Jesse Bogan and Mariano Castillo
San Antonio Express-News Staff Writers
Web Posted: 10/07/2006 11:13 PM CDT
HIDALGO — If there was a place along the winding Rio Grande to justify the controversial fence Congress and President Bush have authorized, it seems Sonny Miller's ranch would be it.
Nine people, most of them Salvadorans, drowned when their smuggler drove a 1987 Crown Victoria into a nearby irrigation canal two years ago. And Miller has a photo of 60 immigrants detained on his property this summer.
Like many South Texas ranchers, he built stairs over a pasture fence so it wouldn't get trampled.
Clearly, there's a lot of foot traffic, yet Miller, 72, is among residents and leaders from both sides of the border — not to mention the rest of the Americas — who are riled up over the "Berlin Wall," as many call the proposed structure.
"It's a waste of money," said Miller, who used to farm vegetables and cotton but now just raises a few cattle. "They'll either go through it, over it or under it."
(Jesse Bogan/Express-News)
Rancher Sonny Miller of Hidalgo says he doesn't support the planned border fence because immigrants will find a way to get in.
The Senate recently joined the House in passing the Secure Fence Act, which calls for 700 miles of fencing along the southern border, including large stretches in Texas — from Laredo to Brownsville, Del Rio to Eagle Pass, and El Paso into New Mexico.
In an election year, the bill was designed to please voters anxious about homeland security, primarily conservatives who long have sought a border clampdown. But the fence's construction is far from a sure thing, and with the exception of those who would build it, support for it appears almost non-existent along the border.
Although 700 miles were authorized, no money was included in the bill. A separate bill signed Wednesday by President Bush appropriated $1.2 billion for border security, which can — but doesn't have to — be used for a fence.
Many questions remain. How close to the river would the fence be built? Will the government condemn private property? What about the long stretches of rough terrain that experts say isn't appropriate for such a barrier? What about environmental concerns?
Sens. Kay Bailey Hutchison and John Cornyn, both Texas Republicans, got assurances the Homeland Security Department will have broad discretion on whether to build the fence and will consult with state and local officials on its location.
"It's all a complex thing, but I think at this point the focus ought to be on appreciation that Congress has finally done something," said Pennsylvania-based Colin Hanna, president of the Web site WeNeedAFence.com, acknowledging that "a year ago, we were just about the only organization advocating a fence, and the idea was very much on the fringe of the debate."
Now he is confident the money needed to build it — an estimated $2 billion to $7 billion — will be approved.
Many foes in Texas and Mexico, however, said the fence ignores the root causes of immigration, is not neighborly, and ultimately would jack up the going rate for smugglers who guide immigrants here or foster more attempts to corrupt officials on international bridges.
Among people interviewed along the border after Senate passage of the Secure Fence Act, those who saw no downside to the fence generally were able to cross the border legally, didn't care to cross the border, or were enthused about financial or employment opportunities stemming from the project.
Brownsville Mayor Eddie Treviño Jr. said fences could be helpful in certain areas, but he described the wall as an "attempt to institutionalize discrimination and racism."
"We spent 40 years trying to tear down the Berlin Wall, and here we are building one (against) our second-largest trading partner," he said, blaming Congress for failing to address comprehensive immigration reform, including a bolstered guest worker program and better pathways to citizenship.
Across the Rio Grande in Matamoros, Matias Miss, a manager of a shelter for undocumented immigrants, said border-area residents shouldn't have a problem with the wall because most have laser visas that allow them to shop, eat and visit with families in the 25-mile border zone of South Texas.
"If I have a house and put up a fence, I am going to feel more secure, and that doesn't mean I can't be a good neighbor," said Miss, 38.
The burden, he said, will fall heaviest on the residents of his shelter, Casa San Juan Diego, some of whom have endured rape, robbery and hunger during their long trips north fueled by dreams of construction, agricultural and service jobs.
They include people like Patricio Vázquez, 23. A farm laborer with a sick mother, he sold a few cows and his stereo and borrowed money from relatives to fund a trip from rural Veracruz state, only to be robbed of his $2,000 on the Rio Grande's banks.
