Barkman points to the GOPs withdrawal of support from public schools saying, "public schools are now seen as a sinister conspiracy of secular humanists, Darwinists, evil teachers’ unions and homosexuals." This is a good complement to the piece I just posted. Cleburne is in Texas. -Angela
School is not like it used to be
by Patrick Barkman
“He decreed statutes for Jacob and established the law in Israel, which He commanded our forefathers to teach their children, so the next generation would know them, even the children yet to be born, and they in turn would tell their children.”
— Psalm 78:5-6
School is back and my youngest has officially started kindergarten. A lot seems different than what I remember; for one thing, kindergarten has computers, which weren’t even invented when I was that age. We had to use an abacus or count rocks.
There seems to be an awful lot of school supplies required nowadays, including enough bottles of glue, coffee filters and manila paper to build a full-scale model of the Great Wall of China.
When I started school, the only supplies we needed were flint and tender to start a campfire and some sticks to make spears to fight off the saber-toothed tigers that were then known to roam the outskirts of Cleburne. Other things have changed, too. Once upon a time, not too terribly long ago, support for public education was one of the few reliably bipartisan issues in Texas and in the nation as a whole.
Both parties recalled the words of Thomas Jefferson to George Wythe in 1786, “I think by far the most important bill in our whole code, is that for the diffusion of knowledge among the people. No other sure foundation can be devised for the preservation of freedom and happiness. The tax which will be paid for this purpose is not more than the thousandth part of what will be paid to kings, priests and nobles who will rise up among us if we leave the people in ignorance.”
In Texas, Sam Houston, a Jeffersonian by way of Jackson, stated, “The benefits of education and of useful knowledge, generally diffused through a community, are essential to the preservation of a free government.”
During his otherwise execrable term as president of the Republic of Texas, Mirabeau Lamar outlined a visionary system for free public schools that earned him the nickname Father of Texas Education. Such unity is gone now, seemingly for good. As the Republic Party has slowly been captured by the ultra-paranoid tin-foil hat crowd, public schools are now seen as a sinister conspiracy of secular humanists, Darwinists, evil teachers’ unions and homosexuals.
The GOP’s war on public schools was perhaps best exemplified when State Rep. Debbie Riddle bloviated, “Where did this idea come from that everybody deserves free education, free medical care, free whatever? It comes from Moscow, from Russia. It comes straight out of the pit of hell. And it’s cleverly disguised as having a tender heart. It’s not a tender heart. It’s ripping the heart out of this country.”
Or, if you prefer the statements of some of the Republican’s spiritual gurus, there’s Pat Robertson: “The public education movement has also been an anti-Christian movement …” or Jerry Falwell: “I hope to see the day when, as in the early days of our country, we don’t have public schools. The churches will have taken them over again and Christians will be running them.”
Actions, of course, speak louder than words. After ignoring school finance for years in favor of multiple special sessions to abolish democracy through redistricting, Texas Republicans recently passed a “reform” bill that doesn’t provide any new money for schools, and in fact will end up providing less funding and higher taxes.
The Bush administration tried hard to bury a Department of Education report showing that, despite their problems, public schools compare favorably with private schools. Our beloved former state representative, Arlene Wohlgemuth, has recently teamed up with millionaire anti-public school candidate sugar daddy Dr. James Leininger to lobby against “special interests” and their “pet causes,” like decent schools.
Wohlgemuth already did her part to kill affordable health insurance for children; so as long as they’re sick, why not keep them ignorant as well? Leininger, and many other Republicans, favor vouchers as a way to interject the “free market” and “competition” into public education, in spite of the fact that our most recent experiment in privitizing education through the use of charter schools has been a dismal failure. So why the Republican hostility toward learning?
The paranoid on the left might observe that ignorant peasants are obedient peasants. The reality, however, is more cynical: It’s just another way to scare votes out of decent people of faith who have legitimate concerns about real education issues — the lack of discipline, under-funded schools, a sometimes unresponsive bureaucracy and so forth.
Like the tele-Pharisees, the GOP deliberately misrepresents court decisions like Engel v. Vitale to suggest that prayer in school is now illegal. It isn’t, of course, and no court anywhere in America has ever ruled that individual students cannot pray in school. Texas Republicans rail about teachers’ unions, though unions in Texas as a whole are virtually powerless.
Fear is a great motivator, though, as is scapegoating. As Lyndon Johnson once said in another context, that of the Civil Rights movement, “If you can convince the lowest white man that he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll even empty his pockets for you.”
In public education, the Republicans hope that if they can make you afraid of teachers, homosexuals and Charles Darwin, you won’t notice their hands in your wallet. This strategy is cynical, it’s shameful and harmful to society and our children and real conservatives, the few who are left, should rise up to denounce it.
Patrick G. Barkman is a
Cleburne resident who invites you to comment on this column, and enjoy additional wise-crackery and general political
incorrectness at his blog,
thelocalcrank.blogspot.com/.
Wednesday, August 23, 2006
Devoted teachers show faith every day
Actions speak louder than words. I quote from this piece: "As people of faith, they know you don't have to talk about your faith to practice it. " -Angela
Devoted teachers show faith every day
DAVID WATERS, Religion
Saturday, August 19, 2006
The parking lot at a nearby elementary school began filling up in mid-July. It was a midsummer mystery to some, but as the son and husband of public school teachers, I knew exactly what was happening.
Teachers were quietly going back to work.
Believe it or not, most public school teachers are back at work weeks before our children show up at their doors.
They spend countless (generally unpaid) hours planning, cleaning, organizing, reorganizing, getting their classrooms, lesson plans and psyches ready for the onslaught of new students and parents, administrative edicts, political posturing and public ambivalence.
Most of us support public schools with our tax dollars. Many of us support them with our children. All of us rely on them to hold society together.
Despite the burdens we put on them and the abuse we pile on them, public schools remain our most valuable and powerful socializing force. More children go to school than to church. Children still spend more time in the classroom than in front of the TV - during the school year, anyway.
Even the Christian Educators Association International, or CEAI, recognizes the value of public schools.
"Public education has the benefit of local, state, and federal funding as well as the best educated and trained teachers in the history of this nation," CEAI explains on its Web site.
"Public schools are usually well funded and have an extensive state and federal system of accountability. Students are exposed to well-developed academic, athletic, and social opportunities far beyond home schoolers and Christian School students.
"For students with special needs, the services are almost endless."
For parents with special
needs, the services don't always measure up.
One of the biggest complaints about public schools is that they are "godless."
"Although not the intent of the First Amendment, many public school educators believe that they must make their schools godless under the banner of 'separation of church and state' to the extent that an environment is created that is hostile to religion," CEAI explains.
To put it in theological terms, that's a lot of hoo-ha.
The vast majority of the nation's 3.5 million elementary and secondary school teachers consider themselves to be people of faith.
As people of faith, they know you don't have to talk about your faith to practice it. They know that you don't have to say that you believe in God to behave as if you do.
Even the folks associated with CEAI know that. They recently held a conference to show teachers how to practice what they preach.
"Regardless of denomination," said Cary Vaughn, a minister and one of the organizers, "teachers wonder how they can share their faith in the workplace when it's prohibited by law in the public schools."
Nonsense. Millions of teachers do that every school day by showing up for work.
In classrooms full of children who are tired, sick, hungry, hyper, depressed or otherwise behaviorally challenged.
Does anyone do more "for the least of these" than public school teachers?
"When you pray, move your feet," says the African proverb. Faithful teachers move their feet all day long.
http://www.courierpress.com/news/2006/aug/19/devoted-teachers-show-faith-every-day/
Devoted teachers show faith every day
DAVID WATERS, Religion
Saturday, August 19, 2006
The parking lot at a nearby elementary school began filling up in mid-July. It was a midsummer mystery to some, but as the son and husband of public school teachers, I knew exactly what was happening.
Teachers were quietly going back to work.
Believe it or not, most public school teachers are back at work weeks before our children show up at their doors.
They spend countless (generally unpaid) hours planning, cleaning, organizing, reorganizing, getting their classrooms, lesson plans and psyches ready for the onslaught of new students and parents, administrative edicts, political posturing and public ambivalence.
Most of us support public schools with our tax dollars. Many of us support them with our children. All of us rely on them to hold society together.
Despite the burdens we put on them and the abuse we pile on them, public schools remain our most valuable and powerful socializing force. More children go to school than to church. Children still spend more time in the classroom than in front of the TV - during the school year, anyway.
Even the Christian Educators Association International, or CEAI, recognizes the value of public schools.
"Public education has the benefit of local, state, and federal funding as well as the best educated and trained teachers in the history of this nation," CEAI explains on its Web site.
"Public schools are usually well funded and have an extensive state and federal system of accountability. Students are exposed to well-developed academic, athletic, and social opportunities far beyond home schoolers and Christian School students.
"For students with special needs, the services are almost endless."
For parents with special
needs, the services don't always measure up.
One of the biggest complaints about public schools is that they are "godless."
"Although not the intent of the First Amendment, many public school educators believe that they must make their schools godless under the banner of 'separation of church and state' to the extent that an environment is created that is hostile to religion," CEAI explains.
To put it in theological terms, that's a lot of hoo-ha.
The vast majority of the nation's 3.5 million elementary and secondary school teachers consider themselves to be people of faith.
As people of faith, they know you don't have to talk about your faith to practice it. They know that you don't have to say that you believe in God to behave as if you do.
Even the folks associated with CEAI know that. They recently held a conference to show teachers how to practice what they preach.
"Regardless of denomination," said Cary Vaughn, a minister and one of the organizers, "teachers wonder how they can share their faith in the workplace when it's prohibited by law in the public schools."
Nonsense. Millions of teachers do that every school day by showing up for work.
In classrooms full of children who are tired, sick, hungry, hyper, depressed or otherwise behaviorally challenged.
Does anyone do more "for the least of these" than public school teachers?
"When you pray, move your feet," says the African proverb. Faithful teachers move their feet all day long.
http://www.courierpress.com/news/2006/aug/19/devoted-teachers-show-faith-every-day/
Monday, August 21, 2006
Did rally unleash new political power?
Did rally unleash new political power?
Hispanics hope interest converts to ballot box clout
02:59 PM CDT on Thursday, August 17, 2006
By FRANK TREJO / The Dallas Morning News
Aftershocks continue to rumble in Dallas this summer in the wake of April's immigration "megamarch" that brought as many 500,000 people to downtown Dallas.
Momentum from the march – the largest civil rights rally in Dallas history – has given area Hispanic activists hope for increased political participation. Some say they are already seeing results:
• Two coalitions are organizing major voter registration drives, called MegaVoto, before the Nov. 7 general election.
• The Southwest Voter Registration Education Project, a Latino civic education organization, recently opened a field office in Oak Cliff.
• A gay League of United Latin American Citizens chapter has formed in Dallas. LULAC officials believe it's the first of its kind in the nation.
• Hispanic teenagers have formed a political group.
Yet questions remain about the march's long-term effects on local politics. How many of the protesters are registering to vote? Will the large number of march participants cause non-Hispanics to take more than a passing interest? And will the march lead to the election of Hispanic candidates in city and county elections?
"[The march] energized the Hispanic community in a very positive way. But now comes the hard work of turning that energy and celebratory momentum into the hard work of naturalizations, voter registrations and turnout," said Cal Jillson, a political scientist at Southern Methodist University.
LOUIS DeLUCA / DMN
Marisela G. Vargas (right) gave Maria Armendariz voter registration information recently at Dallas Market Hall. Two Hispanic coalitions are organizing registration drives before the Nov. 7 election.
Officials with U.S. Immigration and Citizenship Services said the Dallas office noted an increase in the number of naturalization applications in the spring when the national immigration debate was at its height. In April, 1,482 applications were submitted. That compares with 1,269 applications received in April 2005.
In May, applications jumped to 1,647, up from 1,235 in May 2005.
In addition, the number of naturalization forms downloaded online nationally showed a dramatic rise. From October through July 2005, 684,697 were forms downloaded. For the same period this year, the number was 1,183,913.
Voter registration shift?
The effect so far on voter registrations, however, has not been as dramatic. Bruce Sherbet, Dallas County elections administrator, said about 1,500 new voters have registered since April. That's fairly normal for a year without a presidential election, he said.
Dr. Jillson said it's implausible to believe that a march will cause any group to suddenly take political control of the city, especially because at least 30 percent of the Latinos in Texas are not U.S. citizens, and many of those who are have not been politically active.
Tell Us
How much of an impact will the march have on local politics?
We'll see a big shift this fall
Little or no change
Change will come, but gradually
View Results
"It is important to think of this as a very long-term effort at integrating Hispanics into the political and civic life of the city," Dr. Jillson said, adding that he does not expect immediate electoral effects. "But it's absolutely necessary to begin now in order to have an effect two and four years from."
Laura Gonzalez, who teaches cultural studies at Mountain View College and is director of the Oak Cliff Center for Community Studies, said she has been astounded by what has happened to her students and their parents. Area Hispanics, she said, are poised to make a difference.
Amazing transformation
"It's an amazing transformation of my students," said Dr. Gonzalez, an anthropologist. "They are wanting to learn more about politics and public speaking, about Mexican-American history, about social movements."
Recently, some of the leaders of the spring student walkouts, which some credit for raising awareness about the immigration issue, created Young Advocates Spreading Political Awareness. Only a handful of young people have joined the group, but it already has worked at a couple of voter registration drives and plans some of its own.
"There are so many issues now that directly affect us, we wanted our voices heard," said Greisa Martinez, 18.
Another group that traces its origins to the megamarch is the new LULAC chapter, or council, created by gay and lesbian Latinos. The council, based in the Oak Lawn area of Dallas, was formed this summer with about a dozen members.
A council official said the new group would function just as any other LULAC council, working on education and civil rights issues. But it also will act as a bridge between LULAC members and gay and lesbian Hispanics. This fall, members will focus on voter registration.
Jesse Garcia of Dallas is one of the organizers. He said the idea for the council began last year when gay organizations were fighting against a state constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage. The amendment eventually passed.
The idea for the council arose again on the day of the megamarch, Mr. Garcia said.
"Several of us went to the march, and it just hit me as we stood in the middle of all those people, what a beautiful thing it was and how we had some things in common," Mr. Garcia said. "Some of our nation's leaders are trying to paint gays and now immigrants as the root of all our country's evil."
At meetings of two voter registration groups this month, volunteers planned ways to increase the number of registered Hispanic voters by several thousand.
One meeting was in Oak Cliff at the new office of the Southwest Voter Registration Education Project. The other was at the Bill J. Priest Institute in South Dallas and attracted about 45 people, including elected officials, political candidates and community representatives. Their MegaVoto project is a direct tie to the April megamarch.
Among those attending the meeting in South Dallas were Democratic state Reps. Rafael Anchia and Roberto Alonzo, as well as several Dallas County judicial candidates.
Also Online
En español
Mr. Anchia, who has been mentioned as a possible Dallas mayoral candidate next year, said that during the recent conference of the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials in Dallas, the group conducted focus groups with megamarch participants.
Learning to connect
"People talked about previously feeling isolated in their views and not knowing how to connect, but that began to change with the megamarch when they saw these thousands and thousands of other people," he said.
Dallas lawyer Domingo Garcia, one of the megamarch organizers, said a voter registration drive being coordinated by the San Antonio-based Southwest Voter Registration Education project is a result of the march. The group has produced results in the past.
Mr. Garcia and Southwest Voter conducted registration drives in 1988 in Cockrell Hill, just west of downtown Dallas. Before the effort, no more than eight Hispanics ever voted in city elections. In 1988, 191 Hispanics voted, and the City Council became majority Hispanic.
Mr. Garcia hopes the megamarch will produce similar results. "We had 500,000 people that marched for immigrants' rights on April 9," he said, "but that march won't mean much unless we translate those people into votes."
E-mail ftrejo@dallasnews.com
ON THE MOVE
March 27-29 – Thousands of students walk out of classes throughout North Texas to protest immigration proposals.
April 9 – As many as 500,000 people crowd into downtown Dallas in the city's largest civil rights protest.
June 12 – LULAC's first gay council is launched in Dallas.
Sept. 9 – A coalition of organizations plans "MegaVoto" rally at City Hall Plaza.
Sept. 16 – Several organizations will hold voter registration drives throughout city in what is being called the Day of the Latino Vote.
Nov. 7 – The first general election since April's "megamarch."
Online at: http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/news/politics/local/stories/081706dnmetmegamarchfolo.2964fe4.html
Hispanics hope interest converts to ballot box clout
02:59 PM CDT on Thursday, August 17, 2006
By FRANK TREJO / The Dallas Morning News
Aftershocks continue to rumble in Dallas this summer in the wake of April's immigration "megamarch" that brought as many 500,000 people to downtown Dallas.
Momentum from the march – the largest civil rights rally in Dallas history – has given area Hispanic activists hope for increased political participation. Some say they are already seeing results:
• Two coalitions are organizing major voter registration drives, called MegaVoto, before the Nov. 7 general election.
• The Southwest Voter Registration Education Project, a Latino civic education organization, recently opened a field office in Oak Cliff.
• A gay League of United Latin American Citizens chapter has formed in Dallas. LULAC officials believe it's the first of its kind in the nation.
• Hispanic teenagers have formed a political group.
Yet questions remain about the march's long-term effects on local politics. How many of the protesters are registering to vote? Will the large number of march participants cause non-Hispanics to take more than a passing interest? And will the march lead to the election of Hispanic candidates in city and county elections?
"[The march] energized the Hispanic community in a very positive way. But now comes the hard work of turning that energy and celebratory momentum into the hard work of naturalizations, voter registrations and turnout," said Cal Jillson, a political scientist at Southern Methodist University.
LOUIS DeLUCA / DMN
Marisela G. Vargas (right) gave Maria Armendariz voter registration information recently at Dallas Market Hall. Two Hispanic coalitions are organizing registration drives before the Nov. 7 election.
