This blog on Texas education contains posts on higher education, as well as preK-12 policy accountability, testing, bilingual education, immigration, school finance, race, class, and gender issues at both the state and national level. It also represents my digital footprint, of life and career, as a community-engaged scholar in Texas.
A lot brewing right now in Dallas regarding a proposal to go toward "home rule," that I am told means mayorial control of schools (even though Rep. Villalba cited within suggests something differently). A discourse on equity is not present; if anything, communities of color are already turned off by both the proposal (what they know of it) and the way that it is getting done—foisted on them.
"A never-before-used 1995 state law allows school districts to switch to a home-rule format. If 5 percent of DISD’s registered voters sign the petition, the school board will have to name 15 people to a commission to rewrite the district’s charter.
The charter would then have to be approved by local voters and the state education commissioner. Organizers hope to have it on the November ballot."
Inasmuch this is indeed about mayorial control, this is a reactionary and very concerning proposal as it de-democratizes public schooling. It eliminates those structures like our school boards about which people have a vote. Angela
Backers of an effort to convert Dallas ISD to a home-rule district
Thursday night struggled to win over a crowd of frustrated parents,
teachers and activists.
State Rep. Jason Villalba, Dallas City
Council member Jennifer Staubach Gates and others leading a town hall
meeting on the issue in northwest Dallas were interrupted on several
occasions. They were asked why the campaign is moving so fast, who is
funding it, what a new governance structure might look like, and why
none of their promotional materials were published in Spanish.
Attendees appeared largely unsatisfied with the answers.
“We’re
at a crossroads here,” said Villalba, R-Dallas, who is also a DISD
parent. “This is a new process. We need your input. This is not
something that is meant to be done by billionaires from another place.
This is meant to be done by you.”
Villalba acknowledged that many
concerns appear to be centered on possible governance changes. He said
that he would not support a school board with members who are all
appointed by the mayor.
“I can tell you right now: Having appointees appointed solely by the mayor is off the table,” he said.
The
session at the Preston Royal Library was in a hot room that was not
nearly large enough to accommodate the crowd that showed up. It was one
of three town hall meetings held Thursday night by Support Our Public
Schools, the group leading the initiative. The organization launched a
petition drive this month to change DISD to a home-rule district.
Villalba
and Gates hosted the event. Both have endorsed the campaign. The other
meetings were in South Dallas and Pleasant Grove.
Rene Martinez,
leader of the District 3 chapter of the League of United Latin American
Citizens, said the Pleasant Grove meeting was orderly. But he said the
home-rule supporters “got kind of shellacked in terms of a lot of
opposition.”
Similar issues were raised at that meeting, Martinez said.
“What is the rush on this thing?” he said. “Why not start the process again and include people? Who’s behind this?”
Mayor
Mike Rawlings and other supporters say that changing to home-rule would
free the district from burdensome state rules. It could mean an earlier
school start date and a modified curriculum, though the STAAR state
exams would still be required.
Three sources told The Dallas Morning News
this month that the idea was pitched to them with a goal of
establishing a new governance structure, perhaps under the mayor’s
oversight. Rawlings has declined to publicly share specific goals,
saying the process would start with a blank sheet of paper and community
input.
A never-before-used 1995 state law allows school districts
to switch to a home-rule format. If 5 percent of DISD’s registered
voters sign the petition, the school board will have to name 15 people
to a commission to rewrite the district’s charter.
The charter
would then have to be approved by local voters and the state education
commissioner. Organizers hope to have it on the November ballot.
Support
Our Public Schools, also known as SOPS, is financially supported by
Hillcrest High graduate John Arnold, a Houston philanthropist and former
Enron trader and hedge fund manager, and other, anonymous donors.
State
records show the group was formed in November as a tax-exempt 501(c)(4)
nonprofit. Louisa Meyer, chair of the Dallas ISD Citizens Budget Review
Commission, is one of the organization’s five board members. She was
among the meeting leaders at the northwest Dallas meeting.
She addressed whether the names of donors would be publicized.
“It’s the privilege of the donors to remain anonymous,” Meyer said, to a chorus of boos.
SOPS
has declined to say how many of the required 24,459 signatures it has
collected since launching the drive earlier this month.
Thursday’s
forum followed a tough meeting last week between Rawlings and Hispanic
leaders at an East Dallas church. At that gathering, the mayor spoke for
about 10 minutes and was interrupted twice. He walked out after the
second interruption.
On Wednesday, DISD Superintendent Mike Miles
said he believed his schools could improve without becoming a home-rule
district. Miles declined to take an official position on the home-rule
effort, but he shot down the key reasons that advocates are citing for
the campaign. Specifically, he said state law, the Texas Education
Agency and the DISD school board have not stood in the way of his
efforts to overhaul the district.
That’s not consistent with the
message Rawlings, a staunch Miles ally, has been spreading in his
attempt to sell people on home-rule. The mayor and others have argued
that the district has performed so badly that it cannot be fixed without
a radical transformation.
Thursday’s meeting was disrupted
several times by frustrated opponents of the plan. In almost every case,
the meeting organizers ignored them, saying that only questions that
were written down would be answered.
Organizers did answer
numerous written questions, but many others could not be addressed in
the allotted hour. They promised to post the questions and answers on
the group's Facebook page.
Local activist Carlos Quintanilla
refused to be ignored. He demanded to know why the meetings did not also
include opponents of the home-rule effort.
“Because this is not a debate,” Villalba said. “Tonight is a town hall forum.”
Quintanilla promised: “We’re not going to make it easy for you!”
Things are tense right now in Hempstead, Texas (located around fifty miles northwest of Houston) after a principal lost her job for announcing that students were not to speak Spanish. The backlash of this decision is concerning with the school Superintendent herself, worried about her safety. Vandals not only damaged the brakes on 3 HISD school buses, they also left a bedraggled mutilated cat by one of them.