Vázquez said the wall wouldn't be fair, because "we all have a right to eat and have a normal life without so much poverty."
Eduardo Hinojosa Cepeda, mayor of Camargo, a Mexican border town of 20,000, asked, "What would the United States do without our manual labor?"
Hinojosa, a dual citizen born in McAllen, said the wall is bad for the "brother countries" because it makes it look like the United States "doesn't want anything to do with Mexico."
Reynaldo Clemente Cavazos, director of the country club in Reynosa, Mexico, a large border city and manufacturing center, said he already feels like a delinquent when he crosses because of close questioning by U.S. officials at the bridge. It would worsen with a fence, he said.
He compared the tide of undocumented immigrants to the bustling narcotics trade, saying they couldn't be held back by force because they are pulled by U.S. demand.
"Mexico is the diving board, and the United States is the swimming pool," he said.
Across the river, Steve Ahlenius, president of the McAllen Chamber of Commerce, called the wall a "19th-century solution to a 21st-century problem" and said it could erode the local $2 billion retail economy, to which Mexicans contribute a third.
"How it hurts us economically is, the image that we send to Mexico is that, 'We are going to build a wall and we don't want you here,'" he said, adding that the perceived cold shoulder could cause shoppers who make several trips a year to cut back.
Ahlenius finds it hard to believe anyone locally could support the wall, and he said lawmakers who voted for it are "scared about what they think America is becoming."
"People are afraid that America is being more brown. ... This is a country where there has always been opportunity, there has always been freedom, and (when) we start to wall up things and to block things off — we are losing what we really stand for."
In Laredo, Ray Segura, owner of Segura Fence Co., said he's eager to compete for government contracts to help build the fence. He already has teamed up with a San Antonio company to submit a bid.
"There's going to be a lot of contracts, there's going to be a lot of bidding, there's going to be a lot of action," Segura said.
He said that based on his experience, the fence probably would be built on an easement along the river that the government owns and runs along the entire border, usually 30 to 50 feet wide.
He estimated it would take about two to three months per mile of construction for a thick wire fence with holes too small to fit a boot in; twice as long if it is a double fence, as Congress wants.
Also standing to gain was a shirtless man with a tattoo of a bat on his chest.
He was drinking beer last week with two colleagues along the river where smugglers commonly bring immigrants in rafts from the Mexican town of Miguel Alemán to the Texas town of Roma.
The self-described "patero," or smuggler, sat among trash, just beyond the reach of flies buzzing around a dead animal.
"We aren't politicians, we are ruffians. It's going to be more difficult (to cross), but it's going to cost more money," said the man, who appeared to be about 40 and declined to give his name.
"If they want to spend the money on the wall," he said with the flick of a hand, "then spend it."
jbogan@express-news.net
Sunday, October 08, 2006
Study: Hispanic students in Texas increase 43%
" In Texas, the number of Hispanic public school students increased 43 percent -- from 1.3 million in 1993 to 1.8 million in 2003. Texas has the second-largest population of Hispanic students, behind California."
What needs to be remembered is that most of this increase is due to the rate of natural increase (births).
Angela
Study: Hispanic students in Texas increase 43%
Nationwide surge is largest since baby boomer era
Thursday, October 5, 2006
New York Times News Service
Study: Hispanic students in Texas increase 43%
Nationwide surge is largest since baby boomer era
08:24 PM CDT on Thursday, October 5, 2006
New York Times News Service
WASHINGTON -- Fueled by the burgeoning Hispanic population, the number of children in U.S. public schools increased by 4.7 million from 1993 to 2003, the largest surge since the baby boomers started school, a new study shows.
Hispanic students accounted for 64 percent of the total growth, or 3 million children, according to the report by the Pew Hispanic Center, a non-partisan research group.
In Texas, the number of Hispanic public school students increased 43 percent -- from 1.3 million in 1993 to 1.8 million in 2003. Texas has the second-largest population of Hispanic students, behind California.
"Latinos have been the key growing student population over all of American public education," said Richard Fry, a senior researcher at the Pew Hispanic Center and author of the study.
The report, based on data from the Department of Education, shows that during the same time period, the number of black students increased by 1.1 million, the number of Asian students increased by 500,000, and the number of white students declined by 35,000.