Officials with U.S. Immigration and Citizenship Services said the Dallas office noted an increase in the number of naturalization applications in the spring when the national immigration debate was at its height. In April, 1,482 applications were submitted. That compares with 1,269 applications received in April 2005.
In May, applications jumped to 1,647, up from 1,235 in May 2005.
In addition, the number of naturalization forms downloaded online nationally showed a dramatic rise. From October through July 2005, 684,697 were forms downloaded. For the same period this year, the number was 1,183,913.
Voter registration shift?
The effect so far on voter registrations, however, has not been as dramatic. Bruce Sherbet, Dallas County elections administrator, said about 1,500 new voters have registered since April. That's fairly normal for a year without a presidential election, he said.
Dr. Jillson said it's implausible to believe that a march will cause any group to suddenly take political control of the city, especially because at least 30 percent of the Latinos in Texas are not U.S. citizens, and many of those who are have not been politically active.
Tell Us
How much of an impact will the march have on local politics?
We'll see a big shift this fall
Little or no change
Change will come, but gradually
View Results
"It is important to think of this as a very long-term effort at integrating Hispanics into the political and civic life of the city," Dr. Jillson said, adding that he does not expect immediate electoral effects. "But it's absolutely necessary to begin now in order to have an effect two and four years from."
Laura Gonzalez, who teaches cultural studies at Mountain View College and is director of the Oak Cliff Center for Community Studies, said she has been astounded by what has happened to her students and their parents. Area Hispanics, she said, are poised to make a difference.
Amazing transformation
"It's an amazing transformation of my students," said Dr. Gonzalez, an anthropologist. "They are wanting to learn more about politics and public speaking, about Mexican-American history, about social movements."
Recently, some of the leaders of the spring student walkouts, which some credit for raising awareness about the immigration issue, created Young Advocates Spreading Political Awareness. Only a handful of young people have joined the group, but it already has worked at a couple of voter registration drives and plans some of its own.
"There are so many issues now that directly affect us, we wanted our voices heard," said Greisa Martinez, 18.
Another group that traces its origins to the megamarch is the new LULAC chapter, or council, created by gay and lesbian Latinos. The council, based in the Oak Lawn area of Dallas, was formed this summer with about a dozen members.
A council official said the new group would function just as any other LULAC council, working on education and civil rights issues. But it also will act as a bridge between LULAC members and gay and lesbian Hispanics. This fall, members will focus on voter registration.
Jesse Garcia of Dallas is one of the organizers. He said the idea for the council began last year when gay organizations were fighting against a state constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage. The amendment eventually passed.
The idea for the council arose again on the day of the megamarch, Mr. Garcia said.
"Several of us went to the march, and it just hit me as we stood in the middle of all those people, what a beautiful thing it was and how we had some things in common," Mr. Garcia said. "Some of our nation's leaders are trying to paint gays and now immigrants as the root of all our country's evil."
At meetings of two voter registration groups this month, volunteers planned ways to increase the number of registered Hispanic voters by several thousand.
One meeting was in Oak Cliff at the new office of the Southwest Voter Registration Education Project. The other was at the Bill J. Priest Institute in South Dallas and attracted about 45 people, including elected officials, political candidates and community representatives. Their MegaVoto project is a direct tie to the April megamarch.
Among those attending the meeting in South Dallas were Democratic state Reps. Rafael Anchia and Roberto Alonzo, as well as several Dallas County judicial candidates.
Also Online
En español
Mr. Anchia, who has been mentioned as a possible Dallas mayoral candidate next year, said that during the recent conference of the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials in Dallas, the group conducted focus groups with megamarch participants.
Learning to connect
"People talked about previously feeling isolated in their views and not knowing how to connect, but that began to change with the megamarch when they saw these thousands and thousands of other people," he said.
Dallas lawyer Domingo Garcia, one of the megamarch organizers, said a voter registration drive being coordinated by the San Antonio-based Southwest Voter Registration Education project is a result of the march. The group has produced results in the past.
Mr. Garcia and Southwest Voter conducted registration drives in 1988 in Cockrell Hill, just west of downtown Dallas. Before the effort, no more than eight Hispanics ever voted in city elections. In 1988, 191 Hispanics voted, and the City Council became majority Hispanic.
Mr. Garcia hopes the megamarch will produce similar results. "We had 500,000 people that marched for immigrants' rights on April 9," he said, "but that march won't mean much unless we translate those people into votes."
E-mail ftrejo@dallasnews.com
ON THE MOVE
March 27-29 – Thousands of students walk out of classes throughout North Texas to protest immigration proposals.
April 9 – As many as 500,000 people crowd into downtown Dallas in the city's largest civil rights protest.
June 12 – LULAC's first gay council is launched in Dallas.
Sept. 9 – A coalition of organizations plans "MegaVoto" rally at City Hall Plaza.
Sept. 16 – Several organizations will hold voter registration drives throughout city in what is being called the Day of the Latino Vote.
Nov. 7 – The first general election since April's "megamarch."
Online at: http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/news/politics/local/stories/081706dnmetmegamarchfolo.2964fe4.html
When it comes to schools, Texas parents know best
Aug. 20, 2006, 6:18PM
When it comes to schools, Texas parents know best
Let them decide instead of politicians and bureaucrats
By DR. JAMES LEININGER
THERE are two sides to the school choice debate. On one side are those who believe politicians and government are best suited to make decisions for our children; on the other are people who believe parents are best suited to choose what is best for their children.
ADVERTISEMENT
School choice is just that: a chance for parents to choose the best school for their own child. The school choice option being considered in Texas would give parents in large urban school districts the option of changing schools if they prefer and if seats are available. If parents do not want to change or there are no seats available at other public or private schools, everything simply stays as it is today.
When wealthy Texas parents are not satisfied with the school their child attends they have a choice ˜ they move to a better school district or send their child to a private school. For most hard-working Texans, this choice does not exist because they simply cannot afford it. But all parents deserve the right to chose what is best for their child.
It is no comfort to parents who want to send their children to a different school to hear that their child's school will "eventually" improve. Parents and their children cannot afford to wait for their schools to improve; children either learn and develop today or, in most cases, stay a step behind forever.
Generations of Texas children and parents have found themselves with no educational options because they are not rich enough to change addresses or to pay private school tuition. Giving parents the choice of exploring better educational options today with the tax dollars they already pay puts our public policy where it properly belongs ˜ on the side of children hungry to learn and on the side of parents' ability to direct that learning.
There are many reasons why a parent might want to choose a different school for their child. Their current local school may be underperforming; or it may be unsafe and have gang or drug activity. Parents, knowing their own child better than anyone else, may want to choose a school that emphasizes music or the sciences or that has created a more structured academic or behavioral setting. Our public policy should allow the broadest possible menu of educational options because, finally, it is what is best for children that is most important.
Opponents of school choice claim that allowing parents to choose schools will drain money from the public system. This is factually wrong. The school choice pilot program will not be paid for from public education funds. It bears repeating ˜ not one penny will be taken from the Texas education system in order to give parents the choice of the best school for their child. Public education will continue to be funded at the same or greater levels and funding per pupil actually increases. Furthermore, any tax dollars, paid by Texans and spent on educating Texas children, must be tied to accountability measures.
The proposed Texas school choice pilot program is limited to large urban districts with a majority of students who are educationally and economically disadvantaged. To be clear, supporters of school choice support improving all schools. Academic research from scholars at Harvard University shows that school choice programs improve student learning for students choosing to transfer and for those remaining in the public system.
Giving all parents the same ability to find the best school for their child gives power to parents to fulfill to the needs of their children. Under such choice programs, schools are no longer able to take students for granted, but instead must compete to convince parents that they will do the best job in educating their children.
Our campaign has recently funded hundreds of billboards and radio ads inviting parents to participate in education policy and to help enact school choice because parents think first of what is best for their children and because these parents should have the strongest voice in this important public policy debate.
For too long too many legislators have denied parents educational choices while sending their own children to private schools. It's past time that low-income parents had the same education options as the politicians who represent them. It's time to give all parents a choice and every child a chance.
Leininger, a doctor and businessman living in San Antonio, has funded private scholarships for low-income children in San Antonio and other Texas cities and has advocated enactment of school choice programs in Texas for more than 10 years.
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/editorial/outlook/4129345.html
When it comes to schools, Texas parents know best
Let them decide instead of politicians and bureaucrats
By DR. JAMES LEININGER
THERE are two sides to the school choice debate. On one side are those who believe politicians and government are best suited to make decisions for our children; on the other are people who believe parents are best suited to choose what is best for their children.
ADVERTISEMENT
School choice is just that: a chance for parents to choose the best school for their own child. The school choice option being considered in Texas would give parents in large urban school districts the option of changing schools if they prefer and if seats are available. If parents do not want to change or there are no seats available at other public or private schools, everything simply stays as it is today.
When wealthy Texas parents are not satisfied with the school their child attends they have a choice ˜ they move to a better school district or send their child to a private school. For most hard-working Texans, this choice does not exist because they simply cannot afford it. But all parents deserve the right to chose what is best for their child.
It is no comfort to parents who want to send their children to a different school to hear that their child's school will "eventually" improve. Parents and their children cannot afford to wait for their schools to improve; children either learn and develop today or, in most cases, stay a step behind forever.
Generations of Texas children and parents have found themselves with no educational options because they are not rich enough to change addresses or to pay private school tuition. Giving parents the choice of exploring better educational options today with the tax dollars they already pay puts our public policy where it properly belongs ˜ on the side of children hungry to learn and on the side of parents' ability to direct that learning.
There are many reasons why a parent might want to choose a different school for their child. Their current local school may be underperforming; or it may be unsafe and have gang or drug activity. Parents, knowing their own child better than anyone else, may want to choose a school that emphasizes music or the sciences or that has created a more structured academic or behavioral setting. Our public policy should allow the broadest possible menu of educational options because, finally, it is what is best for children that is most important.
Opponents of school choice claim that allowing parents to choose schools will drain money from the public system. This is factually wrong. The school choice pilot program will not be paid for from public education funds. It bears repeating ˜ not one penny will be taken from the Texas education system in order to give parents the choice of the best school for their child. Public education will continue to be funded at the same or greater levels and funding per pupil actually increases. Furthermore, any tax dollars, paid by Texans and spent on educating Texas children, must be tied to accountability measures.
The proposed Texas school choice pilot program is limited to large urban districts with a majority of students who are educationally and economically disadvantaged. To be clear, supporters of school choice support improving all schools. Academic research from scholars at Harvard University shows that school choice programs improve student learning for students choosing to transfer and for those remaining in the public system.
Giving all parents the same ability to find the best school for their child gives power to parents to fulfill to the needs of their children. Under such choice programs, schools are no longer able to take students for granted, but instead must compete to convince parents that they will do the best job in educating their children.
Our campaign has recently funded hundreds of billboards and radio ads inviting parents to participate in education policy and to help enact school choice because parents think first of what is best for their children and because these parents should have the strongest voice in this important public policy debate.
For too long too many legislators have denied parents educational choices while sending their own children to private schools. It's past time that low-income parents had the same education options as the politicians who represent them. It's time to give all parents a choice and every child a chance.
Leininger, a doctor and businessman living in San Antonio, has funded private scholarships for low-income children in San Antonio and other Texas cities and has advocated enactment of school choice programs in Texas for more than 10 years.
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/editorial/outlook/4129345.html
Saturday, August 19, 2006
Local Democrats blast national party panel over campaign spot
Aug. 15, 2006, 9:51PM
Local Democrats blast national party panel over campaign spot
Ad mixes Osama bin Laden's image with 2 Hispanics climbing a fence
By ZEKE MINAYA
Copyright 2006 Houston Chronicle
Harris County Democrats denounced their own party Tuesday after joining the national outcry over a political ad they said equates Hispanic immigrants with terrorists like Osama bin Laden.
The 35-second ad is posted on the Web site of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and attempts to show the failings of Republican leadership on the issue of national and international security. The ad mixes images of bin Laden, the 2004 train bombings in Madrid and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad with footage of two people scaling a fence while the screen flash the words "millions more illegal immigrants."
What began as an attempt to wrestle the traditionally Republican-dominated issue of security away during a hotly contested election year, instead risks driving Hispanic voters away from the Democratic Party, said Houston Councilwoman Carol Alvarado.
"You cannot compare people who come over for economic opportunities to people who are coming over to terrorize our country," she said. "They should not be in the same message, same video or even in the same conversation."
Alvarado wrote the committee chair, Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., to urge the removal of the ad and warn that the "Democratic Party can only stand to lose by alienating millions of Latino voters."
Gerry Birnberg, chair of the Harris County Democratic Party, also wrote Schumer and called for an end to donations to the campaign committee. "Give money to the candidates but not the (committee), because they are just wasting it," he said.
Birnberg and Alvarado said they agreed with the majority of the ad and its overall criticism of Republican leadership.
"The (committee) is correct in criticizing the Republicans," Birnberg said, "but (they were) over the top and out of line when they suggested that people coming to this country to work are somehow equivalently evil and dangerous as a madman terrorist."
The ad has produced a rare instance of bipartisan agreement during an election year. Hispanic Republicans have also attacked the ad. The Associated Press reported that Pedro Celis, chairman of the Republican National Hispanic Assembly, said in a statement Tuesday that the DSCC should remove the ad because it vilifies illegal Hispanic immigrants and is ''appalling.''
Calls to Schumer's offices were not immediately returned.
zeke.minaya@chron.com
This article is: http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/metropolitan/4119855.html
Local Democrats blast national party panel over campaign spot
Ad mixes Osama bin Laden's image with 2 Hispanics climbing a fence
By ZEKE MINAYA
Copyright 2006 Houston Chronicle
Harris County Democrats denounced their own party Tuesday after joining the national outcry over a political ad they said equates Hispanic immigrants with terrorists like Osama bin Laden.
The 35-second ad is posted on the Web site of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and attempts to show the failings of Republican leadership on the issue of national and international security. The ad mixes images of bin Laden, the 2004 train bombings in Madrid and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad with footage of two people scaling a fence while the screen flash the words "millions more illegal immigrants."
What began as an attempt to wrestle the traditionally Republican-dominated issue of security away during a hotly contested election year, instead risks driving Hispanic voters away from the Democratic Party, said Houston Councilwoman Carol Alvarado.
"You cannot compare people who come over for economic opportunities to people who are coming over to terrorize our country," she said. "They should not be in the same message, same video or even in the same conversation."
Alvarado wrote the committee chair, Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., to urge the removal of the ad and warn that the "Democratic Party can only stand to lose by alienating millions of Latino voters."
Gerry Birnberg, chair of the Harris County Democratic Party, also wrote Schumer and called for an end to donations to the campaign committee. "Give money to the candidates but not the (committee), because they are just wasting it," he said.
Birnberg and Alvarado said they agreed with the majority of the ad and its overall criticism of Republican leadership.
"The (committee) is correct in criticizing the Republicans," Birnberg said, "but (they were) over the top and out of line when they suggested that people coming to this country to work are somehow equivalently evil and dangerous as a madman terrorist."
The ad has produced a rare instance of bipartisan agreement during an election year. Hispanic Republicans have also attacked the ad. The Associated Press reported that Pedro Celis, chairman of the Republican National Hispanic Assembly, said in a statement Tuesday that the DSCC should remove the ad because it vilifies illegal Hispanic immigrants and is ''appalling.''
Calls to Schumer's offices were not immediately returned.
zeke.minaya@chron.com
This article is: http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/metropolitan/4119855.html
Charles Murray: What's in a test?
Sunday, August 13, 2006
What's in a test? by Charles Murray, DALLAS MORNING NEWS
Deception and denial, when it comes to No Child Left Behind
Test scores are the last refuge of the No Child Left Behind Act. They have to be, because so little else about the act is attractive.
NCLB takes a giant step toward nationalizing elementary and secondary education, a disaster for federalism.
It pushes classrooms toward relentless drilling, not something that inspires able people to become teachers or makes children eager to learn. It holds good students hostage to the performance of the least talented at a time when the economic future of the country depends more than ever on the performance of the most talented.
The one aspect of the act that could have inspired enthusiasm from me, promoting school choice, has fallen far short of its hopes. The only way to justify NCLB is through compelling evidence that test scores are improving.
So let's talk about test scores.
The case that NCLB has failed to raise test scores had been made most comprehensively in a report from the Civil Rights Project at Harvard University, released just a few weeks ago. The Civil Rights Project has an openly liberal political agenda, but the author of the report, Jaekyung Lee, lays out the data in graphs that anyone can follow, subjects them to appropriate statistical analyses and arrives at conclusions that can stand on their scholarly merits: NCLB has not had a significant impact on overall test scores and has not narrowed the racial and socioeconomic achievement gap.
Is it too early to tell? As a parent who has had children in public schools since NCLB began, I don't think so. The Frederick County, Md., schools our children have attended have turned themselves inside out to try to produce the right test results, with dismaying effects on the content of classroom instruction and devastating effects on teacher morale. We actually lost our best English teacher to the effects of high-stakes testing. "I want to teach my students how to write," he said, "not teach them how to pass a test that says they can write." He quit.
So, yes, I think that if we parents have had to put up with these kinds of troubling effects on our children's schooling for four years, we are entitled to expect evidence of results. After all, "accountability" is NCLB's favorite word, and the Department of Education is holding school systems accountable for improvements in test scores with a vengeance. Sauce for the goose, sauce for the gander.
The Department of Education will undoubtedly produce numbers to dispute the findings of the Civil Rights Project, which brings me to the point of this essay. Those numbers will consist largely of pass percentages, not mean scores. A particular score is deemed to separate "proficient" from "not proficient." Reach that score, and you've passed the test. If 60 percent of one group – blondes, let's say – pass while only 50 percent of redheads pass, then the blonde-redhead gap is 10 percentage points.
A pass percentage is a bad standard for educational progress. Conceptually, "proficiency" has no objective meaning that lends itself to a cutoff. Administratively, the NCLB penalties for failure to make adequate progress give the states powerful incentives to make progress as easy to show as possible. A pass percentage throws away valuable information, telling you whether someone got over a bar, but not how high the bar was set or by how much the bar was cleared. Most important: If you are trying to measure progress in closing group differences, a comparison of changes in pass percentages is inherently misleading.