"A lot of this sounds like Mississippi in the 1950s and '60s," Pinedo said during Monday night's school board meeting, where the decision was made not to renew Lacey's contract.
Folks have known for decades now that Latinos were to become—and are now—a demographic majority. It is unfortunate that for a community and state with such a very long history with Mexicans and Mexican Americans, that they should react or feel so very threatened and angry about this. Prejudices die hard, lamentably.
-Angela
Principal who told kids not to speak Spanish will lose job
Hempstead issue sharpens focus on rising state Latino enrollment
By Lisa Gray | March 18, 2014 | Updated: March 18, 2014 8:46pm
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HEMPSTEAD - The Hempstead school board won't renew the contract of a principal who instructed her students not to speak Spanish, in a rapidly-evolving district where more than half of the students, like many Texas schools, are now Hispanic.
Hempstead Middle School Principal Amy Lacey was placed on paid administrative leave in December after reportedly announcing, via intercom, that students were not to speak Spanish on the school's campus. The Hispanic population of the rural area, roughly 50 miles northwest of Houston, is growing quickly, and Latino advocates say that it's important to allow Spanish in public schools.
"When you start banning aspects of ethnicity or cultural identity," says Augustin Pinedo, director of the League of United Latin American Citizens Region 18, "it sends the message that the child is not wanted: 'We don't want your color. We don't want your kind.' They then tend to drop out early."
Such fast growth is pervasive in Texas, says Steve Murdock, a professor at Rice University and director of the Hobby Center for the Study of Texas. Half of all Texas public-school students are now Hispanic, he notes. "When you look at issues related to education in Texas, to a great extent, you're looking at the education of Hispanic children."
Similar growth patterns, he says, hold true for the rest of the United States: "It's not just Texas."
Civil rights advocates say Lacey's suspension may have set off a campaign to intimidate Hispanics, including the district's superintendent, Delma Flores-Smith. They are calling for the Department of Justice and the FBI to investigate possible civil rights violations. An FBI spokesman would not confirm an investigation.
Flores-Smith reports that she's seen strangers watching her house and taking photos. She says vandals have trashed her yard, and someone has rifled through her garbage. She is worried about her safety.
Last month, school employees found that vandals had damaged the brakes of three Hempstead Independent School District buses and had left behind the bedraggled remains of a dead cat.
Hate crimes?
A bus with visibly severed brake lines didn't leave the bus barn that morning. But two other buses, whose air-brake lines had been subtly nicked, carried children to school before the damage was discovered. Police investigated but didn't identify any suspects.
"A lot of this sounds like Mississippi in the 1950s and '60s," Pinedo said during Monday night's school board meeting, where the decision was made not to renew Lacey's contract.
Pinedo acknowledged that there's no hard evidence that the incidents are related or that they're hate crimes.
"But when the lives of children are put in danger, that's the bottom line," he said. "We don't know what the reasons are. Rather than guess, we're asking the FBI to step in."
He said LULAC and the Mexican American Legal Defense Fund have asked the Department of Justice to investigate possible civil rights violations.
"The whole world is watching," said Tony Diaz, head of the Houston-based radio show Nuestra Palabra and founder of the advocacy group Librotraficantes. "Banning Spanish is a national issue."
"We got a lot of calls about activity in Hempstead," said Cynthia Coles, who represented the Greater Houston Coalition for Justice. "We came to support this board, this superintendent."
They also note that there's no evidence that speaking Spanish hampers learning English, and note that in most of the rest of the world, it's common to speak two or more languages.
At the school district's board meeting in January, Pinedo read a list of American Founding Fathers who spoke multiple languages. They included Benjamin Franklin (French) and Thomas Jefferson (French, Italian, Spanish and Latin).
Business chief ousted
In other action at the meeting Monday, the board voted not to renew the contract of longtime business manager Sharon Loukanis. In October the board had placed her on leave while investigating financial irregularities including work allegedly steered to the plumbing company owned by Loukanis' husband.
Both Lacey's and Loukanis' contracts will expire at the end of the school year.
Before the board's vote, former school board member Kay Kloecker argued that Lacey and Loukanis should be reinstated. Lacey and Loukanis, she said, "continue to get paychecks, but we're paying consultants to do their jobs. The public deserves an explanation for why we haven't had them come back to work when it's been shown that none of the allegations is true."
Lacey said the terms of her leave don't allow her to comment.
Outside the board meeting, Kloecker said that the problem was Flores-Smith, not issues of culture or race.
"We've been a predominantly Hispanic district for several years now," she said. "But we never had a problem until she came." Flores-Smith started the job in August.
After the vote, Flores-Smith expressed satisfaction. "I'm hoping everything will die down now," she said. "We need to get back to peaceful living. And education."
Over the last several days, 230 American men and women competed
against and socialized with athletes from 87 other nations at the 2014
Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia.
The Olympics are not only a
test of individuals’ athletic prowess, but also a test of nations’ good
will, collaboration and diplomacy — and ability to find a common
language.
As the late Nelson Mandela said, “If you talk to a man
in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him
in his language, that goes to his heart.”
To provide our children an excellent education, and to keep
America competitive economically, we would do well to heed his words.
Today, a world-class education means learning to speak, read and write languages in addition to English.
In
an interconnected, interdependent global economy, we must prepare our
children for a future in which their social and economic success will
depend on their ability to understand diverse perspectives and
communicate with people from other cultures and language groups. This
isn’t a matter of getting ahead — it’s a matter of catching up.
It is common for students in other countries to be required to study two or three languages in addition to their own.
In
our country, we have a valuable yet untapped resource within the
estimated 4.6 million students learning English — the fastest-growing
student population in our schools. These students come to school already
speaking a variety of home languages, most commonly Spanish,
Vietnamese, Chinese, Arabic or Hmong.