The impact of high rates of immigration in the 1980's and 1990's -- which produced an influx of young Hispanic adults in their prime childbearing years -- is most evident in the numbers of Hispanic students in elementary schools, the study says.
From 1993 to 2003, Hispanic enrollment in public elementary schools increased by 1.6 million. During the same time, the enrollment of black students increased by 390,000, Asian enrollment increased by 219,000, and white enrollment declined by 1.2 million, the study showed.
In addition, the report said that white students for the most part still attend mostly white schools.
In Florida, the number of Hispanic public school students increased 91 percent -- from 282,000 in 1993 to 538,000 in 2003. Florida has the fourth largest number of Hispanic students, behind California, Texas and New York.
In Ohio, the number of Hispanic public school students increased 49 percent -- from about 24,000 in 1993 to 36,000 in 2003. insert for Cox states)
The report also shows that the nation has seen a boom in the construction of new schools with more than 15,000 built between 1993 and 2003. That marks the most vigorous school construction period in the United States since the 1920's.
Most Hispanic students, however, are being educated in older schools that existed before 1993. The report does not provide a reason why most Hispanic students are not attending the newly built schools.
Harry Pachon, president of the Tomas Rivera Policy Institute at the University of Southern California, said it is not surprising that most Hispanics are not attending the newer schools because new immigrants often settle in older neighborhoods and inner cities.
"There is a correlation between port of entry communities and older schools," he said.
The situation will likely change over time, as Hispanics become more affluent and educated and move to suburban communities and other areas, he said.
"Hispanics are just like all other Americans. They want the dream of the house in the suburbs with the yard, the fence and the dog," he said.
The report also shows that schools with large increases in the Hispanic population have a larger share of low income students as evidenced by an increase in the use of free lunch programs.
In schools with at least a 100 percent increase in Hispanic students from 1993 to 2003, the percent of students using the free lunch program increased from 36 percent to 42 percent, the study said.
The study also found:
- Arkansas saw the largest percent increase in its Hispanic school-age population -- from about 3,900 to 21,400 -- an increase of 454 percent.
- Most Hispanic public school students reside in six states -- Florida, Arizona, Illinois, California, Texas and New York.
-Twenty four states -- including Alabama, Minnesota, Utah, and Iowa -- have seen at least a 100 percent increase in the number of Hispanic public school students from 1993 to 2003.
- Only one state had a decline in Hispanic enrollment during that time. The number of Latino students in Hawaii public schools decreased from 9,082 to 8,487.
http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/latestnews/stories/100606nathispanics.1eafb98.html
Texas inflates graduation rates, researchers say
Texas inflates graduation rates, researchers say
12:02 AM CDT on Friday, October 6, 2006
Associated Press
HOUSTON – Texas grossly inflates its high school graduation numbers, masking critical dropout figures, according to studies to be presented Friday at a Rice University conference.
Academicians from institutions including Rice, Harvard, Stanford and Johns Hopkins, as well as other experts in the field, say their goal is to bring clarity to the problem, explain the implications for the state and nation and lay the groundwork for progress.
In a conference call to reporters on Wednesday, the conference speakers previewed the research and issues they planned to present.
"The graduation crisis is much more urgent than we might understand just based on what the TEA presents," said Chris Swanson, director of the Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit Editorial Projects in Education Research Center, referring to the Texas Education Agency. He notes that the Lone Star state isn't the only one that exaggerates its numbers.
His research, part of a four-year project funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, found Texas' graduation rate to be 66.8 percent, much lower than the 84.2 percent the state reports.
"We do not think our graduation rate is inflated," said Debbie Ratcliffe, spokeswoman for the Texas Education Agency. She questions the researchers' methodology.
Swanson's numbers are almost identical to what other independent researchers have found using various methodologies, the speakers said. Swanson used enrollment-based estimates; others have looked at individual student records and unduplicated data from the state.
Further, Swanson said the inflation increases in the larger districts. Dallas has a 46 percent graduation rate, his study found, not the state's figure of 81 percent. The inflation was also more prominent when looking at minority and poor students.