Take the case of Texas, from which George Bush acquired his faith in NCLB. As the president described it to the Urban League in 2003: "In my state, Texas, 73 percent of the white students passed the math test in 1994, while only 38 percent of African-American students passed it. So we made that the point of reference. We had people focused on the results for the first time – not process, but results. And because teachers rose to the challenge, because the problem became clear, that gap has now closed to 10 points." President Bush's numbers are accurately stated. They are also meaningless.
Any test that meets ordinary standards produces an approximation of what statisticians call a "normal distribution" of scores – a bell curve – because achievement in any open-ended skill such as reading comprehension or mathematics really is more or less normally distributed. The tests that produce anything except a bell curve are usually ones so simple that large proportions of students get every item correct. They hide the underlying normal distribution but don't change it.
Thus point No.1, that using easy tests and discussing results in terms of pass percentages obscure a reality that NCLB seems bent on denying: All the children cannot be above average. They cannot all even be proficient, if "proficient" is defined legitimately. Some children do not have the necessary skills.
Point No.2 goes to the inherent distortions introduced by the use of pass percentages: Because of the underlying normal distribution, a gain in a given number of points has varying effects on group differences depending on where the gain falls.
To illustrate point No.2, consider a test that has a hundred-point scale with a mean of 50 and a standard deviation of 15 (the standard deviation, a measure of the variability of the scores, tells you how tall and skinny or how short and broad the bell curve will be). How many students are involved when a range of, say, 10 points is at issue? The shaded areas in Figure 1 show two possibilities.
The total area under the bell curve includes all the students. The shaded area on the left includes all those with a score of 40 to 49 points – 24.8 percent of all students, if the distribution is perfectly normal. The shaded area on the right includes all those with a score of 80 to 89 points – just 1.9 percent of all students. Suppose we are still comparing redheads and blondes. If the mean score of redheads goes from 40 to 50, it has risen all the way from the 25th to the 50th percentile of all students. If the blonde mean goes from 80 to 90, it has moved merely from the 98th to the 99th percentile of all students.
You do not have to be a statistician to see that these built-in features of normally distributed scores – gains that are equal in points are not equal in the number of students they affect or in the percentile distances that students move – complicate the use of pass percentages when comparing groups.
If you want to get deeper into the math, you may visit a quirky and provocative Web site, www.lagriffedulion.f2s.com, run by someone who calls himself La Griffe du Lion. I surmise that he is an established scholar – a quantitative discipline seems likely – who once published on the fraught topic of group differences, learned how unpleasant and even professionally perilous that can be and decided to remain anonymous henceforth. In any case, his technical skills are first rate. Click on the topic line entitled "Closing the Racial Learning Gap" for a much more detailed version of the argument and data that I am presenting here.
For our purposes, you need know only this: If the real difference between two groups, measured as it should be with means and standard deviations, remains constant, the size of the pass-percentage gap between two groups changes nonlinearly in a mathematically inevitable way. In other words, if there really is a constant, meaningful difference between groups, you can generate a curve that predicts how the point gap will change as tests are made easier or harder or as students become more or less competent. La Griffe has done this, and his curve fits the Texas data almost perfectly. In Figure 2, the white pass rate is used as the basis for predicting the size of the white-black gap. The circles represent the observed sizes of the test score gap from 1994 to 2002.
Test scores in Texas went up for both blacks and whites. Maybe that's good news, representing real gains in learning for everyone, or maybe it's not so good, representing the effects of teaching to the test. The data Texas reports do not permit a judgment. But the black gains are almost exactly what would be predicted if the magnitude of the underlying black-white difference remained unchanged. If there really was closure of the gap, all that Texas has to do is release the group means, as well as information about the black and white distributions of scores, and it will be easy to measure it. Whatever the real closure may be, however, it cannot come close to the dramatic reduction that Mr. Bush found in the difference between black and white pass rates.
In this instance, the percentage-passed measure misleadingly showed a huge reduction in the black-white achievement gap. But look at the lefthand side of the curve. In a state that imposes tough standards – for example, one that establishes a threshold that only 40 percent of whites pass – across-the-board improvements in scores can misleadingly show an increase in the white-black achievement gap when none occurred.
Question: Doesn't this mean that the same set of scores could be made to show a rising or falling group difference just by changing the definition of a passing score? Answer: Yes.
At stake is not some arcane statistical nuance. The federal government is doling out rewards and penalties to school systems across the country based on changes in pass percentages. It is an uninformative measure for many reasons, but when it comes to measuring one of the central outcomes sought by No Child Left Behind, the closure of the achievement gap that separates poor students from rich, Latino from white and black from white, the measure is beyond uninformative. It is deceptive.
Charles Murray, W.H. Brady Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, is the author, most recently, of "In Our Hands: A Plan to Replace the Welfare State." This essay first appeared in The Wall Street Journal. His e-mail address is cmurray@aei.org.
Online at: http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/opinion/points/stories/DN-murray_13edi.ART.State.Edition1.2bdf91f.html
What's in a test? by Charles Murray, DALLAS MORNING NEWS
Deception and denial, when it comes to No Child Left Behind
Test scores are the last refuge of the No Child Left Behind Act. They have to be, because so little else about the act is attractive.
NCLB takes a giant step toward nationalizing elementary and secondary education, a disaster for federalism.
It pushes classrooms toward relentless drilling, not something that inspires able people to become teachers or makes children eager to learn. It holds good students hostage to the performance of the least talented at a time when the economic future of the country depends more than ever on the performance of the most talented.
The one aspect of the act that could have inspired enthusiasm from me, promoting school choice, has fallen far short of its hopes. The only way to justify NCLB is through compelling evidence that test scores are improving.
So let's talk about test scores.
The case that NCLB has failed to raise test scores had been made most comprehensively in a report from the Civil Rights Project at Harvard University, released just a few weeks ago. The Civil Rights Project has an openly liberal political agenda, but the author of the report, Jaekyung Lee, lays out the data in graphs that anyone can follow, subjects them to appropriate statistical analyses and arrives at conclusions that can stand on their scholarly merits: NCLB has not had a significant impact on overall test scores and has not narrowed the racial and socioeconomic achievement gap.
Is it too early to tell? As a parent who has had children in public schools since NCLB began, I don't think so. The Frederick County, Md., schools our children have attended have turned themselves inside out to try to produce the right test results, with dismaying effects on the content of classroom instruction and devastating effects on teacher morale. We actually lost our best English teacher to the effects of high-stakes testing. "I want to teach my students how to write," he said, "not teach them how to pass a test that says they can write." He quit.
So, yes, I think that if we parents have had to put up with these kinds of troubling effects on our children's schooling for four years, we are entitled to expect evidence of results. After all, "accountability" is NCLB's favorite word, and the Department of Education is holding school systems accountable for improvements in test scores with a vengeance. Sauce for the goose, sauce for the gander.
The Department of Education will undoubtedly produce numbers to dispute the findings of the Civil Rights Project, which brings me to the point of this essay. Those numbers will consist largely of pass percentages, not mean scores. A particular score is deemed to separate "proficient" from "not proficient." Reach that score, and you've passed the test. If 60 percent of one group – blondes, let's say – pass while only 50 percent of redheads pass, then the blonde-redhead gap is 10 percentage points.
A pass percentage is a bad standard for educational progress. Conceptually, "proficiency" has no objective meaning that lends itself to a cutoff. Administratively, the NCLB penalties for failure to make adequate progress give the states powerful incentives to make progress as easy to show as possible. A pass percentage throws away valuable information, telling you whether someone got over a bar, but not how high the bar was set or by how much the bar was cleared. Most important: If you are trying to measure progress in closing group differences, a comparison of changes in pass percentages is inherently misleading.
Take the case of Texas, from which George Bush acquired his faith in NCLB. As the president described it to the Urban League in 2003: "In my state, Texas, 73 percent of the white students passed the math test in 1994, while only 38 percent of African-American students passed it. So we made that the point of reference. We had people focused on the results for the first time – not process, but results. And because teachers rose to the challenge, because the problem became clear, that gap has now closed to 10 points." President Bush's numbers are accurately stated. They are also meaningless.
Any test that meets ordinary standards produces an approximation of what statisticians call a "normal distribution" of scores – a bell curve – because achievement in any open-ended skill such as reading comprehension or mathematics really is more or less normally distributed. The tests that produce anything except a bell curve are usually ones so simple that large proportions of students get every item correct. They hide the underlying normal distribution but don't change it.
Thus point No.1, that using easy tests and discussing results in terms of pass percentages obscure a reality that NCLB seems bent on denying: All the children cannot be above average. They cannot all even be proficient, if "proficient" is defined legitimately. Some children do not have the necessary skills.
Point No.2 goes to the inherent distortions introduced by the use of pass percentages: Because of the underlying normal distribution, a gain in a given number of points has varying effects on group differences depending on where the gain falls.
To illustrate point No.2, consider a test that has a hundred-point scale with a mean of 50 and a standard deviation of 15 (the standard deviation, a measure of the variability of the scores, tells you how tall and skinny or how short and broad the bell curve will be). How many students are involved when a range of, say, 10 points is at issue? The shaded areas in Figure 1 show two possibilities.
The total area under the bell curve includes all the students. The shaded area on the left includes all those with a score of 40 to 49 points – 24.8 percent of all students, if the distribution is perfectly normal. The shaded area on the right includes all those with a score of 80 to 89 points – just 1.9 percent of all students. Suppose we are still comparing redheads and blondes. If the mean score of redheads goes from 40 to 50, it has risen all the way from the 25th to the 50th percentile of all students. If the blonde mean goes from 80 to 90, it has moved merely from the 98th to the 99th percentile of all students.
You do not have to be a statistician to see that these built-in features of normally distributed scores – gains that are equal in points are not equal in the number of students they affect or in the percentile distances that students move – complicate the use of pass percentages when comparing groups.
If you want to get deeper into the math, you may visit a quirky and provocative Web site, www.lagriffedulion.f2s.com, run by someone who calls himself La Griffe du Lion. I surmise that he is an established scholar – a quantitative discipline seems likely – who once published on the fraught topic of group differences, learned how unpleasant and even professionally perilous that can be and decided to remain anonymous henceforth. In any case, his technical skills are first rate. Click on the topic line entitled "Closing the Racial Learning Gap" for a much more detailed version of the argument and data that I am presenting here.
For our purposes, you need know only this: If the real difference between two groups, measured as it should be with means and standard deviations, remains constant, the size of the pass-percentage gap between two groups changes nonlinearly in a mathematically inevitable way. In other words, if there really is a constant, meaningful difference between groups, you can generate a curve that predicts how the point gap will change as tests are made easier or harder or as students become more or less competent. La Griffe has done this, and his curve fits the Texas data almost perfectly. In Figure 2, the white pass rate is used as the basis for predicting the size of the white-black gap. The circles represent the observed sizes of the test score gap from 1994 to 2002.
Test scores in Texas went up for both blacks and whites. Maybe that's good news, representing real gains in learning for everyone, or maybe it's not so good, representing the effects of teaching to the test. The data Texas reports do not permit a judgment. But the black gains are almost exactly what would be predicted if the magnitude of the underlying black-white difference remained unchanged. If there really was closure of the gap, all that Texas has to do is release the group means, as well as information about the black and white distributions of scores, and it will be easy to measure it. Whatever the real closure may be, however, it cannot come close to the dramatic reduction that Mr. Bush found in the difference between black and white pass rates.
In this instance, the percentage-passed measure misleadingly showed a huge reduction in the black-white achievement gap. But look at the lefthand side of the curve. In a state that imposes tough standards – for example, one that establishes a threshold that only 40 percent of whites pass – across-the-board improvements in scores can misleadingly show an increase in the white-black achievement gap when none occurred.
Question: Doesn't this mean that the same set of scores could be made to show a rising or falling group difference just by changing the definition of a passing score? Answer: Yes.
At stake is not some arcane statistical nuance. The federal government is doling out rewards and penalties to school systems across the country based on changes in pass percentages. It is an uninformative measure for many reasons, but when it comes to measuring one of the central outcomes sought by No Child Left Behind, the closure of the achievement gap that separates poor students from rich, Latino from white and black from white, the measure is beyond uninformative. It is deceptive.
Charles Murray, W.H. Brady Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, is the author, most recently, of "In Our Hands: A Plan to Replace the Welfare State." This essay first appeared in The Wall Street Journal. His e-mail address is cmurray@aei.org.
Online at: http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/opinion/points/stories/DN-murray_13edi.ART.State.Edition1.2bdf91f.html
Schools debate classroom spending rules
Texas will soon require schools to spend at least 65 percent of their budgets on direct classroom costs. Another interesting experiment. -Angela
Aug 15, 2006
Modified: Aug 15, 2006 3:43 AM
Schools debate classroom spending rules
By APRIL CASTRO, ASSOCIATED PRESS WRITER
AUSTIN, Texas (AP) - Linda Buffe can't imagine taking on another role at work.
She's already the superintendent, bus driver, counselor and special education teacher at the tiny Malone school district near Waco. But now she also has a bit part in a national debate over public school spending.
Texas is one of three states that will soon require schools to spend at least 65 percent of their budgets on direct classroom costs such as teachers and textbooks. Several other states also are moving toward adopting the measure. The idea was to spend more money on children without raising taxes.
But Buffe, like educators across the state, is stumped about where she can cut administrative costs.
"I don't know how much more we can cut those services and still maintain what we have to have," Buffe said. "I do a lot of praying."
Internet retail millionaire Patrick Byrne, founder of the political group First Class Education, kickstarted the movement and wants the so-called "65 percent solution" to be implemented in all 50 states by the end of 2008.
It's now required in Georgia, and Louisiana school officials are working on a similar requirement. Petition drives and television ad campaigns have led to ballot referendums this November in Colorado and Oklahoma. Efforts for 2008 ballot referenda are under way in Washington, Arizona, Missouri and Kansas.
Instructional materials such as laptops and field trips are considered classroom costs under the most widely accepted definition. Transportation, counselors and nurses are not.
"It's simply criminal that superintendents are making well above $200,000-a-year, driving Lexuses and BMWs, when teachers are paying for pencils and paper out of their own pockets," said Tim Mooney, spokesman for First Class Education.
Buffe, who makes about $71,000 a year, is among the administrators and educators who have criticized the proposal because there's little scientific research to back up claims that increased classroom spending improves test scores.
"There certainly doesn't seem to be any research that says spending in these categories means students are going to be more successful; it's one-size-fits-all politics," said Richard Kouri, a lobbyist for the Texas State Teachers Association.
Critics say shifting more money into the classroom will mean cuts to other programs, like nursing, counseling and transportation.
"It's a catchy line, a catchy proposal," said Mary Fulton, a policy analyst for the Education Commission of the States. "On the face of it, it's hard to be against it. It becomes more complicated when you really look into it."
Experts also said the requirement will be tough for small and rural districts.
"Look at some of the big rural isolated districts in Texas; they have really high transportation costs," Fulton said. "There are a lot of differences (among school districts) and Texas is along those lines."
A memo from Mooney to state politicians suggests Republican politics are just as important to the group as the issue.
He claimed the proposal will help policy makers by creating an issue on which school administrators and teachers might disagree. It also could help Republican politicians seem more credible on education issues, eventually helping them adopt more contested policies like private-school vouchers, Mooney said in the memo.
"Once additional fixing and funding of public education can be achieved ... voters may be more greatly predisposed to supporting voucher and charter school proposals, as Republicans address the voting public with greater credibility on public education issues," Mooney wrote.
For Texas, increasing the spending average will redirect about $1 billion into the classroom over the next two years, according to a review of 2004-05 spending data.
That's enough money to give each Texas public school teacher a $4,000 pay raise or hire almost 30,000 new teachers at a salary of $40,000. Or buy an $800 laptop for every public high school student in the state.
But that money might have to be shifted away from such programs as nursing and food services.
"You have to look at the things that might have to be cut by the school district to get to the 65 percent," said Joydeep Roy, an economist who specializes in education issues at the Economic Policy Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank. "You're making a choice between things that are going to be cut and instructional services that are going to be added."
Aug 15, 2006
Modified: Aug 15, 2006 3:43 AM
Schools debate classroom spending rules
By APRIL CASTRO, ASSOCIATED PRESS WRITER
AUSTIN, Texas (AP) - Linda Buffe can't imagine taking on another role at work.
She's already the superintendent, bus driver, counselor and special education teacher at the tiny Malone school district near Waco. But now she also has a bit part in a national debate over public school spending.
Texas is one of three states that will soon require schools to spend at least 65 percent of their budgets on direct classroom costs such as teachers and textbooks. Several other states also are moving toward adopting the measure. The idea was to spend more money on children without raising taxes.
But Buffe, like educators across the state, is stumped about where she can cut administrative costs.
"I don't know how much more we can cut those services and still maintain what we have to have," Buffe said. "I do a lot of praying."
Internet retail millionaire Patrick Byrne, founder of the political group First Class Education, kickstarted the movement and wants the so-called "65 percent solution" to be implemented in all 50 states by the end of 2008.
It's now required in Georgia, and Louisiana school officials are working on a similar requirement. Petition drives and television ad campaigns have led to ballot referendums this November in Colorado and Oklahoma. Efforts for 2008 ballot referenda are under way in Washington, Arizona, Missouri and Kansas.
Instructional materials such as laptops and field trips are considered classroom costs under the most widely accepted definition. Transportation, counselors and nurses are not.
"It's simply criminal that superintendents are making well above $200,000-a-year, driving Lexuses and BMWs, when teachers are paying for pencils and paper out of their own pockets," said Tim Mooney, spokesman for First Class Education.
Buffe, who makes about $71,000 a year, is among the administrators and educators who have criticized the proposal because there's little scientific research to back up claims that increased classroom spending improves test scores.