These languages are
significant not only to our economic competitiveness but also to our
nation’s security. The heritage languages our English learners bring to
school are major assets to preserve and value.
Many schools and communities across the country have established
programs to encourage mastery of multiple languages. In effective
dual-language classrooms, English learners and English-proficient
classmates are provided opportunities to learn academic content while
simultaneously becoming proficient in both languages.
That’s why
our department is encouraging innovations in education of English
learners, in part by making it a priority in the federal Investing in
Innovation (i3) program.
The extraordinary opportunities — and
needs — of our English learner population were the focus of the
three-day National Association for Bilingual Education (NABE)
conference, which convened last week and drew over a thousand
participants.
There, leaders from our department described the department’s
commitment and met with international leaders to improve cross-border
educational coordination.
Educating speakers of other languages in
English, and encouraging mastery of multiple languages, has long been
important to America’s competitiveness — and will be increasingly vital
in the years to come.
We challenge our schools and communities to invest in our future leaders with biliteracy and multiliteracy skills.
Arne
Duncan is U.S. secretary of Education. Libia S. Gil is assistant deputy
secretary of the Office of English Language Acquisition in the
Department of Education.
About a month ago, The New York Times’s Nicholas Kristof wrote a much-discussed column
calling for academics to take on a greater role in public life. Most
professors, he lamented, “just don’t matter in today’s great debates,”
having instead burrowed into rabbit holes of hyper-specialization. PhD
programs, he wrote, “have fostered a culture that glorifies arcane
unintelligibility while disdaining impact and audience.” Professors,
Kristof pleaded, “don’t cloister yourselves like medieval monks—we need
you!”
Shortly before his column came out, Carole Vance and Kim Hopper,
longtime professors at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public
Health, learned that they were losing their jobs because they hadn’t
brought in enough grant money. Both, ironically, are models for the sort
of publicly engaged intellectual Kristof wants to see more of. Vance
has done pioneering work on the intersection of gender, health and human
rights. “She has been a mentor and a leading influence on generations
of scholars as well as activists and practitioners,” says Rebecca
Schleifer, the former advocacy director for the health and human rights
division at Human Rights Watch. Hopper, who divides his time between
Columbia and the Nathan S. Kline Institute for Psychiatric Research, is
both an advocate for the homeless and one of the nation’s foremost
scholars on homelessness. Last year, American Anthropologist
ran a piece highlighting his work beyond academia, noting that Hopper
“has long urged anthropologists to take part in public debates, to
translate ethnographic findings into policy proposals.”
We were sitting in his office, Ted Foss and I, on the third floor of
Judd Hall at the University of Chicago. Foss is the associate director
of the Center for East Asian Studies, a classic area studies program
that gathers under its roof specialists in various disciplines who work
on China, Korea and Japan. Above us, on the fourth floor, were the
offices and seminar room of the university’s Confucius Institute, which
opened its doors in 2010. A Confucius Institute is an academic unit that
provides accredited instruction in Chinese language and culture and
sponsors a variety of extracurricular activities, including art
exhibitions, lectures, conferences, film screenings and celebrations of
Chinese festivals; at Chicago and a number of other schools, it also
funds the research projects of local faculty members on Chinese
subjects. I asked Foss if Chicago’s CI had ever organized lectures or
conferences on issues controversial in China, such as Tibetan
independence or the political status of Taiwan. Gesturing to a far wall,
he said, “I can put up a picture of the Dalai Lama in this office. But
on the fourth floor, we wouldn’t do that.”
Marshall Sahlins is the Charles F. Grey Distinguished Service Professor emeritus of anthropology at the University of...
The reason is that the Confucius Institutes at the University of
Chicago and elsewhere are subsidized and supervised by the government of
the People’s Republic of China. The CI program was launched by the PRC
in 2004, and there are now some 400 institutes worldwide as well as an
outreach program consisting of nearly 600 “Confucius classrooms” in
secondary and elementary schools. In some respects, such a
government-funded educational and cultural initiative is nothing new.
For more than sixty years, Germany has relied on the Goethe-Institut to
foster the teaching of German around the globe. But whereas the
Goethe-Institut, like the British Council and the Alliance Française, is
a stand-alone institution situated outside university precincts, a
Confucius Institute exists as a virtually autonomous unit within the
regular curriculum of the host school—for example, providing accredited
courses in Chinese language in the Department of East Asian Languages
and Civilizations at the University of Chicago.
There’s another big difference: CIs are managed by a foreign
government, and accordingly are responsive to its politics. The
constitution and bylaws of CIs, together with the agreements established
with the host universities, place their academic activities under the
supervision of the Beijing headquarters of the Chinese Language Council
International, commonly known as Hanban. Although official documents
describe Hanban as “affiliated with the Ministry of Education,” it is
governed by a council of high state and party officials from various
political departments and chaired by a member of the Politburo, Vice
Premier Liu Yandong. The governing council over which Liu presides
currently consists of members from twelve state ministries and
commissions, including Foreign Affairs, Education, Finance and Culture,
the State Council Information Office, the National Development and
Reform Commission, and the State Press and Publications Administration.
Simply put, Hanban is an instrument of the party state operating as an
international pedagogical organization.
In larger universities hosting CIs, Hanban assumes responsibility for
a portion of the total Chinese curriculum. In the more numerous smaller
hosts, most or all of the instruction in Chinese language and culture
is under its control. Hanban has the right to supply the teachers,
textbooks and curriculums of the courses in its charge; it also names
the Chinese co-directors of the local Confucius Institutes. Research
projects on China undertaken by scholars with Hanban funds are approved
by Beijing. The teachers appointed by Hanban, together with the academic
and extracurricular programs of the CIs, are periodically evaluated and
approved by Beijing, and host universities are required to accept
Beijing’s supervision and assessments of CI activities. Hanban reserves
the right to take punitive legal action in regard to any activity
conducted under the name of the Confucius Institutes without its
permission or authorization. Hanban has signed agreements that grant
exceptions to these dictates, but usually only when it has wanted to
enlist a prestigious university, such as Stanford or Chicago, in the
worldwide CI project.