Part of the disparity lies in the differing definitions for what a dropout is. The state figures mentioned, from the 2002-2003 school year, do not count the following as dropouts: students who have enrolled in a GED program, students who have passed coursework but not the required state test, students who transferred to another Texas public school but never showed up for class and students who are missing.
The state will begin including the first three of those categories in their calculations, starting this school year, but not because it found fault with its previous method, Ratcliffe said, but rather to align it with the definitions used by the federal No Child Left Behind law and National Center for Education Statistics.
Texas is one of the few states to have a system that tracks individual students, a resource many other states want to emulate.
"The lesson for Texas is that it doesn't matter how good the data collection is. If you're not reporting in an accurate, transparent way, you wind up with very misleading information," said Dan Losen, a senior education law and policy associate with Harvard's Civil Rights Project. "That misleading info means that educators and policy-makers and the general public are going to make bad decisions about education reform or at least not very effective ones. It's a real tragedy."
http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/education/stories/100606dntexdropouts.28a25ee.html
12:02 AM CDT on Friday, October 6, 2006
Associated Press
HOUSTON – Texas grossly inflates its high school graduation numbers, masking critical dropout figures, according to studies to be presented Friday at a Rice University conference.
Academicians from institutions including Rice, Harvard, Stanford and Johns Hopkins, as well as other experts in the field, say their goal is to bring clarity to the problem, explain the implications for the state and nation and lay the groundwork for progress.
In a conference call to reporters on Wednesday, the conference speakers previewed the research and issues they planned to present.
"The graduation crisis is much more urgent than we might understand just based on what the TEA presents," said Chris Swanson, director of the Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit Editorial Projects in Education Research Center, referring to the Texas Education Agency. He notes that the Lone Star state isn't the only one that exaggerates its numbers.
His research, part of a four-year project funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, found Texas' graduation rate to be 66.8 percent, much lower than the 84.2 percent the state reports.
"We do not think our graduation rate is inflated," said Debbie Ratcliffe, spokeswoman for the Texas Education Agency. She questions the researchers' methodology.
Swanson's numbers are almost identical to what other independent researchers have found using various methodologies, the speakers said. Swanson used enrollment-based estimates; others have looked at individual student records and unduplicated data from the state.
Further, Swanson said the inflation increases in the larger districts. Dallas has a 46 percent graduation rate, his study found, not the state's figure of 81 percent. The inflation was also more prominent when looking at minority and poor students.
Part of the disparity lies in the differing definitions for what a dropout is. The state figures mentioned, from the 2002-2003 school year, do not count the following as dropouts: students who have enrolled in a GED program, students who have passed coursework but not the required state test, students who transferred to another Texas public school but never showed up for class and students who are missing.
The state will begin including the first three of those categories in their calculations, starting this school year, but not because it found fault with its previous method, Ratcliffe said, but rather to align it with the definitions used by the federal No Child Left Behind law and National Center for Education Statistics.
Texas is one of the few states to have a system that tracks individual students, a resource many other states want to emulate.
"The lesson for Texas is that it doesn't matter how good the data collection is. If you're not reporting in an accurate, transparent way, you wind up with very misleading information," said Dan Losen, a senior education law and policy associate with Harvard's Civil Rights Project. "That misleading info means that educators and policy-makers and the general public are going to make bad decisions about education reform or at least not very effective ones. It's a real tragedy."
http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/education/stories/100606dntexdropouts.28a25ee.html
Wednesday, October 04, 2006
We can't just 'fix' schools; they need to be retooled
A vision from Chrs Bell, candidate for governor. -Angela
We can't just 'fix' schools; they need to be retooled
An op/ed by Chris Bell, Austin American-Statesman
September 30, 2006
Last week, in a small cafe, a young lady came up to me, shook my hand and told me she was proud to be voting Democratic this November. She was proud because our campaign is firmly rooted in family values and faith — she was proud because we offer a clear vision of greatness for Texas and a comprehensive plan to achieve that vision. And, as she started to let go of my hand, she looked me square in the eye and said, "And, please, do something about our schools. I want my kids to do better than I did."