"There certainly doesn't seem to be any research that says spending in these categories means students are going to be more successful; it's one-size-fits-all politics," said Richard Kouri, a lobbyist for the Texas State Teachers Association.
Critics say shifting more money into the classroom will mean cuts to other programs, like nursing, counseling and transportation.
"It's a catchy line, a catchy proposal," said Mary Fulton, a policy analyst for the Education Commission of the States. "On the face of it, it's hard to be against it. It becomes more complicated when you really look into it."
Experts also said the requirement will be tough for small and rural districts.
"Look at some of the big rural isolated districts in Texas; they have really high transportation costs," Fulton said. "There are a lot of differences (among school districts) and Texas is along those lines."
A memo from Mooney to state politicians suggests Republican politics are just as important to the group as the issue.
He claimed the proposal will help policy makers by creating an issue on which school administrators and teachers might disagree. It also could help Republican politicians seem more credible on education issues, eventually helping them adopt more contested policies like private-school vouchers, Mooney said in the memo.
"Once additional fixing and funding of public education can be achieved ... voters may be more greatly predisposed to supporting voucher and charter school proposals, as Republicans address the voting public with greater credibility on public education issues," Mooney wrote.
For Texas, increasing the spending average will redirect about $1 billion into the classroom over the next two years, according to a review of 2004-05 spending data.
That's enough money to give each Texas public school teacher a $4,000 pay raise or hire almost 30,000 new teachers at a salary of $40,000. Or buy an $800 laptop for every public high school student in the state.
But that money might have to be shifted away from such programs as nursing and food services.
"You have to look at the things that might have to be cut by the school district to get to the 65 percent," said Joydeep Roy, an economist who specializes in education issues at the Economic Policy Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank. "You're making a choice between things that are going to be cut and instructional services that are going to be added."
Marketing the Best Schools
Marketing the Best Schools
By Jay Mathews
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, August 15, 2006; 10:54 AM
I try to avoid anything having to do with school district administration. I consider myself a classroom reporter, watching what the best teachers do to help children learn. To me, school board meetings are death. Interviews with school district superintendents aren't much better.
But a new report dissecting the KIPP Foundation, a very unusual kind of school administration, has reached me, and I am obliged to stifle my boredom with back-office details and reveal what it says. KIPP, short for Knowledge Is Power Program, is the most interesting initiative in American public education at the moment, and I have tried to be first with any important news about KIPP founders Mike Feinberg and Dave Levin and their growing number of teachers and students.
The intriguing part of this report, "The KIPP Schools: Deciding How to Go to Scale," by Howard Husock for the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, is its exploration of the relationship between the 52 KIPP schools in inner city and rural neighborhoods and the clothing store magnates, Doris and Don Fisher, who have bankrolled the foundation. They have left KIPP administrators a free hand and KIPP has set up an intriguing mechanism to rein in the schools that are not performing to the level they want. The Fishers created the GAP stores. I don't shop there, but I have worn some GAP items that I stole from my children's closets. They were comfortable, and I figure the Fishers must be smart because they are worth several hundred million dollars.
I did not realize until I read Husock's report, available at www.ksgcase.harvard. edu how powerful a brand name can be for a public charter school and how control of that name can be used to maintain high learning standards just as it is more commonly used to make sure the buttons on the front of my jeans don't fall off.
Levin and Feinberg had been building their schools for five years when Scott Hamilton, a new breed of educational entrepreneur, told the Fishers in 1999 that if they wanted to back a program with the best hope of improving public education, they ought to put their money on KIPP. Like all such initiatives, this was a big risk. Feinberg's fifth-to-eighth grade KIPP Academy in Houston and Levin's similar school in the South Bronx had produced the highest test scores in their areas for very disadvantaged children with a nine-and-a-half-hour school days, required homework, required summer school, trips, games, competitions and very energetic teaching. But they had only two schools with a total of about 600 children. Many small but hopeful school experiments like that had shriveled away, and there was no guarantee that KIPP would make much of an impact on the sluggish behemoth that is public education in inner city America.
Nonetheless, the Fishers handed Feinberg, Levin and Hamilton $15 million, since raised to about $25 million. Don Fisher told them, "I don't want to do something that just touches a few people. I want to be able to do something that can be expanded in size to do something major in public education." When Fisher asked if they really thought they could do that, Levin replied, "Well, Mr. Fisher, we're not sure, but we'd be more than happy to use your money to find out."
In April 2000, when they got the money, Feinberg was 31, Levin was 30 and Hamilton was 35. None of them had any business experience. They had no interest in running a network of for-profit schools, as Edison Schools Inc. had been doing. They also did not think the GAP's method of owning and operating each of its stores would work, because they could not attract the most creative principals unless they gave them the power to innovate in their schools just as Feinberg and Levin had done.
So they decided to use the money to recruit and train the best school leaders possible, and give them much control over not only how their school would be run, but what city it would be in. The first three principals they selected were Susan Schaeffler, Caleb Dolan and Dan Caesar. Caesar was happy to start a second KIPP school in Houston, where he was teaching, as the foundation asked him to, but when the foundation asked Schaeffler and Dolan to start KIPP schools in Atlanta, each refused. Schaeffler wanted her school in Washington, D.C., where she had been teaching and had family. Dolan wanted his in rural Gaston, N.C., where he was teaching. True to the new independent operator vision for KIPP, the foundation leaders said fine, and quickly saw several reasons why the District and Gaston would be great for KIPP.
John Kanberg, the foundation's chief legal counsel, calls this the "Johnny Appleseed" or "GM-certified mechanic" approach. They pick the best and most ambitious teachers they can find, give them a year's training (called a Fisher Fellowship) in school management, finance and the methods that had worked best for Feinberg and Levin, and then have them set up their school, usually as a public charter that lets them tap tax dollars but follow their own rules.
It has become clear that the KIPP name, and the favorable publicity associated with it, is a powerful tool in winning approval for these charter applications and recruiting good teachers. KIPP schools have been featured on "60 Minutes" and "Oprah." The achievement results from the schools continues to be impressive. So the foundation leaders have constructed a device giving them some leverage on those few occasions when a school proves to be a disappointment.
Husock, who has just become vice president for policy research at the Manhattan Institute, provides the full text of the KIPP Foundation's 10-page Trademark License Agreement for the 2005 to 2006 academic year. Husock said, "The agreement gave the foundation the right to inspect the operation of the school, review its results, and call for 'corrective action,' if found to be needed. What's more, if the school were found to be failing in either financial or educational ways -- the latter defined in terms of the number of students who were performing below appropriate grade levels on standardized tests -- it could take more drastic action," such as revoking the KIPP name. The foundation began a series of school inspections based on Hamilton's experience overseeing charter schools in Massachusetts.
The results from the five oldest KIPP middle schools, those started by Feinberg, Levin, Caesar, Dolan and Schaeffler, are so exceptional that many communities are begging for their own KIPP school. Houston KIPP officials have plans for as many as 40 schools in the next 10 years. The mostly low-income students in those five first schools who entered KIPP fifth grade in 2001 and graduated from eighth grade in 2005 improved on average from the 46th to the 80th percentile in reading and math. Students entering KIPP are now starting at even lower levels of achievement, about the 28th percentile on average. The other 47 KIPP schools, including an elementary school and two high schools, are mostly showing good results, although it will take a long time before most people who understand how schools work are satisfied that the data is solid and reveals an approach that will make a significant difference in the country.
The foundation has used the licensing agreement five times to defrock schools that KIPP did not think were moving in a promising direction. Two schools lost the right to use the KIPP name but continued as public charter schools -- the KIPP SAC Prep because the Sacramento, Calif., school wanted more local control than KIPP would allow and the KIPP PATH Academy in DeKalb County, Ga., because of what KIPP officials told Husock were "philosophical differences." The KIPP Achieve Academy in Atlanta lost the name because of financial problems and was closed by the local district at the end of this school year. Foundation officials said non-charter KIPP schools in Chicago and Asheville, N.C., lost the name in June because of relative low student enrollment and KIPP unhappiness with restrictive district contracts. The Chicago school also had disappointing test scores. Both will be folded next year into district schools housed in the same buildings.
How much this system will effect the growth of more KIPPs is uncertain. But the schools are now in 16 states, and have an open door policy for anyone who wants to take a look around. Whenever I am in a KIPP city, I try to stop by. When assessing a growing new franchise, it is always useful to see exactly what they are selling.
© 2006 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/08/15/AR2006081500423.html
By Jay Mathews
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, August 15, 2006; 10:54 AM
I try to avoid anything having to do with school district administration. I consider myself a classroom reporter, watching what the best teachers do to help children learn. To me, school board meetings are death. Interviews with school district superintendents aren't much better.
But a new report dissecting the KIPP Foundation, a very unusual kind of school administration, has reached me, and I am obliged to stifle my boredom with back-office details and reveal what it says. KIPP, short for Knowledge Is Power Program, is the most interesting initiative in American public education at the moment, and I have tried to be first with any important news about KIPP founders Mike Feinberg and Dave Levin and their growing number of teachers and students.
The intriguing part of this report, "The KIPP Schools: Deciding How to Go to Scale," by Howard Husock for the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, is its exploration of the relationship between the 52 KIPP schools in inner city and rural neighborhoods and the clothing store magnates, Doris and Don Fisher, who have bankrolled the foundation. They have left KIPP administrators a free hand and KIPP has set up an intriguing mechanism to rein in the schools that are not performing to the level they want. The Fishers created the GAP stores. I don't shop there, but I have worn some GAP items that I stole from my children's closets. They were comfortable, and I figure the Fishers must be smart because they are worth several hundred million dollars.
I did not realize until I read Husock's report, available at www.ksgcase.harvard. edu how powerful a brand name can be for a public charter school and how control of that name can be used to maintain high learning standards just as it is more commonly used to make sure the buttons on the front of my jeans don't fall off.
Levin and Feinberg had been building their schools for five years when Scott Hamilton, a new breed of educational entrepreneur, told the Fishers in 1999 that if they wanted to back a program with the best hope of improving public education, they ought to put their money on KIPP. Like all such initiatives, this was a big risk. Feinberg's fifth-to-eighth grade KIPP Academy in Houston and Levin's similar school in the South Bronx had produced the highest test scores in their areas for very disadvantaged children with a nine-and-a-half-hour school days, required homework, required summer school, trips, games, competitions and very energetic teaching. But they had only two schools with a total of about 600 children. Many small but hopeful school experiments like that had shriveled away, and there was no guarantee that KIPP would make much of an impact on the sluggish behemoth that is public education in inner city America.
Nonetheless, the Fishers handed Feinberg, Levin and Hamilton $15 million, since raised to about $25 million. Don Fisher told them, "I don't want to do something that just touches a few people. I want to be able to do something that can be expanded in size to do something major in public education." When Fisher asked if they really thought they could do that, Levin replied, "Well, Mr. Fisher, we're not sure, but we'd be more than happy to use your money to find out."
In April 2000, when they got the money, Feinberg was 31, Levin was 30 and Hamilton was 35. None of them had any business experience. They had no interest in running a network of for-profit schools, as Edison Schools Inc. had been doing. They also did not think the GAP's method of owning and operating each of its stores would work, because they could not attract the most creative principals unless they gave them the power to innovate in their schools just as Feinberg and Levin had done.
So they decided to use the money to recruit and train the best school leaders possible, and give them much control over not only how their school would be run, but what city it would be in. The first three principals they selected were Susan Schaeffler, Caleb Dolan and Dan Caesar. Caesar was happy to start a second KIPP school in Houston, where he was teaching, as the foundation asked him to, but when the foundation asked Schaeffler and Dolan to start KIPP schools in Atlanta, each refused. Schaeffler wanted her school in Washington, D.C., where she had been teaching and had family. Dolan wanted his in rural Gaston, N.C., where he was teaching. True to the new independent operator vision for KIPP, the foundation leaders said fine, and quickly saw several reasons why the District and Gaston would be great for KIPP.
John Kanberg, the foundation's chief legal counsel, calls this the "Johnny Appleseed" or "GM-certified mechanic" approach. They pick the best and most ambitious teachers they can find, give them a year's training (called a Fisher Fellowship) in school management, finance and the methods that had worked best for Feinberg and Levin, and then have them set up their school, usually as a public charter that lets them tap tax dollars but follow their own rules.
It has become clear that the KIPP name, and the favorable publicity associated with it, is a powerful tool in winning approval for these charter applications and recruiting good teachers. KIPP schools have been featured on "60 Minutes" and "Oprah." The achievement results from the schools continues to be impressive. So the foundation leaders have constructed a device giving them some leverage on those few occasions when a school proves to be a disappointment.
Husock, who has just become vice president for policy research at the Manhattan Institute, provides the full text of the KIPP Foundation's 10-page Trademark License Agreement for the 2005 to 2006 academic year. Husock said, "The agreement gave the foundation the right to inspect the operation of the school, review its results, and call for 'corrective action,' if found to be needed. What's more, if the school were found to be failing in either financial or educational ways -- the latter defined in terms of the number of students who were performing below appropriate grade levels on standardized tests -- it could take more drastic action," such as revoking the KIPP name. The foundation began a series of school inspections based on Hamilton's experience overseeing charter schools in Massachusetts.
The results from the five oldest KIPP middle schools, those started by Feinberg, Levin, Caesar, Dolan and Schaeffler, are so exceptional that many communities are begging for their own KIPP school. Houston KIPP officials have plans for as many as 40 schools in the next 10 years. The mostly low-income students in those five first schools who entered KIPP fifth grade in 2001 and graduated from eighth grade in 2005 improved on average from the 46th to the 80th percentile in reading and math. Students entering KIPP are now starting at even lower levels of achievement, about the 28th percentile on average. The other 47 KIPP schools, including an elementary school and two high schools, are mostly showing good results, although it will take a long time before most people who understand how schools work are satisfied that the data is solid and reveals an approach that will make a significant difference in the country.
The foundation has used the licensing agreement five times to defrock schools that KIPP did not think were moving in a promising direction. Two schools lost the right to use the KIPP name but continued as public charter schools -- the KIPP SAC Prep because the Sacramento, Calif., school wanted more local control than KIPP would allow and the KIPP PATH Academy in DeKalb County, Ga., because of what KIPP officials told Husock were "philosophical differences." The KIPP Achieve Academy in Atlanta lost the name because of financial problems and was closed by the local district at the end of this school year. Foundation officials said non-charter KIPP schools in Chicago and Asheville, N.C., lost the name in June because of relative low student enrollment and KIPP unhappiness with restrictive district contracts. The Chicago school also had disappointing test scores. Both will be folded next year into district schools housed in the same buildings.
How much this system will effect the growth of more KIPPs is uncertain. But the schools are now in 16 states, and have an open door policy for anyone who wants to take a look around. Whenever I am in a KIPP city, I try to stop by. When assessing a growing new franchise, it is always useful to see exactly what they are selling.
© 2006 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/08/15/AR2006081500423.html
California: Proposal Revives Bilingual Education Debate
California is revisiting the viability of bilingual education in the form of SB 1769 sponsored by state Sen. Martha Escutia (D-Whittier). I'm so glad to see this. Spanish is not a foreign language, but very much interwoven into our nation's fabric.
-Angela
Proposal Revives Bilingual Education Debate
A state Senate bill would add special reading and writing lessons for English learners. Foes say measure would lead to unequal standards.
By Carla Rivera
Times Staff Writer
August 11, 2006
Several politicians and educators called on the governor Thursday to support legislation that would allow school districts to include extra reading and writing lessons for elementary students struggling to learn English, in a debate that has rekindled California's dormant language wars.
The bill, SB 1769, sponsored by state Sen. Martha Escutia (D-Whittier), additionally would restore about $1.6 million in funding for the state Board of Education that was eliminated in the 2006-07 budget, when a compromise could not be reached on textbook criteria.
Supporters of the bill argue that recently adopted standards for textbook materials do not address the needs of California's 1.6 million English learners, who trail their English-speaking counterparts on standardized test scores.
The new standards will govern textbook materials for elementary and middle school students from 2008 through 2014. They call for a curriculum of English and reading lessons geared to all students during the regular class period, plus an additional hour of instruction targeted at English learners.
Supporters of the legislation want to include an option allowing textbook publishers to submit materials designed to accelerate English reading, writing and comprehension skills for English learners during the regular class period, by incorporating more pictures and simple vocabulary.
Districts could choose to use the new materials, but they would not be mandatory. The Assn. of California School Administrators and more then 40 school districts have endorsed the legislation.
"Districts cannot continue to risk the development of literacy among English learners because of a lack of appropriate materials," Rosa Molina, associate superintendent of the San Jose Unified School District, said at a Sacramento news conference. "We want to move past the rhetoric and debate because we have the reality of children walking through our doors in September."
Escutia alluded to the politically charged nature of the debate. "There are people who look at this and say, 'Oh there she goes again with English learners, she must be pushing bilingual education,' but nothing could be further from the truth," Escutia said.
Assemblywoman Judy Chu (D-Monterey Park), chairwoman of the Assembly's Appropriations Committee, said that textbooks cost California $500 million, and she said the state can't afford to spend resources on books that don't address student achievement gaps.
The question of how best to teach English skills has devolved into a debate over bilingual education, a contentious issue in California. Opponents accuse the bill's supporters of fostering a bilingual approach and say it would lead to separate classrooms and unequal standards for English learners.
Proposition 227, which passed in 1998, mandates that all students learn to read and write in English. Ron Unz, who drafted that measure, said he suspects that SB 1769 is a stealthy attempt to bypass some of its provisions.
"I'm awfully suspicious that this may, in fact, represent an attempt to sneak bilingual education back into California through the back door," said Unz, a Palo Alto software developer who is chairman of the group English for the Children. "All of the leading people pushing this effort were among the leading advocates of bilingualism."
It is a politically sensitive issue for Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, himself an immigrant, who has spoken of his struggle to learn English. And recently, former Govs. Pete Wilson and Gray Davis sent an open letter to Schwarzenegger expressing their support for uniform standards and defending the state board's English-language curriculum.