For all the attention that the Confucius Institutes have attracted in
the United States and elsewhere, there has been virtually no serious
journalistic or ethnographic investigation into their particulars, such
as how the Chinese teachers are trained or how the content of courses
and textbooks are chosen. One difficulty has been that the CIs are
something of a moving target. Not only are Chinese officials willing to
be flexible in their negotiations with elite institutions, but the
general Hanban strategy has also been changing in recent years. Despite
its global reach, the CI program is apparently not achieving the
political objectives of burnishing the image and increasing the
influence of the People’s Republic. Unlike Mao’s Little Red Book
in the era of Third World liberation, the current Chinese regime is a
hard sell. Having the appearance of an attractive political system is a
necessary condition of “soft power” success, as Joseph Nye, who coined
the phrase, has written. The revamped Confucius Institute initiative is
to engage less in language and culture and more in the core teaching and
research of the host university. Still, the working principles of the
CI program remain those of its constitution and bylaws, together with
the model agreements negotiated with participating universities.
Routinely and assiduously, Hanban wants the Confucius Institutes to hold
events and offer instruction under the aegis of host universities that
put the PRC in a good light—thus confirming the oft-quoted remark of
Politburo member Li Changchun that the Confucius Institutes are “an
important part of China’s overseas propaganda set-up.”
A 2011 article in The People’s Daily, the organ of the
Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party, declared as much,
boasting of the spread of the Confucius Institutes (331 at the time)
alongside other indices of China’s ascent to world-political prominence,
such as its annual growth rate of 8 percent, its technological and
military accomplishments, and its newfound status as the second-largest
economy in the world. “Why is China receiving so much attention now? It
is because of its ever-increasing power…. Today we have a different
relationship with the world and the West: we are no longer left to their
tender mercies. Instead we have slowly risen and are becoming their
equal.”
"Does a school district using Common Core in any way to teach state
standards violate the law?" That was the question asked by Senator Dan
Patrick (R-Houston), Chairman of the Senate Education Committee. The
senator asked in a December 2013 letter
to Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott in which he requested an opinion
from the Attorney General on House Bill 462, the legislation passed
during the 83rd Legislative Session that was intended to prohibit the Common Core State Standards Initiative from entering Texas public school classrooms.
The Common Core State Standards are the controversial
public education initiative in which 45 states and the District of
Columbia participate. Texas is a non-Common Core state. Yet, content
has been coming home from the classroom which was the impetus for
Senator Patrick's request letter in which he wrote, "certain school
districts within Texas are currently using Common Core to teach the
Texas state standards." Breitbart Texas has also raised concerns about HB 462 legislation.
"Imagine what a good doctor would think if he or she were told that the
problems in our healthcare system would be solved if only doctors were
publicly branded with an A, B or C grade by some external authority
using only numbers generated by computers based only on two absurdly
limited dimensions of healthcare outcomes. Suppose all the talk of
improving healthcare came down to getting rid of bad doctors, but the
government was doing almost nothing to improve the quality of new
doctors. What do you think young people at the top of their high school
graduating classes would think of the medical profession as an option
if they saw all these punitive actions being taken against doctors, if
they saw that, increasingly, doctors had less and less control over
their work and young doctors were not making enough money to support a
family? What do you suppose doctors would think if hospital
administrators got together and decided that the answer to the country's
healthcare problems was to use a 49-page evaluation rubric to evaluate
all the doctors admitted to practice at that hospital?
Test-based
accountability and teacher evaluation systems are not neutral in their
effect. It is not simply that they fail to improve student
performance. Their pernicious effect is to create an environment that
could not be better calculated to drive the best practitioners out of
teaching and to prevent the most promising young people from entering
it. If we want broad improvement in student performance and we want to
close the gap between disadvantaged students and the majority of our
students, then we will abandon test-based accountability and teacher
evaluation as key drivers of our education reform program."
By Valerie Strauss,
Updated: February 21 at 6:00 am
With resistance to standardized test-obsessed school reform growing
around the country, three dozen local, state and national organizations
and individuals have now banded together in an alliance to expand
efforts to bring sanity to education policy.
The alliance, which is called
Testing Resistance and Reform Spring, will support a range of public
education and mobilizing tactics — including boycotts, opt-out
campaigns, rallies and legislation — in its effort to stop the high-stakes use of standardized tests,
to reduce the number of standardized exams, and to replace
multiple-choice tests with performance-based assessments and school
work. The alliance will help activists in different parts of the country
connect through a new Web site that offers resources for activists, including fact sheets and guides on how to hold events to get out their message.
The emergence of the alliance represents a maturing of the grassroots testing resistance that has been building for several years
locally in states , including Texas, Florida, New York and Illinois.
Though many supporters of Barack Obama expected him to end the
standardized testing obsession of George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind
when Obama was first elected president, many now say that the Obama
administration has gone beyond the excesses of NCLB to inappropriately
make high-stakes standardized tests the key measure of achievement by
students, teachers, principals and schools.
Assessment experts say that standardized test scores are not a
reliable or valid way to make high stakes decisions about the
effectiveness of teachers or the achievement of students, but education
policymakers have ignored these warnings for years. This has led to
situations that are nothing short of preposterous, such as teachers
being evaluated on the test scores of students they never had.
Meanwhile, the emphasis on testing has led to an explosion of tests
being given to kids; for example, fourth-graders in the Pittsburgh
Public Schools have to take 33 standardized tests mandated by the district or state this school year. It is this reality that has fueled the resistance.
