.C. Since then, the mythology of the '60s has dominated the idea of youthful activism.
Of the three big events of the early civil rights movement -- the 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education decision, the 1955-56 Montgomery bus boycott and the sit-ins -- the sit-ins have always been the least understood and, yet, the most important for today's young activists.
We forget how troubled the civil rights movement was in January 1960. It was six years after Brown, but fewer than 1 in 100 black students in the South attended an integrated school.
And during the four years after the end of the bus boycott, Martin Luther King Jr. struggled to build on that victory. Many worried that the civil rights movement had ground to a halt. Then Greensboro changed everything.
In the time before Twitter, the rapid spread of the sit-ins was shocking. The first sit-in was an impulsive act, led by college students. They spread to Nashville, Atlanta, Miami, Durham, N.C., and Little Rock, Ark. -- more than 70 cities and towns in eight weeks. By summer, more than 50,000 people had taken part in one.
At the time, this was not just the largest black protest against segregation ever; it was the largest outburst of civil disobedience in American history. The sit-ins rewrote the rules of protest. They were remarkably egalitarian: Everyone participated; everyone was in equal danger. And they went viral because they were easy to copy. All one needed for a sit-in was some friends and a commitment to a few simple principles of nonviolent protest.
Most important, the sit-ins were designed to highlight the immorality of segregation by forcing Southern policemen to arrest polite, well-dressed college students sitting quietly just trying to order a shake or a burger. The students believed deeply in Thoreau's idea that the only place for a just person in an unjust society is jail.
The contrast with King's early efforts was stark. He had worked hard during the bus boycott to prevent arrests. To his thinking, only protests that remained within the bounds of the law could win the war against Jim Crow. The NAACP similarly believed in the power of the courts to end school segregation. But such efforts were so bureaucratic that ordinary African Americans often felt more like observers than participants.
To their African American contemporaries, the college students seemed the unlikeliest group to revive the civil rights movement. Just three years earlier, E. Franklin Frazier, the eminent black sociologist, had condemned them for believing that "money and conspicuous consumption are more important than knowledge." What did Frazier miss?
He failed to see how the comfort of postwar affluence and popular culture bred agitation and activism as easily as it did indifference and apathy. The sit-ins owed more to Little Richard and Levi's than to Jesus and the Bible.
Youth culture in the '50s often made it seem that generation mattered more than race. After all, weren't African American couples sharing the dance floor with white ones on the hit teen show "American Bandstand"? Yet, in their everyday lives, black teens still felt the sting of segregation. The first thing the Greensboro Four did before starting their sit-in at Woolworth's was to purchase some school supplies at the store. If their money was good enough for pencils, why weren't they good enough to have a seat at the counter?
To many Americans, the sit-ins were unnerving. In a 1961 Gallup Poll, 57% of those who responded said the protests hurt the civil rights movement. Black elders such as King and NAACP head Roy Wilkins tried to control the sit-ins by co-opting the students as junior partners.
The students instead formed their own organization, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. SNCC soon emerged as the most dynamic, creative and influential civil rights organization in the '60s. It produced a generation of black leaders, including John Lewis, Julian Bond, Bob Moses, Stokely Carmichael, Marion Barry and dozens of others.
SNCC took the movement to the most violent reaches of the Deep South. Its aggressive tactics -- the courting of arrests and the willingness to risk beatings -- forced the confrontation with racial segregation that compelled congressional intervention. The great milestones of the movement -- the freedom rides, Freedom Summer, Selma, Birmingham -- grew from the tactical innovation of the sit-ins. King may have stirred the nation's soul with the movement's poetry, but SNCC moved it to action with the prose of its grass-roots organizing.
Fifty years later, my students tend to see SNCC's members as mythic figures, a "greatest generation" of activists whose achievements they cannot equal. But I remind them of what they have in common with the SNCC generation. Both have been condemned by adults for their materialism, pop culture and assumed political apathy. Both grew up in a period of relative prosperity that left them comfortable but also unsatisfied. Both came of age when new forms of communication -- TV then, the Internet now -- unsettled politics.
There are many lessons from the sit-ins relevant to the lives of today's young people. Before it was a bumper sticker, SNCC lived out the true meaning of "think globally, act locally." But the most important lesson is to stop looking at the '60s as the manual for modern activism. What made the sit-ins so powerful is how they broke away from the prevailing wisdom to create a new model for change. Look forward, not back, I tell them. It's not your parents' movement anymore.
Andrew B. Lewis is the author of "The Shadows of Youth: The Remarkable Journey of the Civil Rights Generation."
Copyright © 2010, The Los Angeles Times
Opinion
The sit-ins that changed America
The civil rights movement was energized by these '60s-era protests.