The governor has taken no formal position on the legislation but is concerned that it might lead to isolating students based on their language ability, said spokeswoman Margita Thompson.
"He fears that using separate books and curriculum for subjects that all students take will lead to segregating and separating kids just because English is not their first language," Thompson said.
The governor is open to working with Latino legislators to explore other options, including after-school programs or supplemental materials to assist students, said Thompson. He has also included $20 million in this year's budget for a pilot project to help identify the best teaching practices for English learners.
Schwarzenegger is also intent on restoring funding to the state board and its nine staff members, whose salaries have been picked up by the administration and the state Department of Education. Roger Magyar, the board's executive director, said his office is continuing to function but that the impasse threatens to hamper other critical work such as overseeing the state's testing system and implementation of the education code.
He said the board is not inclined to give in to the demands of SB 1769 supporters but is hoping for some sort of compromise.
"Perhaps," Magyar said, "we can give some instructions to publishers to help clarify issues and bridge some of the gap."
Copyright 2006 Los Angeles Times
http://www.latimes.com/news/education/la-me-english11aug11,1,3733437.story?coll=la-news-learning
-Angela
Proposal Revives Bilingual Education Debate
A state Senate bill would add special reading and writing lessons for English learners. Foes say measure would lead to unequal standards.
By Carla Rivera
Times Staff Writer
August 11, 2006
Several politicians and educators called on the governor Thursday to support legislation that would allow school districts to include extra reading and writing lessons for elementary students struggling to learn English, in a debate that has rekindled California's dormant language wars.
The bill, SB 1769, sponsored by state Sen. Martha Escutia (D-Whittier), additionally would restore about $1.6 million in funding for the state Board of Education that was eliminated in the 2006-07 budget, when a compromise could not be reached on textbook criteria.
Supporters of the bill argue that recently adopted standards for textbook materials do not address the needs of California's 1.6 million English learners, who trail their English-speaking counterparts on standardized test scores.
The new standards will govern textbook materials for elementary and middle school students from 2008 through 2014. They call for a curriculum of English and reading lessons geared to all students during the regular class period, plus an additional hour of instruction targeted at English learners.
Supporters of the legislation want to include an option allowing textbook publishers to submit materials designed to accelerate English reading, writing and comprehension skills for English learners during the regular class period, by incorporating more pictures and simple vocabulary.
Districts could choose to use the new materials, but they would not be mandatory. The Assn. of California School Administrators and more then 40 school districts have endorsed the legislation.
"Districts cannot continue to risk the development of literacy among English learners because of a lack of appropriate materials," Rosa Molina, associate superintendent of the San Jose Unified School District, said at a Sacramento news conference. "We want to move past the rhetoric and debate because we have the reality of children walking through our doors in September."
Escutia alluded to the politically charged nature of the debate. "There are people who look at this and say, 'Oh there she goes again with English learners, she must be pushing bilingual education,' but nothing could be further from the truth," Escutia said.
Assemblywoman Judy Chu (D-Monterey Park), chairwoman of the Assembly's Appropriations Committee, said that textbooks cost California $500 million, and she said the state can't afford to spend resources on books that don't address student achievement gaps.
The question of how best to teach English skills has devolved into a debate over bilingual education, a contentious issue in California. Opponents accuse the bill's supporters of fostering a bilingual approach and say it would lead to separate classrooms and unequal standards for English learners.
Proposition 227, which passed in 1998, mandates that all students learn to read and write in English. Ron Unz, who drafted that measure, said he suspects that SB 1769 is a stealthy attempt to bypass some of its provisions.
"I'm awfully suspicious that this may, in fact, represent an attempt to sneak bilingual education back into California through the back door," said Unz, a Palo Alto software developer who is chairman of the group English for the Children. "All of the leading people pushing this effort were among the leading advocates of bilingualism."
It is a politically sensitive issue for Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, himself an immigrant, who has spoken of his struggle to learn English. And recently, former Govs. Pete Wilson and Gray Davis sent an open letter to Schwarzenegger expressing their support for uniform standards and defending the state board's English-language curriculum.
The governor has taken no formal position on the legislation but is concerned that it might lead to isolating students based on their language ability, said spokeswoman Margita Thompson.
"He fears that using separate books and curriculum for subjects that all students take will lead to segregating and separating kids just because English is not their first language," Thompson said.
The governor is open to working with Latino legislators to explore other options, including after-school programs or supplemental materials to assist students, said Thompson. He has also included $20 million in this year's budget for a pilot project to help identify the best teaching practices for English learners.
Schwarzenegger is also intent on restoring funding to the state board and its nine staff members, whose salaries have been picked up by the administration and the state Department of Education. Roger Magyar, the board's executive director, said his office is continuing to function but that the impasse threatens to hamper other critical work such as overseeing the state's testing system and implementation of the education code.
He said the board is not inclined to give in to the demands of SB 1769 supporters but is hoping for some sort of compromise.
"Perhaps," Magyar said, "we can give some instructions to publishers to help clarify issues and bridge some of the gap."
Copyright 2006 Los Angeles Times
http://www.latimes.com/news/education/la-me-english11aug11,1,3733437.story?coll=la-news-learning
Kids' English fluency flourishes
Kids' English fluency flourishes
Language skills soar in young Spanish speakers, while adults falter
By David Washburn
and Danielle Cervantes
UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER / RESEARCH ANALYST
August 15, 2006
HOWARD LIPIN / Union-Tribune
Diana Citron taught her 11th grade English Language Development class yesterday at San Ysidro High School. Attending her class were Brenda Bedoy, 16, (left) and Wendy Gonzalez, 14. English skills have been improving for children from Spanish-speaking households.
School-age children from Spanish-speaking households in San Diego County and throughout California are gaining English fluency at record rates, while fluency among adults – especially seniors – is slipping, according to data released today by the U.S. Census Bureau.
From 2000 to 2005, San Diego County's percentage of children ages 5 to 17 from Spanish-speaking households who speak English “very well” has jumped to 71 percent from 60 percent.
Meanwhile, English fluency among adult Spanish speakers dropped from 50 percent in 1990 and 2000 to 48 percent in 2005. The census reports a more precipitous decline for those 65 and older. The fluency rate for this group dropped from 45 percent in 1990 to 35 percent in 2005.
Statewide, English fluency rates among Spanish-speakers across all age groups largely mirror those in San Diego County.
These divergent trends materialized while the number of Spanish-speaking immigrants increased at identical 12-percent clips locally and statewide during the first half of the decade, according to the Census Bureau. San Diego County was home to roughly 35,000 more foreign-born Spanish speakers in 2005 than in 2000.
The data comes from the 2005 American Community Survey, part of the Census Bureau's effort to modernize the decennial census and provide annually updated socio-economic data.
Numbers on language ability, experts say, can be explained by both a big push among school districts to boost English fluency and larger, more established immigrant communities in San Diego County where adults have an increasingly easier time getting by with only basic English, or none at all.
This phenomenon has demographers, community leaders and school officials at once rejoicing and wringing their hands.
Fluency will give Latino youths better chances at college degrees and good-paying jobs, experts say. But their parents and grandparents, by not learning English, run the risk of becoming more isolated and stuck at the lower rungs of the socio-economic ladder.
“My first response when I saw this data was, 'Yahoo! We are going in the direction we need to be going,' ” said John Weeks, the director of San Diego State University's International Population Center. “Key to success in this country is fluency in English, and we see that happening with children of immigrants.”
Consider Abden Goméz, 16, and his family in San Ysidro.
Abden, his parents and four older siblings all immigrated here from Tijuana in 2004. Two years on, only Abden, a junior at San Ysidro High School, is proficient in English.
So in addition to keeping up with his course work, Abden has another, sometimes all-consuming, responsibility: family interpreter. If an English speaker phones the Goméz household, Abden is summoned. When his mother goes to the grocery store, he tags along to translate. Dad often will call from work with a question about an English word.
CHARLIE NEUMAN / Union-Tribune
Silvia Sanchez washed dishes yesterday at Lola's Market-Deli in Carlsbad. Sanchez is one of a growing number of Spanish-speaking immigrants settling in the county.
Heads of households are responsible for responding to the census surveys, and reporting the English ability of other members of their household. The reporting method leaves open the possibility that heads of households will overstate the English-language ability of other household members.
School officials say the increase in fluency among students is real, and they credit new laws at the federal and state levels for the improvement.
Proposition 227, which California voters passed overwhelmingly in 1998, changed the focus of schools from bilingual education to an English-immersion model. Now, parents who want their English-language learners taught in a bilingual setting must go to the school and sign a waiver. Otherwise, the children are “immersed” in English in the regular classroom.
Since 2002, the federal government's No Child Left Behind Act has required schools to report test scores of English-language learners, and other special-needs children, in their own subgroup rather than lumping them in with the scores of all students.
Both laws have placed significant pressure on schools, and more specifically classroom teachers, to raise the English proficiency level of their students. If schools don't, they risk being cast as “underperforming” and face sanctions.
“Every teacher now realizes that we are all responsible for English learners,” said Alma Pirazzini, director of Academic Support Programs for the Sweetwater Union High School District. “Before, it was assumed that bilingual education programs would take care of them.”
The gains in English fluency over the past several years eventually should translate into better educational attainment among San Diego County Latinos, but the data does not show that yet. Countywide, nearly two-thirds of Latino adults 25 or older have not attended any college, according to the new census data.
“We've seen in the past children gaining language proficiency,” said Fernando Soriano, a professor of human development at Cal State San Marcos. “(But) there seems to be a wall that doesn't allow Hispanics to go beyond a few years of college.”
Soriano and other demographers acknowledge that because census takers only ask educational attainment questions of those 25 and over, they may be missing younger Latino adults who are attending college now and will show up as college educated in the coming years.
There is not as much optimism for gains in fluency for older adults who have come in recent years to San Diego County's established immigrant communities. Not only do they have less incentive to learn, but adult English-language learning programs have been cut from state and local budgets, said Deborah Reed, an economist for the Public Policy Institute of California.
“Studies have shown that a vast majority of Spanish-language adults want to learn English,” Reed said. “But if the programs aren't there, it's going to be one of those things you put off.”
Maritza Cruz, 27, a cook at Lola's Market-Deli in Carlsbad, wants to learn more English so she doesn't have to depend on her 11-year-old son to translate. Even though Cruz emigrated from Oaxaca, Mexico, 10 years ago, she has failed to do so thus far.
She took a class once for five months and quit because “I didn't have much time,” she said, given the demands of work and family.
Now that her younger son is no longer a baby, Cruz plans to enroll in English as a Second Language classes at nearby Jefferson Elementary School next month.
Cruz and others like her face an uphill battle, experts say, because they lived for so long in an insulated immigrant community.
Olivia Rosillo calls such communities “capsules” that continue to expand and allow newcomers to exist within them.
“There are rigid boundaries,” said Rosillo, director of family therapy and social communications at the Villa Nueva Apartments, a low-income housing complex in San Ysidro. “They don't intermingle with Americans. How many people who don't speak English have American friends? They are segregated.”
That feeling of isolation has motivated young Abden Goméz to go from almost no English two years ago to the highest English language development class at San Ysidro High. He'll enroll in a standard English class next year.
After graduation Abden plans to enroll in Southwestern College and eventually become a U.S. customs agent.
“I like English, and I need it to work, because bilingual is better than one language,” he said. “It can pay more.”
Staff writers Chris Moran, Janine Zúñiga and Lola Sherman contributed to this report.
Find this article at:
http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/education/20060815-9999-1n15speak.html
Language skills soar in young Spanish speakers, while adults falter
By David Washburn
and Danielle Cervantes
UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER / RESEARCH ANALYST
August 15, 2006
HOWARD LIPIN / Union-Tribune
Diana Citron taught her 11th grade English Language Development class yesterday at San Ysidro High School. Attending her class were Brenda Bedoy, 16, (left) and Wendy Gonzalez, 14. English skills have been improving for children from Spanish-speaking households.
School-age children from Spanish-speaking households in San Diego County and throughout California are gaining English fluency at record rates, while fluency among adults – especially seniors – is slipping, according to data released today by the U.S. Census Bureau.
From 2000 to 2005, San Diego County's percentage of children ages 5 to 17 from Spanish-speaking households who speak English “very well” has jumped to 71 percent from 60 percent.
Meanwhile, English fluency among adult Spanish speakers dropped from 50 percent in 1990 and 2000 to 48 percent in 2005. The census reports a more precipitous decline for those 65 and older. The fluency rate for this group dropped from 45 percent in 1990 to 35 percent in 2005.
Statewide, English fluency rates among Spanish-speakers across all age groups largely mirror those in San Diego County.
These divergent trends materialized while the number of Spanish-speaking immigrants increased at identical 12-percent clips locally and statewide during the first half of the decade, according to the Census Bureau. San Diego County was home to roughly 35,000 more foreign-born Spanish speakers in 2005 than in 2000.
The data comes from the 2005 American Community Survey, part of the Census Bureau's effort to modernize the decennial census and provide annually updated socio-economic data.
Numbers on language ability, experts say, can be explained by both a big push among school districts to boost English fluency and larger, more established immigrant communities in San Diego County where adults have an increasingly easier time getting by with only basic English, or none at all.
This phenomenon has demographers, community leaders and school officials at once rejoicing and wringing their hands.
Fluency will give Latino youths better chances at college degrees and good-paying jobs, experts say. But their parents and grandparents, by not learning English, run the risk of becoming more isolated and stuck at the lower rungs of the socio-economic ladder.
“My first response when I saw this data was, 'Yahoo! We are going in the direction we need to be going,' ” said John Weeks, the director of San Diego State University's International Population Center. “Key to success in this country is fluency in English, and we see that happening with children of immigrants.”
Consider Abden Goméz, 16, and his family in San Ysidro.
Abden, his parents and four older siblings all immigrated here from Tijuana in 2004. Two years on, only Abden, a junior at San Ysidro High School, is proficient in English.
So in addition to keeping up with his course work, Abden has another, sometimes all-consuming, responsibility: family interpreter. If an English speaker phones the Goméz household, Abden is summoned. When his mother goes to the grocery store, he tags along to translate. Dad often will call from work with a question about an English word.
CHARLIE NEUMAN / Union-Tribune
Silvia Sanchez washed dishes yesterday at Lola's Market-Deli in Carlsbad. Sanchez is one of a growing number of Spanish-speaking immigrants settling in the county.
Heads of households are responsible for responding to the census surveys, and reporting the English ability of other members of their household. The reporting method leaves open the possibility that heads of households will overstate the English-language ability of other household members.
School officials say the increase in fluency among students is real, and they credit new laws at the federal and state levels for the improvement.
Proposition 227, which California voters passed overwhelmingly in 1998, changed the focus of schools from bilingual education to an English-immersion model. Now, parents who want their English-language learners taught in a bilingual setting must go to the school and sign a waiver. Otherwise, the children are “immersed” in English in the regular classroom.
Since 2002, the federal government's No Child Left Behind Act has required schools to report test scores of English-language learners, and other special-needs children, in their own subgroup rather than lumping them in with the scores of all students.
Both laws have placed significant pressure on schools, and more specifically classroom teachers, to raise the English proficiency level of their students. If schools don't, they risk being cast as “underperforming” and face sanctions.
“Every teacher now realizes that we are all responsible for English learners,” said Alma Pirazzini, director of Academic Support Programs for the Sweetwater Union High School District. “Before, it was assumed that bilingual education programs would take care of them.”
The gains in English fluency over the past several years eventually should translate into better educational attainment among San Diego County Latinos, but the data does not show that yet. Countywide, nearly two-thirds of Latino adults 25 or older have not attended any college, according to the new census data.
“We've seen in the past children gaining language proficiency,” said Fernando Soriano, a professor of human development at Cal State San Marcos. “(But) there seems to be a wall that doesn't allow Hispanics to go beyond a few years of college.”
Soriano and other demographers acknowledge that because census takers only ask educational attainment questions of those 25 and over, they may be missing younger Latino adults who are attending college now and will show up as college educated in the coming years.
There is not as much optimism for gains in fluency for older adults who have come in recent years to San Diego County's established immigrant communities. Not only do they have less incentive to learn, but adult English-language learning programs have been cut from state and local budgets, said Deborah Reed, an economist for the Public Policy Institute of California.
“Studies have shown that a vast majority of Spanish-language adults want to learn English,” Reed said. “But if the programs aren't there, it's going to be one of those things you put off.”
Maritza Cruz, 27, a cook at Lola's Market-Deli in Carlsbad, wants to learn more English so she doesn't have to depend on her 11-year-old son to translate. Even though Cruz emigrated from Oaxaca, Mexico, 10 years ago, she has failed to do so thus far.
She took a class once for five months and quit because “I didn't have much time,” she said, given the demands of work and family.
Now that her younger son is no longer a baby, Cruz plans to enroll in English as a Second Language classes at nearby Jefferson Elementary School next month.
Cruz and others like her face an uphill battle, experts say, because they lived for so long in an insulated immigrant community.
Olivia Rosillo calls such communities “capsules” that continue to expand and allow newcomers to exist within them.
“There are rigid boundaries,” said Rosillo, director of family therapy and social communications at the Villa Nueva Apartments, a low-income housing complex in San Ysidro. “They don't intermingle with Americans. How many people who don't speak English have American friends? They are segregated.”
That feeling of isolation has motivated young Abden Goméz to go from almost no English two years ago to the highest English language development class at San Ysidro High. He'll enroll in a standard English class next year.
After graduation Abden plans to enroll in Southwestern College and eventually become a U.S. customs agent.
“I like English, and I need it to work, because bilingual is better than one language,” he said. “It can pay more.”
Staff writers Chris Moran, Janine Zúñiga and Lola Sherman contributed to this report.
Find this article at:
http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/education/20060815-9999-1n15speak.html
California: Appeals court upholds exit exam
Aug. 12, 2006
Appeals court upholds exit exam
STATE SCHOOLS SUPERINTENDENT HAILS RULING
By Dana Hull
Mercury News
The California Court of Appeal issued a ruling Friday that upholds the controversial California High School Exit Exam for the class of 2006.