The founding members of the alliance are the Center for Fair & Open Testing, or FairTest, as well as Parents Across America, United Opt Out, Network for Public Education, and Save Our Schools.
Prominent educators, activists and bloggers who are partners in the alliance are: Wayne Au, associate professor, University of Washington
Anthony Cody, teacher, blogger
Nikhil Goyal, student, activist
Jesse Hagopian, teacher, Garfield High School, Seattle, Washington
Deborah Meier
Diane Ravitch
Angela Valenzuela, professor, U-Texas, Austin
George Wood, superintendent, Federal Hocking Local Schools, Stewart, Ohio Organizations that are alliance partners are:
National
Coalition for Essential Schools
HispanEduca
K-12 News Network
National Latino/a Education Research and Policy (NLERAP)
Rethinking Schools
State and Local
Change the Stakes (New York)
Chicagoland Researchers and Advocates for Transformative Education (CReATE)
Citizens for Public Schools (Massachussetts)
Jefferson County Teachers Association (JCTA) (Kentucky)
MecklenburgACTS.org (North Carolina)
More Than a Score (Chicago)
New York State Allies for Public Education (NYSAPE)
Opt Out Orlando (Florida)
Parents United for Responsible Education (Chicago)
ReThinking Testing Midhudson Region (New York)
Social Equality Educators (Seattle)
Students 4 Our School (Denver)
SWside Parents Alliance (Chicago)
Teacher Activist Group – TAG Boston
Texas Center for Education Policy
Time Out from Testing (New York)
Youth Organizers for the Now Generation (YOUNG) (Boston)
" Black men are largely underrepresented in our nation's classrooms; it has been widely reported that they make up less than 2 percent of our country's teachers."
I credit the
late Octavio Paz for initiating a high-profile conversation about Chicano/a
identity, but there's a lot to this article and his analysis that really needs
to get unpacked in terms of why Chicano/as hate Paz so much. For
starters, blanket characterizations of any kind about a people are harmful and
disparaging and ultimately, untenable as a claim.
He "others" Mexican Americans and in so doing, not only creates
a distance between Mexicans and Mexican Americans/Chianos, but his
positionality as a member of Mexico's elite situates him and members of his
class as “above” Mexican Americans upon whom they look down.
I also learned today from
Dr. Gilbert Gonzalez that the word, “Chicano”
is used in print as far back as 1926 appearing, for example, in Las Aventuras De Don Chipote and Cuando Los Pericos Mamen.
Another problem is his characterizing us as "hijos de la chingada," as progeny of the great rape—of Doña Marina/La Malinche by Hernán Cortés. He can be an hijo de la chingada if he likes. Us Chicanas love, adore, and respect our mother without whom we would not exist.
A final point. What I do not like about either Stavans or Amy
Chua and Jeb Rubenfeld’s hypotheses about immigrant achievement is not only
again, the very broad strokes they take for, in effect, negatively categorizing
large categories of humanity in disparaging ways which is neither scientific nor uplifting, but they also place so much
of the onus for underachievement on our communities rather than on the culturally chauvinistic and oppressive system of schooling that is more the norm than the exception.
Never mind Mexican Americans’ deep and very conflicted history with their
struggles related to bilingual education, immigration, high-stakes testing, tracking, (hyper)segregation,
school finance, and poverty, against a broader panorama of historical
marginalization in politics, society, and the economy.
To psychologize Chicanos/as and Latinos/as,
generally in a reductive manner commits the same symbolic violence that all of
these systems and institutions mete out in a casual, normative manner that is
unfortunately, the air that we so regularly breathe that it, too, becomes
invisible—not only to those in power, but also to ourselves.
The etymology of Chicano is surrounded in mystery. I’ve seen its roots traced to Nahuatl, specifically to the term Mexica,
as the people encountered by Hernán Cortéz and his soldiers conquering
Tenochtitlán in the early quarter of the 16th century where known. In
Spanish, the word is pronounced Meshika: the x functions as sh.
Mexico, as a nation, opts to look at the Mexicas as their defining
ancestors. Curiously, when first registering the name, the missionaries
spelled it Méjico, with a j. It transitioned to an x when the country ceded from Spain, becoming independent in 1810.
In any case, Chicano might be an abbreviation of Mexicano,
although Chicanos prefer to see themselves not as Mexico’s children but
as its ancestors. According to legend, Aztlán, their Xanadu, located in
either present-day northern Mexico or somewhere in the American
Southwest, or maybe as far as Oregon, was the place where the Mexicans
originated in their journey for a promised land, which they ultimately
found in a region of five lakes where Mexico City was built. In their
mythology, an eagle sitting on a rock in a lake, devouring a serpent—the
symbol at the center of the Mexican flag—was a divine sign for them to
settle there.
My research suggests that the original appearance of Chicano in print is traced to 1947, in a story by Mario Suárez published in Arizona Quarterly. I have also seen other etymologies for Chicano. The word acquired fresh currency in the sixties, during the civil-rights era. Some people spell it Xicano.
(Curiously, I’ve never come across a Chicano calling himself Aztleño,
meaning “dweller of Aztlán.”) On several occasions, I’ve seen the word
connected with chicanery: according to Merriam-Webster, “deception by
artful subterfuge or sophistry.” In this regard, the word suggests a
double conscience, an idea—linked to W.E.B. DuBois’s The Souls of Black Folk
(1903)—that characterizes, broadly understood, the identity of minority
people. Daniel Chacón has a collection of stories titled Chicano Chicanery (2000).
This year marks the hundredth anniversary of Octavio Paz’s birth.