She speaks for almost every Texan I've met — and she speaks for me. I want our children to do better than we did. I want to make one thing clear from the start; unlike Gov. Rick Perry and Carole Keeton Strayhorn, I'm not going to promise to "fix" Texas schools.
Trying to fix Texas schools would be like spending hard-earned money to fix an electric typewriter. Even if I got it running better, it would still be a typewriter. It would never compete with a laptop computer and the World Wide Web.
Texas schools aren't broken. They're running on an obsolete operating system. It's time for a bold new direction.
Here's my promise: Texas students will be the most skilled, knowledgeable, creative, innovative, ambitious, productive and healthy young people in the world in 10 years. Texas students will pass any standardized test because they will have learned to learn, not because they memorized useless facts. Your governor should not be willing to settle for anything less. But the people who run schools now would rather defend the status quo than acknowledge the reality that schools aren't working.
Perry is the worst offender. He can't mention raising standards without talking about standardized tests. He uses the TAKS like the end-all, be-all of education.
Everything in our schools is geared toward helping kids get better scores on that test. What we have is a public school system that has put a premium on mediocrity and failed to meet even that low standard. Only two of every three students make it to graduation. For those graduating, our SAT scores are darn near the worst in the country. And then those lucky enough to get to that next step are showing up at colleges increasingly unprepared to do the work, forcing colleges to teach what our kids should have learned in high school.
If we want a different result, we need to commit ourselves to big, dramatic changes. We need to "retool our schools." We must do more than apply a fresh coat of paint to an outmoded factory. Texas needs schools that prepare our kids for greatness not just for standardized tests.
My very first act as governor will be to appoint a blue-ribbon commission to figure out how to make our schools the best in the country. I don't pretend to have all the answers. But leadership requires that I put some ideas on the table. My main role as governor will be to articulate a common goal and a new vision for public education in Texas.
Here's where I think we should start: High-stakes testing has tied teachers' hands and turned them into little more than glorified test-prep monitors. We need to empower teachers to teach children how to learn in self-directed, group learning environments. We won't see progress in Texas until we end the tyranny of the TAKS test. Next, we must modernize our learning model. Schools need to focus on critical thinking, communication skills, teamwork, self-direction and other skills necessary for success in today's economy.
Finally, we need to engage parents. Too often, we forget that the most important teachers children will ever have are their parents. We need to work with parents to make sure their kids are showing up at school every day ready to learn.
We know what the stakes are. We know what the goal is. And we know that we're not going to get there if we continue along our current path. What Texas needs is a governor with the courage to lead. Only then can we begin to build the best public school system in the country. And only then will the Texas that's in our hearts become the Texas we see around us.
Bell is the 2006 Democratic gubernatorial nominee.
We can't just 'fix' schools; they need to be retooled
An op/ed by Chris Bell, Austin American-Statesman
September 30, 2006
Last week, in a small cafe, a young lady came up to me, shook my hand and told me she was proud to be voting Democratic this November. She was proud because our campaign is firmly rooted in family values and faith — she was proud because we offer a clear vision of greatness for Texas and a comprehensive plan to achieve that vision. And, as she started to let go of my hand, she looked me square in the eye and said, "And, please, do something about our schools. I want my kids to do better than I did."
She speaks for almost every Texan I've met — and she speaks for me. I want our children to do better than we did. I want to make one thing clear from the start; unlike Gov. Rick Perry and Carole Keeton Strayhorn, I'm not going to promise to "fix" Texas schools.
Trying to fix Texas schools would be like spending hard-earned money to fix an electric typewriter. Even if I got it running better, it would still be a typewriter. It would never compete with a laptop computer and the World Wide Web.
Texas schools aren't broken. They're running on an obsolete operating system. It's time for a bold new direction.
Here's my promise: Texas students will be the most skilled, knowledgeable, creative, innovative, ambitious, productive and healthy young people in the world in 10 years. Texas students will pass any standardized test because they will have learned to learn, not because they memorized useless facts. Your governor should not be willing to settle for anything less. But the people who run schools now would rather defend the status quo than acknowledge the reality that schools aren't working.
Perry is the worst offender. He can't mention raising standards without talking about standardized tests. He uses the TAKS like the end-all, be-all of education.