But attorneys for a group of students who brought the suit said they would file a petition for review in the California Supreme Court within 10 days.
The legal back-and-forth has alternately frustrated and given hope to thousands of students, many of them English language learners, who are still struggling to pass the exam. In May, an Alameda County Superior Court judge ruled that many students had not had an equal opportunity to learn the material being tested; that decision has now been effectively overturned.
Friday's ruling by justices in the court's 1st District in San Francisco hands a huge victory to state schools Superintendent Jack O'Connell, who was traveling in Phoenix but quickly arranged a teleconference with reporters. O'Connell has long argued that awarding diplomas to this year's seniors who failed the exit exam would hurt them more than help.
``The court's decision affirmed what I have long said: The purpose of an education is not to equip students with diplomas, but with essential skills they need to survive in a competitive global economy,'' said O'Connell, a former high school teacher. ``Students have a right to an education. They do not have a right to a diploma.''
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger also issued a statement applauding the ruling and stressed that this year's state budget includes $75 million for support services to help students who are still struggling with the exam.
But the plaintiffs' attorneys said many of the measures designed to help students are too little and too late.
``As a result of this ruling, one of our clients will be unable to attend college at California State University,'' said attorney Arturo Gonzalez in a statement. ``In addition, the 40,000 students who have not passed the exit exam are unlikely to benefit from any remedial measure that might be implemented at this late date.''
Student advocates have argued that students, particularly those who attend schools in poor neighborhoods, often lack trained teachers and adequate textbooks and are being tested on material they were never taught.
But ``the skills tested on the CAHSEE are neither esoteric nor highly advanced,'' wrote the Court of Appeal panel in its ruling.
Students first take the exit exam as high school sophomores and can take it again as juniors and seniors if they are struggling to pass it.
They must earn a 60 percent score on a test of 10th-grade English skills and a 55 percent score on a test of math, which includes some algebra. In January, the pass rate for the Class of 2006 was 89 percent; state education officials said Friday that figure has inched up to 91 percent.
But just 83 percent of African-American students and 77 percent of English language learners have passed it.
Still, O'Connell defends the exam, saying all students should be held to the same high standard.
Contact Dana Hull at dhull@mercurynews.com or (408) 920-2706.
The Mercury News is pleased to let readers post comments about an article at the end of the article. Please increase the credibility of your post by including your full name and city when commenting.
http://www.mercurynews.com
Appeals court upholds exit exam
STATE SCHOOLS SUPERINTENDENT HAILS RULING
By Dana Hull
Mercury News
The California Court of Appeal issued a ruling Friday that upholds the controversial California High School Exit Exam for the class of 2006.
But attorneys for a group of students who brought the suit said they would file a petition for review in the California Supreme Court within 10 days.
The legal back-and-forth has alternately frustrated and given hope to thousands of students, many of them English language learners, who are still struggling to pass the exam. In May, an Alameda County Superior Court judge ruled that many students had not had an equal opportunity to learn the material being tested; that decision has now been effectively overturned.
Friday's ruling by justices in the court's 1st District in San Francisco hands a huge victory to state schools Superintendent Jack O'Connell, who was traveling in Phoenix but quickly arranged a teleconference with reporters. O'Connell has long argued that awarding diplomas to this year's seniors who failed the exit exam would hurt them more than help.
``The court's decision affirmed what I have long said: The purpose of an education is not to equip students with diplomas, but with essential skills they need to survive in a competitive global economy,'' said O'Connell, a former high school teacher. ``Students have a right to an education. They do not have a right to a diploma.''
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger also issued a statement applauding the ruling and stressed that this year's state budget includes $75 million for support services to help students who are still struggling with the exam.
But the plaintiffs' attorneys said many of the measures designed to help students are too little and too late.
``As a result of this ruling, one of our clients will be unable to attend college at California State University,'' said attorney Arturo Gonzalez in a statement. ``In addition, the 40,000 students who have not passed the exit exam are unlikely to benefit from any remedial measure that might be implemented at this late date.''
Student advocates have argued that students, particularly those who attend schools in poor neighborhoods, often lack trained teachers and adequate textbooks and are being tested on material they were never taught.
But ``the skills tested on the CAHSEE are neither esoteric nor highly advanced,'' wrote the Court of Appeal panel in its ruling.
Students first take the exit exam as high school sophomores and can take it again as juniors and seniors if they are struggling to pass it.
They must earn a 60 percent score on a test of 10th-grade English skills and a 55 percent score on a test of math, which includes some algebra. In January, the pass rate for the Class of 2006 was 89 percent; state education officials said Friday that figure has inched up to 91 percent.
But just 83 percent of African-American students and 77 percent of English language learners have passed it.
Still, O'Connell defends the exam, saying all students should be held to the same high standard.
Contact Dana Hull at dhull@mercurynews.com or (408) 920-2706.
The Mercury News is pleased to let readers post comments about an article at the end of the article. Please increase the credibility of your post by including your full name and city when commenting.
http://www.mercurynews.com
Security Through Education
The Chancellor of the University System of Maryland cautions us that unless we address access to higher education, "our national ethos of social upward mobility will be lost and we will devolve into a two-tier society with a permanent underclass." -Angela
By William E. Kirwan
Monday, August 14, 2006; A13
A national security crisis is brewing, and if our country doesn't take immediate action, it could be devastating for the future of the United States.
Consider these facts: Worldwide, the United States ranks seventh in high-school completion rates and ninth in the percentage of high-school graduates who enroll in college. Of every 100 current eighth-graders in America, just 18 will receive a college degree during the next 10 years. Based on current participation and completion rates, the education pipeline reveals alarming holes.
The "prescription" for what ails education in this country enjoys widespread consensus: Improve the performance of our primary and secondary school students and provide access to affordable, high-quality higher education to more people. But how the country goes about filling this prescription is a matter of significant debate.
Clearly, a "fix" to the problem requires the combined and coordinated efforts of various sectors. Central to the effort, however, must be higher education. Higher education, after all, prepares the teachers for the schools and sets the standards for the degrees.
What should higher education do to help plug the holes in the education pipeline and enable our nation to address its most pressing long-term national security issue: the development of a robust and superbly educated workforce?
First, higher education must become more engaged in improving primary and secondary school performance. Colleges and universities need to encourage more students to pursue teaching careers and, in partnership with local school districts, better prepare prospective teachers with the content knowledge and pedagogy skills to succeed. Universities must work more effectively with the K-12 sector to ensure that student assessment in high school is closely aligned with college entrance requirements, and that the transition from high school to college is as seamless as advancement from 11th to 12th grade.
The best way to achieve such transformational changes is through so-called statewide K-16 councils, which bring educational leaders from all levels -- superintendents, principals, university presidents, deans -- together with business and community leaders on a regular basis to develop reform agendas. Such an approach is working in Maryland and a few other states.
As a second means of plugging the holes, state governments and higher education need to rethink the way they distribute financial aid. During the past two decades there has been a huge shift in the allocation of university-based aid, away from students with demonstrated financial need and toward high-ability students -- often from upper-middle-class families -- whom universities seek in order to improve their SAT profiles and "vanity" rankings. Too many low-income students are either discouraged from attending college or must work such long hours that their progress toward a degree is unreasonably delayed or, worse, terminated.
Fortunately, we have seen several "enlightened" universities -- including the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Harvard University, the University of Virginia and the University of Maryland, College Park -- introduce programs to ensure that students from families at the lower end of the economic ladder can graduate debt-free. At the University System of Maryland, we recently adopted a policy requiring that students from families with the lowest levels of income graduate with the lowest debt. Planned expenditures on institutional need-based aid by USM institutions have increased more than 30 percent in the past year.
Finally, higher education -- especially public higher education -- must learn to operate with a more cost-conscious budget model. Most other sectors have experienced significant productivity gains through rigorous attention to cost containment. Higher education can no longer afford to ignore this strategy.
Investment of state funds in higher education on a per-student basis is at a 25-year low. It has fallen from about $7,100 in 2001 to just over $5,800 in 2005. As state investment on a per-student basis has declined, the tuition burden on students and their families has increased. In more than a quarter of our states, tuition revenue is now greater than the state's investment in its public colleges and universities. In the coming decades, areas such as health care, energy, and social services for an aging population will require an ever greater proportion of available tax dollars, accelerating the decline in public investment in higher education.
With that decline and without serious attention to cost containment, colleges and universities will face two highly undesirable alternatives: Accept more students at generally affordable tuition levels and see quality erode or protect quality by driving up tuition to levels that will be prohibitive for low-income students.
With the leadership of its Board of Regents, the University System of Maryland has incorporated cost containment as a formal part of its budget development process. These efforts have reduced the "bottom line" by more than $40 million for the system's 13 institutions during the past two years.
Filling the holes in America's education pipeline must become an urgent national priority. Nowhere is strong, unified action more necessary than at our colleges and universities. In partnership with others sectors, higher education must be held accountable for embracing its role and responsibilities to help improve K-12 education, increasing its need-based financial aid substantially, and containing costs more aggressively. If this doesn't happen, U.S. leadership in the global economy will erode. Perhaps even more threatening, our national ethos of social upward mobility will be lost and we will devolve into a two-tier society with a permanent underclass.
The writer is chancellor of the University System of Maryland.
© 2006 The Washington Post Company\http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/08/13/AR2006081300721.html
By William E. Kirwan
Monday, August 14, 2006; A13
A national security crisis is brewing, and if our country doesn't take immediate action, it could be devastating for the future of the United States.
Consider these facts: Worldwide, the United States ranks seventh in high-school completion rates and ninth in the percentage of high-school graduates who enroll in college. Of every 100 current eighth-graders in America, just 18 will receive a college degree during the next 10 years. Based on current participation and completion rates, the education pipeline reveals alarming holes.
The "prescription" for what ails education in this country enjoys widespread consensus: Improve the performance of our primary and secondary school students and provide access to affordable, high-quality higher education to more people. But how the country goes about filling this prescription is a matter of significant debate.
Clearly, a "fix" to the problem requires the combined and coordinated efforts of various sectors. Central to the effort, however, must be higher education. Higher education, after all, prepares the teachers for the schools and sets the standards for the degrees.
What should higher education do to help plug the holes in the education pipeline and enable our nation to address its most pressing long-term national security issue: the development of a robust and superbly educated workforce?
First, higher education must become more engaged in improving primary and secondary school performance. Colleges and universities need to encourage more students to pursue teaching careers and, in partnership with local school districts, better prepare prospective teachers with the content knowledge and pedagogy skills to succeed. Universities must work more effectively with the K-12 sector to ensure that student assessment in high school is closely aligned with college entrance requirements, and that the transition from high school to college is as seamless as advancement from 11th to 12th grade.
The best way to achieve such transformational changes is through so-called statewide K-16 councils, which bring educational leaders from all levels -- superintendents, principals, university presidents, deans -- together with business and community leaders on a regular basis to develop reform agendas. Such an approach is working in Maryland and a few other states.
As a second means of plugging the holes, state governments and higher education need to rethink the way they distribute financial aid. During the past two decades there has been a huge shift in the allocation of university-based aid, away from students with demonstrated financial need and toward high-ability students -- often from upper-middle-class families -- whom universities seek in order to improve their SAT profiles and "vanity" rankings. Too many low-income students are either discouraged from attending college or must work such long hours that their progress toward a degree is unreasonably delayed or, worse, terminated.
Fortunately, we have seen several "enlightened" universities -- including the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Harvard University, the University of Virginia and the University of Maryland, College Park -- introduce programs to ensure that students from families at the lower end of the economic ladder can graduate debt-free. At the University System of Maryland, we recently adopted a policy requiring that students from families with the lowest levels of income graduate with the lowest debt. Planned expenditures on institutional need-based aid by USM institutions have increased more than 30 percent in the past year.
Finally, higher education -- especially public higher education -- must learn to operate with a more cost-conscious budget model. Most other sectors have experienced significant productivity gains through rigorous attention to cost containment. Higher education can no longer afford to ignore this strategy.
Investment of state funds in higher education on a per-student basis is at a 25-year low. It has fallen from about $7,100 in 2001 to just over $5,800 in 2005. As state investment on a per-student basis has declined, the tuition burden on students and their families has increased. In more than a quarter of our states, tuition revenue is now greater than the state's investment in its public colleges and universities. In the coming decades, areas such as health care, energy, and social services for an aging population will require an ever greater proportion of available tax dollars, accelerating the decline in public investment in higher education.
With that decline and without serious attention to cost containment, colleges and universities will face two highly undesirable alternatives: Accept more students at generally affordable tuition levels and see quality erode or protect quality by driving up tuition to levels that will be prohibitive for low-income students.
With the leadership of its Board of Regents, the University System of Maryland has incorporated cost containment as a formal part of its budget development process. These efforts have reduced the "bottom line" by more than $40 million for the system's 13 institutions during the past two years.
Filling the holes in America's education pipeline must become an urgent national priority. Nowhere is strong, unified action more necessary than at our colleges and universities. In partnership with others sectors, higher education must be held accountable for embracing its role and responsibilities to help improve K-12 education, increasing its need-based financial aid substantially, and containing costs more aggressively. If this doesn't happen, U.S. leadership in the global economy will erode. Perhaps even more threatening, our national ethos of social upward mobility will be lost and we will devolve into a two-tier society with a permanent underclass.
The writer is chancellor of the University System of Maryland.
© 2006 The Washington Post Company\http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/08/13/AR2006081300721.html
TEA adds 241 schools with suspect scores
TEA adds 241 schools with suspect scores
Campuses not likely to be part of inquiry into possible TAKS cheating
11:40 PM CDT on Friday, August 11, 2006
By JOSHUA BENTON / The Dallas Morning News
Texas officials have released the names of 241 more schools with suspicious patterns in their test scores. But none are likely to be targeted in the upcoming round of state investigations into possible cheating.
The new list, released Friday, brings the total number of schools with suspicious scores to 699. That's almost one-tenth of all the Texas schools that administered the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills in 2005.
Earlier, the Texas Education Agency had released the names of only 442 schools that had at least one classroom with suspicious scores.
But Caveon – the test-security company the TEA hired to look for cheaters – also looked for schools that had suspicious score patterns schoolwide. Because of differences in the ways Caveon analyzed the scores, some schools were flagged as suspicious schoolwide without raising red flags in any specific classroom.
DallasNews.com/Extra
Schools where Caveon found suspicious score patterns schoolwide
Schools where Caveon found suspicious score patterns in one or more classrooms
The TEA had not asked Caveon for the schoolwide list until The Dallas Morning News revealed its existence three weeks ago.
"We wanted to be able to look at all the schools as we think about how to move forward," spokeswoman Debbie Graves Ratcliffe said.
Later this month, a new task force will decide which of the schools with suspicious scores will be subject to on-site investigations by agency staff members. The TEA is tripling its number of investigators in anticipation of inquiries taking months to complete.
But TEA officials have said they do not consider campuses with suspect schoolwide patterns to be as high a priority as those with classroom-level anomalies.
"We think the original list is the one we need to focus on," Ms. Ratcliffe said.
Statistically, it is somewhat easier for an entire school to be flagged than for an individual classroom. That's because the margin of error in Caveon's analysis grows smaller as the number of students grows larger.
For example, if a 30-student classroom has three suspicious answer sheets, that could just be the result of random chance. But if a 3,000-student school had 300 suspicious answer sheets, that would raise a red flag.
The agency will formulate a recommendation on which schools to investigate in the coming weeks. The task force will make the final decision. Investigations are expected to begin in September.
Even with the new schools, Houston – the state's largest district – still has the most suspicious schools in the state, 83. Dallas, the second-largest district, is next with 49 schools.
On the previous, shorter list, Dallas had only 39 suspicious schools. Most area suburban districts also saw small increases in the number of schools making the list.
In other large urban districts, El Paso now has 20 schools on the list, Austin has 12, Fort Worth has 11, and San Antonio has six.
The new list also includes 16 schools that had suspicious classroom scores but were not included on the TEA's initial list.
Caveon looked for a variety of suspicious patterns in a school's test scores. For example, a classroom might be flagged if a large number of students had suspiciously similar answer choices on the TAKS. Large numbers of erasures on student answer sheets, unexpected gains in student performance, and unusual answer patterns could also earn a school a place on Caveon's list.
The suspicious schoolwide scores show some schools where test-security problems may be systemic. For example, in Dallas, several high schools had suspicious scores schoolwide in all four subjects tested – reading, math, science and social studies.
Those schools were A. Maceo Smith, Carter, Spruce, Kimball, Lincoln, Molina, Roosevelt, Samuell, South Oak Cliff and Sunset.
Well-off suburban districts continue to be flagged primarily for big jumps in test scores, mostly in their high schools. Many of those districts' superintendents have said those gains are the result of quality instruction, not cheating.
Urban districts were much more likely to be flagged for students who had identical or nearly identical answer sheets, suggesting that students were copying one another's answers on the high-stakes graduation TAKS test. Explanations for those patterns have been harder to come by.
E-mail jbenton@dallasnews.com
ON THE LIST
The Texas Education Agency has released the names of the 699 Texas schools that the test-security firm Caveon has identified as having suspect scores on the 2005 TAKS. The TEA initially identified only 442 of them. Here's how many schools in major North Texas districts appeared on the list.
Allen: 3 schools
Arlington: 4 schools
Carroll: 4 schools
Carrollton-Farmers Branch: 4 schools
Charter schools: 10 campuses
Coppell: 3 schools
Crowley: 5 schools
Dallas: 49 schools
DeSoto: 1 school
Fort Worth: 11 schools
Frisco: 3 schools
Garland: 3 schools
Grand Prairie: 4 schools
Grapevine-Colleyville: 5 schools
Highland Park: 3 schools
Hurst-Euless-Bedford: 3 schools
Kennedale: 1 school
Lake Dallas: 1 school
Lewisville: 11 schools
Lovejoy: 1 school
Mansfield: 1 school
McKinney: 6 schools
Mesquite: 4 schools
Plano: 13 schools
Ponder: 1 school
Richardson: 10 schools
Rockwall: 2 schools
Royse City: 1 school
Wilmer-Hutchins: 2 schools*
Wylie: 2 schools
*Wilmer-Hutchins has since been shut down.