Mexico’s only Nobel laureate for literature, Paz was an extraordinary hombre de letras:
a poet, an essayist, a publisher, a diplomat, as well as “a
philanthropic ogre,” a phrase he used in one of his numerous books to
talk about the role of the state in modern society but which some of us,
his admirers, prefer as a description of him. Paz’s ego was
inflammatory: a true cosmopolitan, he was ready to devour you if you
displayed any criticism of his oeuvre. In any case, arguably Paz’s most
famous book is The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950), a monograph
about the Mexican psyche. Influence by Alfred Adler and other late
psychoanalysts, Paz used his considerable intellectual talents to offer
incisive opinions on his own country’s ethos.
The initial chapter of The Labyrinth of Solitude is called
“The Pachuco and Other Extremes.” Awarded a Guggenheim fellowship, Paz
lived in Los Angeles in the forties, where he was exposed to
Mexican-American culture. Put succinctly, he found it appalling. Pachuco
was a social type of youth: defiant, dressed up in a zoot suit with a
hat, and embracing a distinct jargon. The ubiquitous comedian Tin Tan
still personifies the pachuco. The best portrait I know of the era is Luis Valdez’s play Zoot Suit (1979), about the zoot-suit riots of 1943.
Anyway, Chicanos hate Paz. Thus it seems unlikely, to me at least,
that they will celebrate his centennial. For they believe Paz
misrepresented them. In Paz’s view, pachucos—e.g., a particular type of
Chicano—suffered from an overabundance of culture. And, even more
scandalously, they were overwhelmed by an inferiority complex.
Is Paz right? In other chapters, he describes Mexicans as also
suffering from that complex. Bizarrely, among Mexicans he is an icon,
whereas among Chicanos he is Satan.
A student of mine from Los Angeles asked me that question. She wondered if the etymology of Chicano, a word the younger generation hesitates to adopt (they call themselves Mexican-American), might come from chico, not taken as child but as small. My student called my attention to Presumed Incompetent
(2012), a collection of academic essays edited by Gabriella Gutiérrez y
Muhs et al., about the plight of working-class women of color in
academe. My student identified with the sections on Chicanas.
The question she raised, I said, comes at a time when the baggage
behind “the inferiority complex” is being reconceptualized. It used to
be that an inferiority complex was a defect. Nowadays, things are
different—especially in the context of the debate surrounding “the
triple package.” The thesis, made by the wife and husband writers Amy
Chua and Jeb Rubenfeld, is that certain immigrant minorities (Asians,
Jews, Hindus, etc.), on the road to success, exhibit three
characteristics: a superiority as well as an inferiority complex, plus
traction to make it to the top. The issue, of course, is why some
minority groups display this traction and not others.
I will leave the answer to psychologists. In any case, since
ancestral times Mexicans—and I am one—have nurtured an inferiority
complex. Chicanos do too. Is the name Chicano pushing them down, making them small? Can it be turned into an engine of success?
It all boils down, my student said, to “the colonial mentality”:
Chicanos feel inferior because they have been taught to feel that way.
But Hindus were also subalterns of empire and, depending on the region,
so were Asians. Not to mention Jews, whose plight as slaves in Egypt is
recalled every year during the Passover Seder.
My response: Etymology isn’t fate. Actually, unless one consents,
fate isn’t fate either. After all, having a double consciousness is
better than having only one.
It IS amazing that there is not more reaction against the workings behind these shifts. The writer makes the point that while the large oil companies are easy to blame, a lack of reaction is reducible to ignorance and complacency.
The
truth is, it is too late for all of that. Greening the ski industry is
commendable, but it isn’t nearly enough. Nothing besides a national
policy shift on how we create and consume energy will keep our mountains
white in the winter — and slow global warming to a safe level.
This
is no longer a scientific debate. It is scientific fact. The greatest
fear of most climate scientists is continued complacency that leads to a
series of natural climatic feedbacks — like the melting of the
methane-rich permafrost of Arctic Canada.
This is certainly a challenge that the next generation will have to tackle much better than we have managed to do in ours.
Wouldn't it be amazing if our educational systems embraced a kind of critical and social justice STEM approach that would graduate cadres upon cadres of youth that can take on this multi-faceted problem?
Of course, we need our teachers to be well prepared to teach this, as well, so this is also a responsibility that should be equally shouldered by our teacher preparation programs of all types.
Surely, there are places within our K-12 system where this is occurring, but this really needs to be a new default in science-based instruction that is itself interdisciplinary and policy oriented. Short of this, our descendants are destined to a world without snow—and all that attaches to that, as well. -Angela
Slopes were closed last month at Fichtelberg mountain in Oberwiesenthal, Germany.Jan Woitas/European Pressphoto Agency
OVER
the next two weeks, hundreds of millions of people will watch Americans
like Ted Ligety and Mikaela Shiffrin ski for gold on the downhill
alpine course. Television crews will pan across epic vistas of the
rugged Caucasus Mountains, draped with brilliant white ski slopes. What
viewers might not see is the 16 million cubic feet of snow that was
stored under insulated blankets last year to make sure those slopes
remained white, or the hundreds of snow-making guns that have been
running around the clock to keep them that way.
Officials
canceled two Olympic test events last February in Sochi after several
days of temperatures above 60 degrees Fahrenheit and a lack of snowfall
had left ski trails bare and brown in spots. That situation led the
climatologist Daniel Scott,
a professor of global change and tourism at the University of Waterloo
in Ontario, to analyze potential venues for future Winter Games. His
thought was that with a rise in the average global temperature of more
than 7 degrees Fahrenheit possible by 2100, there might not be that many
snowy regions left in which to hold the Games. He concluded that of the
19 cities that have hosted the Winter Olympics, as few as 10 might be
cold enough by midcentury to host them again. By 2100, that number
shrinks to 6.
The
planet has warmed 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit since the 1800s, and as a
result, snow is melting. In the last 47 years, a million square miles of
spring snow cover has disappeared from the Northern Hemisphere. Europe
has lost half of its Alpine glacial ice since the 1850s, and if climate
change is not reined in, two-thirds of European ski resorts will be
likely to close by 2100.