By Andrew B. Lewis
January 31, 2010
The "sixties" were born on Feb. 1, 1960, 50 years ago this week, when four African American college students staged the first sit-in at a segregated lunch counter in Greensboro, N.C. Since then, the mythology of the '60s has dominated the idea of youthful activism.
Of the three big events of the early civil rights movement -- the 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education decision, the 1955-56 Montgomery bus boycott and the sit-ins -- the sit-ins have always been the least understood and, yet, the most important for today's young activists.
We forget how troubled the civil rights movement was in January 1960. It was six years after Brown, but fewer than 1 in 100 black students in the South attended an integrated school.
And during the four years after the end of the bus boycott, Martin Luther King Jr. struggled to build on that victory. Many worried that the civil rights movement had ground to a halt. Then Greensboro changed everything.
In the time before Twitter, the rapid spread of the sit-ins was shocking. The first sit-in was an impulsive act, led by college students. They spread to Nashville, Atlanta, Miami, Durham, N.C., and Little Rock, Ark. -- more than 70 cities and towns in eight weeks. By summer, more than 50,000 people had taken part in one.
At the time, this was not just the largest black protest against segregation ever; it was the largest outburst of civil disobedience in American history. The sit-ins rewrote the rules of protest. They were remarkably egalitarian: Everyone participated; everyone was in equal danger. And they went viral because they were easy to copy. All one needed for a sit-in was some friends and a commitment to a few simple principles of nonviolent protest.
Most important, the sit-ins were designed to highlight the immorality of segregation by forcing Southern policemen to arrest polite, well-dressed college students sitting quietly just trying to order a shake or a burger. The students believed deeply in Thoreau's idea that the only place for a just person in an unjust society is jail.
The contrast with King's early efforts was stark. He had worked hard during the bus boycott to prevent arrests. To his thinking, only protests that remained within the bounds of the law could win the war against Jim Crow. The NAACP similarly believed in the power of the courts to end school segregation. But such efforts were so bureaucratic that ordinary African Americans often felt more like observers than participants.
To their African American contemporaries, the college students seemed the unlikeliest group to revive the civil rights movement. Just three years earlier, E. Franklin Frazier, the eminent black sociologist, had condemned them for believing that "money and conspicuous consumption are more important than knowledge." What did Frazier miss?
He failed to see how the comfort of postwar affluence and popular culture bred agitation and activism as easily as it did indifference and apathy. The sit-ins owed more to Little Richard and Levi's than to Jesus and the Bible.
Youth culture in the '50s often made it seem that generation mattered more than race. After all, weren't African American couples sharing the dance floor with white ones on the hit teen show "American Bandstand"? Yet, in their everyday lives, black teens still felt the sting of segregation. The first thing the Greensboro Four did before starting their sit-in at Woolworth's was to purchase some school supplies at the store. If their money was good enough for pencils, why weren't they good enough to have a seat at the counter?
To many Americans, the sit-ins were unnerving. In a 1961 Gallup Poll, 57% of those who responded said the protests hurt the civil rights movement. Black elders such as King and NAACP head Roy Wilkins tried to control the sit-ins by co-opting the students as junior partners.
The students instead formed their own organization, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. SNCC soon emerged as the most dynamic, creative and influential civil rights organization in the '60s. It produced a generation of black leaders, including John Lewis, Julian Bond, Bob Moses, Stokely Carmichael, Marion Barry and dozens of others.
SNCC took the movement to the most violent reaches of the Deep South. Its aggressive tactics -- the courting of arrests and the willingness to risk beatings -- forced the confrontation with racial segregation that compelled congressional intervention. The great milestones of the movement -- the freedom rides, Freedom Summer, Selma, Birmingham -- grew from the tactical innovation of the sit-ins. King may have stirred the nation's soul with the movement's poetry, but SNCC moved it to action with the prose of its grass-roots organizing.
Fifty years later, my students tend to see SNCC's members as mythic figures, a "greatest generation" of activists whose achievements they cannot equal. But I remind them of what they have in common with the SNCC generation. Both have been condemned by adults for their materialism, pop culture and assumed political apathy. Both grew up in a period of relative prosperity that left them comfortable but also unsatisfied. Both came of age when new forms of communication -- TV then, the Internet now -- unsettled politics.
There are many lessons from the sit-ins relevant to the lives of today's young people. Before it was a bumper sticker, SNCC lived out the true meaning of "think globally, act locally." But the most important lesson is to stop looking at the '60s as the manual for modern activism. What made the sit-ins so powerful is how they broke away from the prevailing wisdom to create a new model for change. Look forward, not back, I tell them. It's not your parents' movement anymore.