Online at: http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/news/texassouthwest/stories/081206dnmettakscheat.2126ecc.html
Campuses not likely to be part of inquiry into possible TAKS cheating
11:40 PM CDT on Friday, August 11, 2006
By JOSHUA BENTON / The Dallas Morning News
Texas officials have released the names of 241 more schools with suspicious patterns in their test scores. But none are likely to be targeted in the upcoming round of state investigations into possible cheating.
The new list, released Friday, brings the total number of schools with suspicious scores to 699. That's almost one-tenth of all the Texas schools that administered the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills in 2005.
Earlier, the Texas Education Agency had released the names of only 442 schools that had at least one classroom with suspicious scores.
But Caveon – the test-security company the TEA hired to look for cheaters – also looked for schools that had suspicious score patterns schoolwide. Because of differences in the ways Caveon analyzed the scores, some schools were flagged as suspicious schoolwide without raising red flags in any specific classroom.
DallasNews.com/Extra
Schools where Caveon found suspicious score patterns schoolwide
Schools where Caveon found suspicious score patterns in one or more classrooms
The TEA had not asked Caveon for the schoolwide list until The Dallas Morning News revealed its existence three weeks ago.
"We wanted to be able to look at all the schools as we think about how to move forward," spokeswoman Debbie Graves Ratcliffe said.
Later this month, a new task force will decide which of the schools with suspicious scores will be subject to on-site investigations by agency staff members. The TEA is tripling its number of investigators in anticipation of inquiries taking months to complete.
But TEA officials have said they do not consider campuses with suspect schoolwide patterns to be as high a priority as those with classroom-level anomalies.
"We think the original list is the one we need to focus on," Ms. Ratcliffe said.
Statistically, it is somewhat easier for an entire school to be flagged than for an individual classroom. That's because the margin of error in Caveon's analysis grows smaller as the number of students grows larger.
For example, if a 30-student classroom has three suspicious answer sheets, that could just be the result of random chance. But if a 3,000-student school had 300 suspicious answer sheets, that would raise a red flag.
The agency will formulate a recommendation on which schools to investigate in the coming weeks. The task force will make the final decision. Investigations are expected to begin in September.
Even with the new schools, Houston – the state's largest district – still has the most suspicious schools in the state, 83. Dallas, the second-largest district, is next with 49 schools.
On the previous, shorter list, Dallas had only 39 suspicious schools. Most area suburban districts also saw small increases in the number of schools making the list.
In other large urban districts, El Paso now has 20 schools on the list, Austin has 12, Fort Worth has 11, and San Antonio has six.
The new list also includes 16 schools that had suspicious classroom scores but were not included on the TEA's initial list.
Caveon looked for a variety of suspicious patterns in a school's test scores. For example, a classroom might be flagged if a large number of students had suspiciously similar answer choices on the TAKS. Large numbers of erasures on student answer sheets, unexpected gains in student performance, and unusual answer patterns could also earn a school a place on Caveon's list.
The suspicious schoolwide scores show some schools where test-security problems may be systemic. For example, in Dallas, several high schools had suspicious scores schoolwide in all four subjects tested – reading, math, science and social studies.
Those schools were A. Maceo Smith, Carter, Spruce, Kimball, Lincoln, Molina, Roosevelt, Samuell, South Oak Cliff and Sunset.
Well-off suburban districts continue to be flagged primarily for big jumps in test scores, mostly in their high schools. Many of those districts' superintendents have said those gains are the result of quality instruction, not cheating.
Urban districts were much more likely to be flagged for students who had identical or nearly identical answer sheets, suggesting that students were copying one another's answers on the high-stakes graduation TAKS test. Explanations for those patterns have been harder to come by.
E-mail jbenton@dallasnews.com
ON THE LIST
The Texas Education Agency has released the names of the 699 Texas schools that the test-security firm Caveon has identified as having suspect scores on the 2005 TAKS. The TEA initially identified only 442 of them. Here's how many schools in major North Texas districts appeared on the list.
Allen: 3 schools
Arlington: 4 schools
Carroll: 4 schools
Carrollton-Farmers Branch: 4 schools
Charter schools: 10 campuses
Coppell: 3 schools
Crowley: 5 schools
Dallas: 49 schools
DeSoto: 1 school
Fort Worth: 11 schools
Frisco: 3 schools
Garland: 3 schools
Grand Prairie: 4 schools
Grapevine-Colleyville: 5 schools
Highland Park: 3 schools
Hurst-Euless-Bedford: 3 schools
Kennedale: 1 school
Lake Dallas: 1 school
Lewisville: 11 schools
Lovejoy: 1 school
Mansfield: 1 school
McKinney: 6 schools
Mesquite: 4 schools
Plano: 13 schools
Ponder: 1 school
Richardson: 10 schools
Rockwall: 2 schools
Royse City: 1 school
Wilmer-Hutchins: 2 schools*
Wylie: 2 schools
*Wilmer-Hutchins has since been shut down.
Online at: http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/news/texassouthwest/stories/081206dnmettakscheat.2126ecc.html
Learning From Boston: A Bad School Made Good
Richard J. Murphy School shows how mayoral control and accountability can get results.
August 10, 2006
NEARLY 80% OF THE STUDENTS at Richard J. Murphy School, a worn but clean building in a neighborhood that's slightly more worn and slightly less clean, are poor. The vast majority are minorities. Many of them come from risky neighborhoods. In other words, Murphy is like many schools in Los Angeles — except that it's in the Boston neighborhood of Dorchester. And most of its students go on to astounding academic success.
Murphy School's standardized test scores have surged upward in the last seven years. Its students score in the top 5% in reading and math among all Boston schools. About 70% of them are promoted into one of Boston's three elite "exam schools," the coveted high school seats open only to students who get top scores on an entrance test.
Not every Boston school has improved as much as Murphy. Yet the transformations there illustrate how dramatically a strong system of mayoral control can change schools. Murphy has benefited from an unfettered mayor who envisions goals for the district and fights for the money to reach them; a strong superintendent who sets the standards and curriculum and demands results; and an empowered and talented principal focused on parents, teachers and students.
Of course, there are many successful schools in L.A. too, and they use some of the same strategies that have worked for Murphy. But the school's achievements can be directly linked to the change in accountability and attitude that mayoral control brings about. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa's plan to take some control of the L.A. Unified School District, which the state Senate will consider next week, doesn't go far enough in changing the culture — and the lines of responsibility — to have such an effect.
Like the neighborhood that surrounds the school, Murphy's 900-plus student body is ethnically mixed, with African Americans making up the single biggest group. Many of the students wear uniforms — a light blue shirt and khakis — that are so popular with parents that they will be mandatory in the fall.
Parental involvement is one area that has improved markedly under mayoral control. At Murphy, parents persuaded the school district to extend what was once an elementary school to eighth grade, as many other Boston schools have done. The extended grades provide students with long-term relationships with teachers and a more consistent program through their first nine years of education.
Like the rest of Boston public schools, Murphy has full-day kindergarten. It runs an academic after-school program for students whose parents work and gives them one-to-one help with their homework. This fall, like a growing number of elementary schools, it will offer pre-kindergarten.
Murphy's teachers, after some initial skepticism, appear to be thriving. Boston, like Los Angeles, has its own program to credential teachers. But in L.A., trainees are in charge of their own classrooms. In Boston, they work as aides to highly regarded teachers, learning by example and through feedback.
Even the district's centralized curriculum and strict standards are accepted as a day-to-day campus reality. One of the most striking features of Murphy School is to see those standards made manifest not only in the classrooms but in the library and hallways.
The standards are in black and white everywhere a visitor looks: The Boston curriculum puts great value on critical thinking and writing. Pictures and phrases glued to poster board aren't enough. Students must be able to articulate in writing not just their thoughts about literature and history but how and why they got their math answers. So student writing, along with student artwork, is posted everywhere at Murphy. Next to each piece of work is an excerpt from the city's learning standards, explaining how the assignment helped students master the goals.
Student achievement is encouraged in less subtle ways as well. During lunch, the students are asked to bring their books and spend 15 minutes reading after they've finished eating. It's more than an hour of extra reading each week, the teachers point out. The school holds Saturday sessions to prepare its students for the entrance tests to the exam schools.
Much of Murphy School's culture comes from Mary Russo, its principal. Russo is a passionate believer in parent involvement (if parents want school uniforms, they get them) and in a strong central curriculum, carried out by teachers who are continually trained by coaches and each other. Russo visits classrooms daily and gives weekly informal evaluations to each of the school's five dozen or so teachers.
These weren't easy transitions. When Russo arrived at Murphy seven years ago, teachers were accustomed to working in private, teaching what they wanted to teach and how they wanted to teach it, with no one looking over their shoulders. They were surprised when Russo asked them to provide a writing sample from each of their students and resentful when, appalled by the poor writing, she brought in a writing coach to train the teachers. She then sat in on the coaching sessions.
Because of the dramatic improvements at Murphy, it is among the Boston schools with the authority to make many of its own budget decisions. Last year, Murphy teachers decided to save money by doing without substitute teachers. Instead, they covered for each other when someone was out sick. And what did they decide to buy with the saved money? More time with teaching coaches.
It may sound like a minor detail, but the teachers' newfound respect for coaching — a practice that L.A.'s teachers would restrict under Villaraigosa's plan — shows just how much has changed in Boston schools since they came under mayoral control almost 15 years ago. That kind of change is possible in Los Angeles too. But it's more likely to happen when the mayor runs the schools.
Copyright 2006 Los Angeles Times
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/california/la-ed-murphy10aug10,1,2665569,print.story?coll=la-headlines-pe-california
Richard J. Murphy School shows how mayoral control and accountability can get results.
August 10, 2006
NEARLY 80% OF THE STUDENTS at Richard J. Murphy School, a worn but clean building in a neighborhood that's slightly more worn and slightly less clean, are poor. The vast majority are minorities. Many of them come from risky neighborhoods. In other words, Murphy is like many schools in Los Angeles — except that it's in the Boston neighborhood of Dorchester. And most of its students go on to astounding academic success.
Murphy School's standardized test scores have surged upward in the last seven years. Its students score in the top 5% in reading and math among all Boston schools. About 70% of them are promoted into one of Boston's three elite "exam schools," the coveted high school seats open only to students who get top scores on an entrance test.
Not every Boston school has improved as much as Murphy. Yet the transformations there illustrate how dramatically a strong system of mayoral control can change schools. Murphy has benefited from an unfettered mayor who envisions goals for the district and fights for the money to reach them; a strong superintendent who sets the standards and curriculum and demands results; and an empowered and talented principal focused on parents, teachers and students.
Of course, there are many successful schools in L.A. too, and they use some of the same strategies that have worked for Murphy. But the school's achievements can be directly linked to the change in accountability and attitude that mayoral control brings about. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa's plan to take some control of the L.A. Unified School District, which the state Senate will consider next week, doesn't go far enough in changing the culture — and the lines of responsibility — to have such an effect.
Like the neighborhood that surrounds the school, Murphy's 900-plus student body is ethnically mixed, with African Americans making up the single biggest group. Many of the students wear uniforms — a light blue shirt and khakis — that are so popular with parents that they will be mandatory in the fall.
Parental involvement is one area that has improved markedly under mayoral control. At Murphy, parents persuaded the school district to extend what was once an elementary school to eighth grade, as many other Boston schools have done. The extended grades provide students with long-term relationships with teachers and a more consistent program through their first nine years of education.
Like the rest of Boston public schools, Murphy has full-day kindergarten. It runs an academic after-school program for students whose parents work and gives them one-to-one help with their homework. This fall, like a growing number of elementary schools, it will offer pre-kindergarten.
Murphy's teachers, after some initial skepticism, appear to be thriving. Boston, like Los Angeles, has its own program to credential teachers. But in L.A., trainees are in charge of their own classrooms. In Boston, they work as aides to highly regarded teachers, learning by example and through feedback.
Even the district's centralized curriculum and strict standards are accepted as a day-to-day campus reality. One of the most striking features of Murphy School is to see those standards made manifest not only in the classrooms but in the library and hallways.
The standards are in black and white everywhere a visitor looks: The Boston curriculum puts great value on critical thinking and writing. Pictures and phrases glued to poster board aren't enough. Students must be able to articulate in writing not just their thoughts about literature and history but how and why they got their math answers. So student writing, along with student artwork, is posted everywhere at Murphy. Next to each piece of work is an excerpt from the city's learning standards, explaining how the assignment helped students master the goals.
Student achievement is encouraged in less subtle ways as well. During lunch, the students are asked to bring their books and spend 15 minutes reading after they've finished eating. It's more than an hour of extra reading each week, the teachers point out. The school holds Saturday sessions to prepare its students for the entrance tests to the exam schools.
Much of Murphy School's culture comes from Mary Russo, its principal. Russo is a passionate believer in parent involvement (if parents want school uniforms, they get them) and in a strong central curriculum, carried out by teachers who are continually trained by coaches and each other. Russo visits classrooms daily and gives weekly informal evaluations to each of the school's five dozen or so teachers.
These weren't easy transitions. When Russo arrived at Murphy seven years ago, teachers were accustomed to working in private, teaching what they wanted to teach and how they wanted to teach it, with no one looking over their shoulders. They were surprised when Russo asked them to provide a writing sample from each of their students and resentful when, appalled by the poor writing, she brought in a writing coach to train the teachers. She then sat in on the coaching sessions.
Because of the dramatic improvements at Murphy, it is among the Boston schools with the authority to make many of its own budget decisions. Last year, Murphy teachers decided to save money by doing without substitute teachers. Instead, they covered for each other when someone was out sick. And what did they decide to buy with the saved money? More time with teaching coaches.
It may sound like a minor detail, but the teachers' newfound respect for coaching — a practice that L.A.'s teachers would restrict under Villaraigosa's plan — shows just how much has changed in Boston schools since they came under mayoral control almost 15 years ago. That kind of change is possible in Los Angeles too. But it's more likely to happen when the mayor runs the schools.
Copyright 2006 Los Angeles Times
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/california/la-ed-murphy10aug10,1,2665569,print.story?coll=la-headlines-pe-california
State's teacher incentive pay plan ready to reward
State's teacher incentive pay plan ready to reward
Hundreds of campuses, including 78 in Dallas school district, invited to participate
11:40 PM CDT on Wednesday, August 9, 2006
By TERRENCE STUTZ / The Dallas Morning News
AUSTIN – Let the classroom competition begin.
Texas' first full-fledged attempt to reward teachers for students' performance is under way this school year, with 1,162 public schools – 15 percent of all campuses – invited to participate in the state's new incentive pay plan.
Schools must let the state know today if they want a piece of the merit pay pie, and few are expected to turn down an offer that could fatten teachers' paychecks by $3,000 to $10,000 a year – if their students perform well on next spring's state assessment.
Proposed state grants for individual schools have already been posted by the Texas Education Agency, with amounts ranging from $40,000 at many elementary schools to $295,000 for one of the largest high schools in the state.
The Dallas school district has 78 schools on the list for grants, the largest a $230,000 grant to W.T. White High School. Other local districts – Arlington, Richardson, Carrollton-Farmers Branch, Plano, Hurst-Euless-Bedford, Mesquite, McKinney, Irving, Grand Prairie, Garland, Fort Worth and Duncanville – all had anywhere from one to a handful of campuses on the list.
Statewide, more than 33,000 teachers could get incentive pay from the $100 million Educator Excellence Fund if most districts opt to spread the money around and award the minimum bonus of $3,000.
"It will be a nice back-to-school present for a lot of teachers," said Debbie Ratcliffe, a spokeswoman for the state agency.
DallasNews.com/Extra
Complete list of schools selected for the merit pay program (.pdf)
In Texas, the average teacher salary is just under $42,000.
The program is limited this year to schools that have a large proportion of low-income students. To be eligible, a school must be in the top half of campuses in the state with the highest percentages of "educationally disadvantaged" children.
Those schools were then evaluated based on their state performance ratings from last year. Schools qualified if they were rated "exemplary" or "recognized" – the top two grades in the accountability system – or if they were in the top quartile in math or reading improvements on the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills.
Once school districts agree to participate in the program, educational teams on each campus will devise the specifics for doling out the money with an eye toward rewarding teachers who have the greatest impact on student achievement, as measured by this year's TAKS scores.
Dallas Independent School District spokesman Celso Martinez said the district is working on a plan to award the grant money.
"It's not going to be a complicated formula," Mr. Martinez said of the distribution. "It will be unique to each campus."
Mr. Martinez said performance would play a role in how the money is divvied up on some campuses.
"We're definitely working ... to ensure there's some equality," he said. "But at the same time, there has to be some performance-rated faction built in."
State Education Commissioner Shirley Neeley and her staff, who are drafting guidelines for the program, also will review and approve each of the plans submitted by schools that participate.
While state teacher groups opposed the merit pay scheme when it was approved by the Legislature in a special session in May, proponents of the idea said it was time for Texas to start rewarding its best teachers and thereby encourage them to remain in the classroom.
"This is the best way I know to show gratitude to those who do excellent work in the classroom," said Sen. Florence Shapiro, R-Plano, who authored the legislation that created one of the nation's largest incentive pay programs for educators.
"This will really make a difference for kids in high-poverty schools."
Brock Gregg of the Association of Texas Professional Educators, on the other hand, said it "makes no sense" to single out campuses with large numbers of poor students, and then give money only to those with higher performance ratings from the state.
"It seems like schools that are struggling more with their students ought to get some of that money," he said.
Richard Kouri of the Texas State Teachers Association said another problem is that the performance ratings are from 2005, nearly a year before the incentive plan was passed by the Legislature.
"Not only is this program heavily dependent on a single standardized test, but it is also based on work done by people who had no knowledge of the incentive pay plan at the time they performed their work," he said. "That defies the definition of an incentive."