Porter Fox is the features editor at Powder magazine and the author of “Deep: The Story of Skiing and the Future of Snow.”
This interview with former Stanford President Gerhard Casper brings back memories of the contentious 80s at Stanford over the Western Civilization curriculum. Note: I was there from 1983-1990 as a doctoral student in Sociology.
Although Donald Kennedy was the president during this time period, the consequences were particularly felt during the Casper administration. When I think of how horribly this administration was to our legendary and heroic leaders at Stanford—the late Tony and Cecilia Burciaga—were treated, this memory is a very painful one for so many of us.
Among other things, this interview with former President Casper shows exactly how liberal individualism can align to reactionary politics and agendas. This whole debate of course set off a firestorm of reaction from which we have largely not recovered, in my view. Whole language instruction virtually died and phonics-based instruction came in with a ferocity. Although high-stakes testing was slowly evolving in Texas and nationally during this same time period, it is safe to say that this was welcomed by the right because of the ways that the system structured out the deeper kinds of conversations, themes and issues that the multiculturalism movement was, and has been, about. Fortunately, here in Texas, our historians like Dr. Emilio Zamora, Keith Erekson and others are weighing in on the high school social studies standards at the State Board of Education level and making the basic argument that without this knowledge of subaltern histories—a systemic absence of which the Western Civ debate at Stanford was impactful—students are neither well-prepared for college, nor for life in an increasingly globalized world. The different contributors to the Erekson anthology
collectively not only present the intricacies of the debate, they also provide an anatomy of the ideological strands that unmask many of the hidden beliefs, ideologies, and interests that advocate for a highly conservative status quo.
All told, things are a changing nevertheless here in Texas. -Angela
Former Stanford president
Gerhard Casper is a senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute and a
professor of law and, by courtesy, political science. His book The Winds of Freedom: Addressing Challenges to the University,
to be published by Yale University Press in February, comprises
selected speeches he made about contentious issues during his presidency
(1992 to 2000) accompanied by his current thoughts on their context.
Stanford recently interviewed Casper (an abridged transcript is in the
print magazine); an excerpt from the book follows.
Sunday, February 02, 2014
The outcome of this case will surely have ripple effects for teacher tenure. Quotes from within:
“It’s
yet another example of not rolling up your sleeves and dealing with a
problem, but instead finding a scapegoat,” Ms. Weingarten said. “They
are not suing about segregation or funding or property tax systems — all
the things you really need to get kids a level playing field. They want
to strip teachers of any rights to a voice.”
State
education laws across the country are changing. School districts in 29
states use poor effectiveness as grounds for dismissal, according to a
report released Thursday by the National Council on Teacher Quality, a
Washington-based think tank that tracks teacher policies. Just five
years ago, no states allowed student performance to be considered in
teachers’ evaluations, said Kate Walsh, the executive director of the
center. Now, 20 states require such data.
Some
of the students who are suing the State of California over tenure for
teachers walked to a news conference this week outside Superior Court in
Los Angeles.Monica Almeida/The New York Times
LOS
ANGELES — They have tried and failed to loosen tenure rules for
teachers in contract talks and state legislatures. So now, a group of
rising stars in the movement to overhaul education employment has gone
to court.
In
a small, wood-paneled courtroom here this week, nine public school
students are challenging California’s ironclad tenure system, arguing
that their right to a good education is violated by job protections that
make it too difficult to fire bad instructors. But behind the students
stand a Silicon Valley technology magnate who is financing the case and
an all-star cast of lawyers that includes Theodore B. Olson, the former
solicitor general of the United States, who recently won the Supreme
Court case that effectively overturned the state’s ban on same-sex
marriage.
“Children
have the right to access good education and an effective teacher
regardless of their circumstances,” said David F. Welch, the
telecommunications entrepreneur who spent millions of his own dollars to
create Students Matter, the organization behind the lawsuit. The group
describes itself as a national nonprofit dedicated to sponsoring
litigation of this type, and the outcome in California will provide the
first indication of whether it can succeed.
Launch media viewer
John E. Deasy, the schools superintendent of Los Angeles.Monica Almeida/The New York Times
At
issue is a set of rules that grant permanent employment status to
California teachers after 18 months on the job, require a lengthy
procedure to dismiss a teacher, and set up a seniority system in which
the teachers most recently hired must be the first to lose their jobs
when layoffs occur, as they have regularly in recent years.
Teachers’
unions, which hold powerful sway among lawmakers here, contend that the
protections are necessary to ensure that teachers are not fired
unfairly. Without these safeguards, the unions say, the profession will
not attract new teachers.
“Tenure
is an amenity, just like salary and vacation, that allows districts to
recruit and retain teachers despite harder working conditions, pay that
hasn’t kept pace and larger class sizes,” James M. Finberg, a lawyer for
the California teachers’ unions, said this week in his opening
statement in court.
The
monthlong trial promises to be a closely watched national test case on
employment laws for teachers, one of the most contentious debates in
education. Many school superintendents and advocates across the country
call such laws detrimental and anachronistic, and have pressed for the
past decade for changes, with mixed success. Tenure for teachers has
been eliminated in three states and in Washington, D.C., and a handful
of states prohibit seniority as a factor in teacher layoffs. But in many
large states with urban school districts, including California and New
York, efforts to push through such changes in the legislature have
repeatedly failed.
While
several lawsuits demanding more money for schools have succeeded across
the country, the California case is the most sweeping legal challenge
claiming that students are hurt by employment laws for teachers. The
case also relies on a civil rights argument that so far is untested:
that poor and minority students are denied equal access to education
because they are more likely to have “grossly ineffective” teachers.
Judge
Rolf Michael Treu, of Los Angeles County Superior Court, will decide
the nonjury trial. His ruling will almost certainly be appealed to the
State Supreme Court.