Andrew B. Lewis is the author of "The Shadows of Youth: The Remarkable Journey of the Civil Rights Generation."
Copyright © 2010, The Los Angeles Times
Confusion bars children's author from curriculum
Confusion bars children's author from curriculum
By TRACI SHURLEY
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Updated: 12:05 a.m. Monday, Jan. 25, 2010
Published: 2:06 p.m. Sunday, Jan. 24, 2010
What do the authors of the children's book "Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?" and a 2008 book called "Ethical Marxism: The Categorical Imperative of Liberation" have in common?
Both are named Bill Martin and, for now, neither is being added to Texas schoolbooks.
In their haste to sort out the state's social studies curriculum standards last week, the State Board of Education tossed children's author Martin, who died in 2004, from a proposal for the third-grade section. Board member Pat Hardy, who made the motion, cited books he had written for adults that contain "very strong critiques of capitalism and the American system."
Trouble is, the Bill Martin Jr. who wrote the "Brown Bear" series never wrote anything political, unless you count a book that taught kids how to say the Pledge of Allegiance, his friends said this week. The book on Marxism was written by Bill Martin, a philosophy professor at DePaul University in Chicago.
Bill Martin Jr.'s name would have been included on a list with author Laura Ingalls Wilder and artist Carmen Lomas Garza as examples of individuals who would be studied for their cultural contributions.
Hardy said she was trusting the research of another board member, Terri Leo, when she made her motion and comments about Martin's writing. Leo had sent her an e-mail earlier in the week, alerting her to Bill Martin Jr.'s listing on the Borders.com Web site as the author of "Ethical Marxism." Leo's note, however, also said she hadn't read the book.
"She said that that was what he wrote, and I said: 'Fine with me. It's a good enough reason for me to get rid of someone,'" said Hardy, who has complained vehemently about the volume of names being added to the curriculum standards.
In an e-mail exchange, Leo said she planned to make a motion to replace Bill Martin and sent Hardy a list of possible alternatives. Hardy said she thought she was doing what Leo wanted when she made the motion.
Leo, however, said she wasn't asking Hardy to make any motions. She said she didn't do any "research."
"Since I didn't check it out, I wasn't about to make the motion," Leo said, adding that she never meant for her "FYI" e-mail to Hardy to be spoken about in a public forum.
Hardy said that her interest was in paring down that list and that she didn't mean to offend anyone.
For some, however, the mix-up is an indicator of a larger problem with the way the elected board members have approached the update of state curriculum standards, also known as the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills.
Board members will take up social studies standards again in March. They plan to take a final vote on updates in May.
Hardy's motion is "a new low in terms of the group that's supposed to represent education having such faulty research and making such a false leap without substantiating what they're doing," said Michael Sampson, Martin's co-author on 30 children's books.
Sampson is a professor of early childhood education at the University of South Florida at St. Petersburg, Fla., but he used to work in Texas. He and Martin also traveled the country putting on educational conferences for teachers and children.
The social studies standards update, which started last spring when groups of educators met to suggest revisions, has brought criticism from the right and the left about politicizing the process. As trustees worked their way through a draft last week, political ideas like imperialism, communism and free enterprise were at the heart of some of the changes.
For example, member Don McLeroy, the board's conservative former chairman, suggested taking out mention of the first Red Scare, an anti-communism movement after World War I. He argued that it was short-lived, but Hardy appealed to him to realize the importance of the event, and it was kept in.
Hardy, who represents part of Tarrant County and Ellis, Johnson and Parker counties, clashed with her Republican colleagues in several areas. But she said she had never heard of Bill Martin Jr.'s work before receiving an e-mail from Leo.
A quick look on the Internet might add to the confusion.
The online bookseller Amazon.com links the names of the authors. However, a quick scroll down on the Ethical Marxism page on Amazon gives a brief description of the philosophy professor.
That Bill Martin was surprised to hear that his name had come up at the meeting in Austin.
"My own books don't seem to get out there in the world nearly as much as I'd like, so it is amusing that a trustee involved in this discussion in the Texas State Board of Education would even be aware of them," he said in an e-mail.
"But I imagine this trustee applied the same level of care in her inquiry on this question as she brings to the idea that young people cannot be exposed to criticisms of the capitalist system. So, a fine example for our youth," he wrote.
Tommy Thomason, director of the Texas Center for Community Journalism at Texas Christian University, also wasn't pleased. He read about Hardy's discussion in the Star-Telegram and contacted the paper for clarification. He also worked with Martin and considers it a tragedy his friend's name is being "besmirched."