Although the education agency originally proposed a minimum $60,000 grant for schools that qualify for merit pay, Ms. Ratcliffe said some smaller schools felt it would be difficult to distribute such a large sum in the coming school year.
So the minimum grant was dropped to $40,000, freeing up some of the funding and allowing an additional 200 campuses to participate.
At least 75 percent of the $100 million in incentive funds this year must be spent on teachers who teach core subjects measured by the TAKS. Schools will have discretion in distributing the other 25 percent, which could go to teachers in other subjects or school administrators.
Schools could not issue bonuses to employees whose primary responsibilities are in the athletic department.
The merit pay program will be expanded to other schools in the 2007-08 school year when total annual funding will reach $260 million. Bonuses in the second program will also be based primarily on student test scores. All districts will be eligible.
A $10 million pilot program was launched last year at the direction of Gov. Rick Perry, who has long advocated incentive pay for teachers. A total of 98 districts participated in the pilot program, which will continue this year.
Staff writer Tawnell D. Hobbs contributed to this report.
E-mail tstutz@dallasnews.com
ELIGIBLE SCHOOLS IN DISD
Dallas public schools invited by the state to participate in the Texas Educator Excellence Grant program:
$230,000
W.T. White High
$215,000
Carter High
$210,000
Hillcrest High
$170,000
Titche Elementary
Marcus Elementary
Lincoln High
$165,000
Frank Elementary
Casa View Elementary
$135,000
Hotchkiss Elementary
Urban Park Elementary
$130,000
Chavez Elementary
Ireland Elementary
$125,000
Kiest Elementary
Kahn Elementary
Preston Hollow Elementary
Winnetka Elementary
$120,000
Walker Vanguard Elementary
Medrano Elementary
Peabody Elementary
Donald Elementary
Mount Auburn Elementary
Reinhardt Elementary
San Jacinto Elementary
Tolbert Elementary
Blair Elementary
$100,000
Arcadia Park Elementary
Macon Elementary
Edison Learning Center Middle
Caillet Elementary
Moseley Elementary
$90,000
Seguin Elementary
Highland Meadows Elementary
Peeler Elementary
Reagan Elementary
Pershing Elementary
Conner Elementary
$75,000
Sanger Elementary
Bayles Elementary
Alexander Elementary
Rice Elementary
Allen Elementary
Ervin Elementary
Hogg Elementary
Carpenter Elementary
Rhoads Elementary
Dorsey Elementary
Cochran Elementary
Zumwalt Middle
Business and Management High
Health Professions High
Marsalis Elementary
Field Elementary
$60,000
Lee Elementary
$50,000
Earhart Elementary
Pease Elementary
Lisbon Elementary
Dunbar Elementary
Government/Law/Law Enforcement High
Science and Engineering High
Gooch Elementary
$45,000
Milam Elementary
Carr Elementary
City Park Elementary
Carver Elementary
Jill Stone Elementary
McMillan Elementary
De Zavala Elementary
MLK Elementary
Williams Elementary
Miller Elementary
$40,000
Arlington Park Elementary
Dade Elementary
Environmental Science Academy Middle School
James Learning Center Elementary
Rangel Middle
Harllee Elementary
Wheatley Elementary
Education and Social Service High
SOURCE: Texas Education Agency
Online at: http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/education/stories/081006dntexmeritpay.20b40a7.html
Hundreds of campuses, including 78 in Dallas school district, invited to participate
11:40 PM CDT on Wednesday, August 9, 2006
By TERRENCE STUTZ / The Dallas Morning News
AUSTIN – Let the classroom competition begin.
Texas' first full-fledged attempt to reward teachers for students' performance is under way this school year, with 1,162 public schools – 15 percent of all campuses – invited to participate in the state's new incentive pay plan.
Schools must let the state know today if they want a piece of the merit pay pie, and few are expected to turn down an offer that could fatten teachers' paychecks by $3,000 to $10,000 a year – if their students perform well on next spring's state assessment.
Proposed state grants for individual schools have already been posted by the Texas Education Agency, with amounts ranging from $40,000 at many elementary schools to $295,000 for one of the largest high schools in the state.
The Dallas school district has 78 schools on the list for grants, the largest a $230,000 grant to W.T. White High School. Other local districts – Arlington, Richardson, Carrollton-Farmers Branch, Plano, Hurst-Euless-Bedford, Mesquite, McKinney, Irving, Grand Prairie, Garland, Fort Worth and Duncanville – all had anywhere from one to a handful of campuses on the list.
Statewide, more than 33,000 teachers could get incentive pay from the $100 million Educator Excellence Fund if most districts opt to spread the money around and award the minimum bonus of $3,000.
"It will be a nice back-to-school present for a lot of teachers," said Debbie Ratcliffe, a spokeswoman for the state agency.
DallasNews.com/Extra
Complete list of schools selected for the merit pay program (.pdf)
In Texas, the average teacher salary is just under $42,000.
The program is limited this year to schools that have a large proportion of low-income students. To be eligible, a school must be in the top half of campuses in the state with the highest percentages of "educationally disadvantaged" children.
Those schools were then evaluated based on their state performance ratings from last year. Schools qualified if they were rated "exemplary" or "recognized" – the top two grades in the accountability system – or if they were in the top quartile in math or reading improvements on the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills.
Once school districts agree to participate in the program, educational teams on each campus will devise the specifics for doling out the money with an eye toward rewarding teachers who have the greatest impact on student achievement, as measured by this year's TAKS scores.
Dallas Independent School District spokesman Celso Martinez said the district is working on a plan to award the grant money.
"It's not going to be a complicated formula," Mr. Martinez said of the distribution. "It will be unique to each campus."
Mr. Martinez said performance would play a role in how the money is divvied up on some campuses.
"We're definitely working ... to ensure there's some equality," he said. "But at the same time, there has to be some performance-rated faction built in."
State Education Commissioner Shirley Neeley and her staff, who are drafting guidelines for the program, also will review and approve each of the plans submitted by schools that participate.
While state teacher groups opposed the merit pay scheme when it was approved by the Legislature in a special session in May, proponents of the idea said it was time for Texas to start rewarding its best teachers and thereby encourage them to remain in the classroom.
"This is the best way I know to show gratitude to those who do excellent work in the classroom," said Sen. Florence Shapiro, R-Plano, who authored the legislation that created one of the nation's largest incentive pay programs for educators.
"This will really make a difference for kids in high-poverty schools."
Brock Gregg of the Association of Texas Professional Educators, on the other hand, said it "makes no sense" to single out campuses with large numbers of poor students, and then give money only to those with higher performance ratings from the state.
"It seems like schools that are struggling more with their students ought to get some of that money," he said.
Richard Kouri of the Texas State Teachers Association said another problem is that the performance ratings are from 2005, nearly a year before the incentive plan was passed by the Legislature.
"Not only is this program heavily dependent on a single standardized test, but it is also based on work done by people who had no knowledge of the incentive pay plan at the time they performed their work," he said. "That defies the definition of an incentive."
Although the education agency originally proposed a minimum $60,000 grant for schools that qualify for merit pay, Ms. Ratcliffe said some smaller schools felt it would be difficult to distribute such a large sum in the coming school year.
So the minimum grant was dropped to $40,000, freeing up some of the funding and allowing an additional 200 campuses to participate.
At least 75 percent of the $100 million in incentive funds this year must be spent on teachers who teach core subjects measured by the TAKS. Schools will have discretion in distributing the other 25 percent, which could go to teachers in other subjects or school administrators.
Schools could not issue bonuses to employees whose primary responsibilities are in the athletic department.
The merit pay program will be expanded to other schools in the 2007-08 school year when total annual funding will reach $260 million. Bonuses in the second program will also be based primarily on student test scores. All districts will be eligible.
A $10 million pilot program was launched last year at the direction of Gov. Rick Perry, who has long advocated incentive pay for teachers. A total of 98 districts participated in the pilot program, which will continue this year.
Staff writer Tawnell D. Hobbs contributed to this report.
E-mail tstutz@dallasnews.com
ELIGIBLE SCHOOLS IN DISD
Dallas public schools invited by the state to participate in the Texas Educator Excellence Grant program:
$230,000
W.T. White High
$215,000
Carter High
$210,000
Hillcrest High
$170,000
Titche Elementary
Marcus Elementary
Lincoln High
$165,000
Frank Elementary
Casa View Elementary
$135,000
Hotchkiss Elementary
Urban Park Elementary
$130,000
Chavez Elementary
Ireland Elementary
$125,000
Kiest Elementary
Kahn Elementary
Preston Hollow Elementary
Winnetka Elementary
$120,000
Walker Vanguard Elementary
Medrano Elementary
Peabody Elementary
Donald Elementary
Mount Auburn Elementary
Reinhardt Elementary
San Jacinto Elementary
Tolbert Elementary
Blair Elementary
$100,000
Arcadia Park Elementary
Macon Elementary
Edison Learning Center Middle
Caillet Elementary
Moseley Elementary
$90,000
Seguin Elementary
Highland Meadows Elementary
Peeler Elementary
Reagan Elementary
Pershing Elementary
Conner Elementary
$75,000
Sanger Elementary
Bayles Elementary
Alexander Elementary
Rice Elementary
Allen Elementary
Ervin Elementary
Hogg Elementary
Carpenter Elementary
Rhoads Elementary
Dorsey Elementary
Cochran Elementary
Zumwalt Middle
Business and Management High
Health Professions High
Marsalis Elementary
Field Elementary
$60,000
Lee Elementary
$50,000
Earhart Elementary
Pease Elementary
Lisbon Elementary
Dunbar Elementary
Government/Law/Law Enforcement High
Science and Engineering High
Gooch Elementary
$45,000
Milam Elementary
Carr Elementary
City Park Elementary
Carver Elementary
Jill Stone Elementary
McMillan Elementary
De Zavala Elementary
MLK Elementary
Williams Elementary
Miller Elementary
$40,000
Arlington Park Elementary
Dade Elementary
Environmental Science Academy Middle School
James Learning Center Elementary
Rangel Middle
Harllee Elementary
Wheatley Elementary
Education and Social Service High
SOURCE: Texas Education Agency
Online at: http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/education/stories/081006dntexmeritpay.20b40a7.html
Neil Bush's IgniteLearning is in the Houston News...
Neil Bush was in the Houston papers from Mon through Thurs last week. Check out all the pieces and also the ignitelearning website at for upcoming events, testimonials, sample curriculum and "ignited" schools. Some are in the Austin area.
-Angela
Houston Chronicle News
HISD buys Neil Bush's software
Neil's deal
Chron Editorial Op-ed
Bush's software defended
Teachers' aid or cash cow?
Houston Press
Help a Bruddah Out
Houston Press
History for Dummies
-Angela
Houston Chronicle News
HISD buys Neil Bush's software
Neil's deal
Chron Editorial Op-ed
Bush's software defended
Teachers' aid or cash cow?
Houston Press
Help a Bruddah Out
Houston Press
History for Dummies
Friday, August 18, 2006
Census Shows Growth of Immigrants
Also go to this website on American Community Survey in order to see how your community is changing. -Angela
August 15, 2006
Census Shows Growth of Immigrants /NYTimes
By RICK LYMAN
The number of immigrants living in American households rose 16 percent over the last five years, fueled largely by recent arrivals from Mexico, according to fresh data released by the Census Bureau.
And increasingly, immigrants are bypassing the traditional gateway states like California and New York and settling directly in parts of the country that until recently saw little immigrant activity — regions like the Upper Midwest, New England and the Rocky Mountain States.
Coming in the heart of an election season in which illegal immigration has emerged as an issue, the new data from the bureau’s 2005 American Community Survey is certain to generate more debate. But more than that, demographers said, it highlights one reason immigration has become such a heated topic.
“What’s happening now is that immigrants are showing up in many more communities all across the country than they have ever been in,” said Audrey Singer, an immigration fellow at the Brookings Institution. “So it’s easy for people to look around and not just see them, but feel the impact they’re having in their communities. And a lot of these are communities that are not accustomed to seeing immigrants in their schools, at the workplace, in their hospitals.”
By far the largest numbers of immigrants continue to live in the six states that have traditionally attracted them: California, New York, Texas, Florida, New Jersey and Illinois.
Immigrants also continue to flow into a handful of states in the Southeast, like Georgia and North Carolina, a trend that was discerned in the 2000 census.
But it is in the less-expected immigrant destinations that demographers find the most of interest in the new data.
Indiana saw a 34 percent increase in the number of immigrants; South Dakota saw a 44 percent rise; Delaware 32 percent; Missouri 31 percent; Colorado 28 percent; and New Hampshire 26 percent.
“It’s the continuation of a pattern that we first began to see 10 or 15 years ago,” said Jeff Passel, senior research associate at the Pew Hispanic Center, who has examined the new census data. “But instead of being confined to areas like the Southeast, it’s beginning to spill over into some Midwestern states, like Indiana and Ohio. It’s even moving up into New England.”
Over all, immigrants now make up 12.4 percent of the nation’s population, up from 11.2 percent in 2000. That amounts to an estimated 4.9 million additional immigrants for a total of 35.7 million, a number larger than the population of California.
Unlike the full census, which measures all population, the American Community Survey covers only what census officials call “household” population — that is, people living in households, rather than in “group quarters” like universities, long-term care facilities and prisons.
Thus, the 16 percent increase in immigrants since 2000 refers only to the household population. (The nation’s household population in 2005 was 288,378,137, up from 273,637,296 in 2000.)
From 1990 to 2000, the total population showed a 57 percent increase in the foreign-born population, to 31.1 million, from 19.8 million.
Still, the rise in the immigrant household population since 2000 seems to indicate that the blazing pace of immigration seen throughout the 1990’s has continued into the first half of this decade.
And along with the increase in the overall number of immigrants, the survey found an increase in the numbers who are not United States citizens — an estimated 2.4 million more since 2000. The survey did not try to distinguish between noncitizens in the country legally, like students or guest workers, and those in the country illegally.
Georgia and North Carolina, states that had already seen significant increases in their immigrant population in the 1990’s, continue to see rising numbers. In Georgia, for instance, foreign-born residents accounted for 7.2 percent of the state’s population in 2000, and 9 percent in 2005.
“We’ve been getting very diverse down here,” said Judy Hadley, statistical research analyst for the Georgia Office of Planning and Budget. “You name any country and we’ve got it.”
Ms. Singer pointed out that much of the growth in immigrants was in “suburban areas and a lot of other places that really have no history of immigration.”
Immigration was just one area covered by the first release of data from the American Community Survey, which also covered such demographic information as race, age, education and marital status.
The survey detected a significant increase in the number of Americans over age 25 who hold a bachelor’s degree or higher — 27.2 percent of that population in 2005 compared with 24.4 percent in 2000.
This contributes to what has been a half-decade surge in Americans’ educational attainment. In 1940, only 4.6 percent of Americans held a bachelor’s degree.
The survey found that the percentage of Americans who are 65 or over is shrinking, from 12.6 percent of the population in 1990 to 12.4 percent in 2000 and 12.1 percent in 2005.
Partly, this is driven by the huge influx in immigrants, who tend to be of working age or younger. But demographers caution against seeing this as a long-term trend.
“It’s more like the lull before the storm,” said William H. Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution. “Before long, the baby boomers are going to start getting into that age group in large numbers and the percentage will shoot up.”
The survey is intended as an annual bolster to the bureau’s constitutionally mandated census of the country’s population every 10 years. It began as a test program in 1996 and has gradually expanded to where it can now provide detailed data for nearly 7,000 geographic areas, including all Congressional districts and counties or cities of 65,000 or more.
In coming months, more data from the survey will cover income, poverty and housing.
Besides getting larger, the survey found shifts in the composition of the nation’s immigrant population.
“Essentially, it’s a continuation of the Mexicanization of U.S. immigration,” said Steven Camarota, director of research at the Center for Immigration Studies. “You would expect Mexicans to be increasing their share in places like Georgia and North Carolina, which already saw some increases, but they’ve also increased their share of the population, and quite dramatically, in states like Michigan, Delaware and Montana.”
More of America’s immigrants, legal or not, come from Mexico than any other country, an estimated 11 million in 2005, compared with nearly 1.8 million Chinese and 1.4 million Indians.
Conversely, the percentage of immigrants who were born in European countries has dropped sharply — 29.4 percent in the last five years, demographers say, because immigrants who came to the United States in the mid-20th century are now dying.
A study of this data by Mr. Passel for the Pew Hispanic Center showed that while 58 percent of the immigrants who arrived in the United States since 2000 settled in 5 of the traditional gateway states, 24 percent settled in 9 second-tier states (including Georgia, Massachusetts and Washington) and 11 percent found homes in 11 third-tier states, many of which have seen little immigration before (stretching from Connecticut to Minnesota to Nevada).
And while many of those first- and second-tier states saw the largest numbers of new arrivals from Mexico, Mr. Passel found, it was some of the third-tier states that saw the largest percentage increases: Alabama, South Carolina, Missouri, Kentucky, Ohio and Pennsylvania.
Two decades ago, demographers said, some 75 percent to 80 percent of new immigrants settled in one of the half-dozen gateway states and tended to stay there. Then, in the last 10 to 15 years, the pattern shifted and increasing numbers began to stay in the gateways briefly and then move. Now, they say, the pattern is that more immigrants are simply bypassing the gateways altogether.
“The biggest thing that drives immigration to specific destinations is that the immigrant already knows someone who is living there,” Mr. Camarota said.
The common pattern, demographers said, is that a handful of immigrants move to a new region from one of the gateway states and put down roots. Then, once settled, they become a pipeline for others in their family or their home village to move directly into the same area.
“It’s looking like what happens is that a person from a given community, say in Nicaragua, is getting established,” said Bob Coats, the governor’s census liaison in North Carolina. “And then they send word home that they have a good job and other people — neighbors, family members — come to join them and you have these enclaves of people from one country, one region, becoming established in the same area.”
Brenda Goodman contributed reporting from Atlanta for this article.
Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/15/us/15census.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
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