Witnesses are expected to explain many of their basic assumptions about how to create quality schools.
The
first witness for the plaintiffs was John E. Deasy, the superintendent
of Los Angeles Unified School District and a staunch opponent of tenure
rules and “last in, first out” seniority for teachers. Mr. Deasy
testified that attempts to dismiss ineffective teachers can cost
$250,000 to $450,000 and include years of appeals and legal proceedings.
Often, he said, the district is forced to decide that the time and
money would be too much to spend on a case with an unclear outcome, in
part because a separate governing board can reinstate the teachers. Such
rules make it impossible not to place ineffective teachers at schools
with high poverty rates, he told the court.
Launch media viewer
Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers.Philip Scott Andrews for The New York Times
“I
absolutely do not believe it’s in the best interest of students
whatsoever,” Mr. Deasy said of the layoff policy. “The decision about
who should be in front of students should be the most effective teacher.
These statutes prohibit that from being a consideration at all. By
virtue of that, it cannot be good for students.”
Teachers’
unions contend that such job protections help schools keep the best
teachers and recruit new ones to a job that is often exhausting,
challenging and low paid. Mr. Finberg, the lawyer for the unions, said
in court that the fact that Mr. Deasy has increased the number of
ineffective teachers dismissed from the classroom — to about 100 of the
district’s 30,000 teachers — suggests that the laws are working.
The
plaintiffs’ legal team, from the firm of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher,
includes not only Mr. Olson, who served as solicitor general under
President George W. Bush, but also Theodore J. Boutrous Jr., a lawyer
for Apple in its antitrust case on e-book pricing. The lawyers and
public relations firm behind Students Matter previously teamed to
overturn the California ballot measure against same-sex marriage and say
this case could have a similar ripple effect across the country. Among
the boldface names siding publicly with the plaintiffs is Antonio R.
Villaraigosa, the former mayor of Los Angeles, who joined them in a news
conference outside the courthouse this week.
“The
case has the potential to have really broad and important implications
not just for California,” said Michelle A. Rhee, the former Washington
schools chancellor who now runs Students First, an advocacy group that
works to elect leaders who support changing the employment laws for
teachers. “In an ideal world you would want policies to be passed in the
legislature, but in California there was no movement on that. I think
in this case they were tired of waiting.”
Teachers’
unions nationwide have fought changes in employment laws, contending
that their members must be protected from capricious or vengeful
administrators. In Colorado, where a sweeping law in 2010 created a new
system to evaluate teachers, the unions are suing over a provision that
lets principals decide whether to hire veteran teachers who lost jobs
because of budget cuts or drops in enrollment.
Randi
Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, said
in a telephone interview that the California case echoes the fights she
had when she led the teachers’ union in New York, and called the lawsuit
“worse than troubling.”
“It’s
yet another example of not rolling up your sleeves and dealing with a
problem, but instead finding a scapegoat,” Ms. Weingarten said. “They
are not suing about segregation or funding or property tax systems — all
the things you really need to get kids a level playing field. They want
to strip teachers of any rights to a voice.”
State
education laws across the country are changing. School districts in 29
states use poor effectiveness as grounds for dismissal, according to a
report released Thursday by the National Council on Teacher Quality, a
Washington-based think tank that tracks teacher policies. Just five
years ago, no states allowed student performance to be considered in
teachers’ evaluations, said Kate Walsh, the executive director of the
center. Now, 20 states require such data.
“We
have really seen mountains move in some places — the trend in the
country has been toward meaningful ways to evaluate teachers and to use
that evaluation to make tenure decisions,” Ms. Walsh said in an
interview. “But I don’t think anyone has figured out how to implement
them particularly well yet.”
Rep. George Miller from California is claiming innocence. How can he when we had just come out of a federal court case on high-stakes testing here in Texas and we learned unequivocally that the system produced a disparate impact on Latino/as, African Americans, special education children, and English language learners?
The trial produced ample evidence, as well, about where this system was headed.
Plus, Dr. Linda McNeil and I visited with his office staff before the passage of NCLB—and many other offices from the Texas Congressional delegation.
The late Senator Paul Wellstone was a fierce, very vocal opponent during this time period, as well. His office, especially Jill Morningstar, was instrumental in educating many offices about the expected harmful effects of this law. Boy, was his death ever untimely.
With all of these offices, we shared evidence from Texas that this law would marginalize both students and curriculum—and most especially, children of color and the poor.
This law was nevertheless about ideology based on harmful assumptions about teachers and kids, while also appealing to the "managerial mindset," those thinking that a stick was needed to force teachers to teach and the kids to learn. To quote Jonathan Kozol, never mind the "savage inequalities" of our schools. And never mind the opinion of professionals—not all of them racist or classist—as he actually suggests in this interview, albeit obliquely.
But that is exactly how they got the liberal vote—this law would make white teachers teach Black and Brown kids, regardless. No excuses! And guess what? We not only do not have to invest in education, but we can even threaten taking away their resources with this law.
How offensive, cruel, and fantastically convenient. -Angela
Rep.
George Miller, D-Martinez, visited with EdSource Today staff shortly
after announcing his retirement after 40 years in Congress. Credit:
Lillian Mongeau, EdSource
Rep. George Miller, a leading architect of the No Child Left
Behind legislation, says he never anticipated that the landmark
education law would ignite the testing obsession that engulfed the
nation’s schools, leading to what some have charged is a simplistic
“drill and kill” approach that subverts real instruction.
EdSource sat down with Miller, D-Martinez, last week for a lengthy
and wide-ranging conversation on his accomplishments, philosophy and
hopes for the future of public education. The Contra Costa County
congressman, who served as chair or ranking minority member of the House
Education Committee and the Workforce Committee since 1997, announced
earlier this month that after 40 years in the House of Representatives,
he would not seek re-election when his current term expires.