He said Martin's only political agenda would be "supporting children and giving them wonderful literature they love to read."
___
January 25, 2010 01:05 AM EST
Copyright 2010, The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
By TRACI SHURLEY
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Updated: 12:05 a.m. Monday, Jan. 25, 2010
Published: 2:06 p.m. Sunday, Jan. 24, 2010
What do the authors of the children's book "Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?" and a 2008 book called "Ethical Marxism: The Categorical Imperative of Liberation" have in common?
Both are named Bill Martin and, for now, neither is being added to Texas schoolbooks.
In their haste to sort out the state's social studies curriculum standards last week, the State Board of Education tossed children's author Martin, who died in 2004, from a proposal for the third-grade section. Board member Pat Hardy, who made the motion, cited books he had written for adults that contain "very strong critiques of capitalism and the American system."
Trouble is, the Bill Martin Jr. who wrote the "Brown Bear" series never wrote anything political, unless you count a book that taught kids how to say the Pledge of Allegiance, his friends said this week. The book on Marxism was written by Bill Martin, a philosophy professor at DePaul University in Chicago.
Bill Martin Jr.'s name would have been included on a list with author Laura Ingalls Wilder and artist Carmen Lomas Garza as examples of individuals who would be studied for their cultural contributions.
Hardy said she was trusting the research of another board member, Terri Leo, when she made her motion and comments about Martin's writing. Leo had sent her an e-mail earlier in the week, alerting her to Bill Martin Jr.'s listing on the Borders.com Web site as the author of "Ethical Marxism." Leo's note, however, also said she hadn't read the book.
"She said that that was what he wrote, and I said: 'Fine with me. It's a good enough reason for me to get rid of someone,'" said Hardy, who has complained vehemently about the volume of names being added to the curriculum standards.
In an e-mail exchange, Leo said she planned to make a motion to replace Bill Martin and sent Hardy a list of possible alternatives. Hardy said she thought she was doing what Leo wanted when she made the motion.
Leo, however, said she wasn't asking Hardy to make any motions. She said she didn't do any "research."
"Since I didn't check it out, I wasn't about to make the motion," Leo said, adding that she never meant for her "FYI" e-mail to Hardy to be spoken about in a public forum.
Hardy said that her interest was in paring down that list and that she didn't mean to offend anyone.
For some, however, the mix-up is an indicator of a larger problem with the way the elected board members have approached the update of state curriculum standards, also known as the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills.
Board members will take up social studies standards again in March. They plan to take a final vote on updates in May.
Hardy's motion is "a new low in terms of the group that's supposed to represent education having such faulty research and making such a false leap without substantiating what they're doing," said Michael Sampson, Martin's co-author on 30 children's books.
Sampson is a professor of early childhood education at the University of South Florida at St. Petersburg, Fla., but he used to work in Texas. He and Martin also traveled the country putting on educational conferences for teachers and children.
The social studies standards update, which started last spring when groups of educators met to suggest revisions, has brought criticism from the right and the left about politicizing the process. As trustees worked their way through a draft last week, political ideas like imperialism, communism and free enterprise were at the heart of some of the changes.
For example, member Don McLeroy, the board's conservative former chairman, suggested taking out mention of the first Red Scare, an anti-communism movement after World War I. He argued that it was short-lived, but Hardy appealed to him to realize the importance of the event, and it was kept in.
Hardy, who represents part of Tarrant County and Ellis, Johnson and Parker counties, clashed with her Republican colleagues in several areas. But she said she had never heard of Bill Martin Jr.'s work before receiving an e-mail from Leo.
A quick look on the Internet might add to the confusion.
The online bookseller Amazon.com links the names of the authors. However, a quick scroll down on the Ethical Marxism page on Amazon gives a brief description of the philosophy professor.
That Bill Martin was surprised to hear that his name had come up at the meeting in Austin.
"My own books don't seem to get out there in the world nearly as much as I'd like, so it is amusing that a trustee involved in this discussion in the Texas State Board of Education would even be aware of them," he said in an e-mail.
"But I imagine this trustee applied the same level of care in her inquiry on this question as she brings to the idea that young people cannot be exposed to criticisms of the capitalist system. So, a fine example for our youth," he wrote.
Tommy Thomason, director of the Texas Center for Community Journalism at Texas Christian University, also wasn't pleased. He read about Hardy's discussion in the Star-Telegram and contacted the paper for clarification. He also worked with Martin and considers it a tragedy his friend's name is being "besmirched."
He said Martin's only political agenda would be "supporting children and giving them wonderful literature they love to read."
___
January 25, 2010 01:05 AM EST
Copyright 2010, The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
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