Everything in our schools is geared toward helping kids get better scores on that test. What we have is a public school system that has put a premium on mediocrity and failed to meet even that low standard. Only two of every three students make it to graduation. For those graduating, our SAT scores are darn near the worst in the country. And then those lucky enough to get to that next step are showing up at colleges increasingly unprepared to do the work, forcing colleges to teach what our kids should have learned in high school.
If we want a different result, we need to commit ourselves to big, dramatic changes. We need to "retool our schools." We must do more than apply a fresh coat of paint to an outmoded factory. Texas needs schools that prepare our kids for greatness not just for standardized tests.
My very first act as governor will be to appoint a blue-ribbon commission to figure out how to make our schools the best in the country. I don't pretend to have all the answers. But leadership requires that I put some ideas on the table. My main role as governor will be to articulate a common goal and a new vision for public education in Texas.
Here's where I think we should start: High-stakes testing has tied teachers' hands and turned them into little more than glorified test-prep monitors. We need to empower teachers to teach children how to learn in self-directed, group learning environments. We won't see progress in Texas until we end the tyranny of the TAKS test. Next, we must modernize our learning model. Schools need to focus on critical thinking, communication skills, teamwork, self-direction and other skills necessary for success in today's economy.
Finally, we need to engage parents. Too often, we forget that the most important teachers children will ever have are their parents. We need to work with parents to make sure their kids are showing up at school every day ready to learn.
We know what the stakes are. We know what the goal is. And we know that we're not going to get there if we continue along our current path. What Texas needs is a governor with the courage to lead. Only then can we begin to build the best public school system in the country. And only then will the Texas that's in our hearts become the Texas we see around us.
Bell is the 2006 Democratic gubernatorial nominee.
Seeing vouchers for what they are
by Steve Blow, Dallas Morning News. I generally agree with this piece except for his conclusion that quality public schools is one of our nation's greatest achievements. True for some, but not for all. Schools do a very good job of reproducing the inequalities that we see in society. -Angela
05:27 AM CDT on Wednesday, October 4, 2006
To be honest, I'm not all that enthused about writing this column. Seems we've trod this ground before.
But when the opposition is so relentless and the stakes are so high, it's foolish to let tedium distract.
So let's take a moment to counter the $400,000 advertising campaign now aimed at you – the one touting "school choice." And, of course, that's code for "private school vouchers."
Once again, this is the high-dollar handiwork of San Antonio vouchers proponent – no, that's too mild – let's say "vouchers zealot" James Leininger.
This fellow just won't take "no" for an answer. Over and over, the Texas Legislature has rejected his voucher schemes – taking the wiser course of raising standards for public schools, not draining funds from them.
In the last legislative elections, you recall, Dr. Leininger tried an end run by pouring campaign money toward the defeat of five key voucher opponents.
His $2.5 million investment succeeded in ousting two of them.
The strategy this time is a little class warfare. In radio ads and on billboards, he's trying to stir up the wrath of poor folks.
I spotted one of the billboards on the edge of downtown yesterday. It shows a nice, upstanding black family and says: "All families deserve a choice, Not just the rich. Give parents a choice, Give children a chance."
That's the wedge Dr. Leininger and his Texans For School Choice hope to use in getting a voucher pilot project approved when the Legislature convenes in January. The plan would take money from public schools and give it to low-income families for private-school tuition.
But let's look at three significant issues overlooked by this latest campaign:
No. 1. Parents already have a choice. Every school district of any size offers a variety of options – magnet schools, specialty career or arts schools, talented-and-gifted schools, etc. Add to that the 313 charter public schools across the state, which offer free, open enrollment to students, no matter where they live.
And on top of all that, by law, no student is trapped in a low-performing school. Districts are required to offer transfers from any school that failed to meet federal academic standards for two years.
No. 2. Parents have choices, but few exercise them. So why gamble on vouchers? Where is this competitive pressure that is supposed to create great schools?
Nationally, only 1 to 2 percent of eligible students transfer from low-performing schools. It was 1.1 percent last year in Dallas and less than 1 percent in Fort Worth.
The excellent, rigorous KIPP TRUTH Academy – a free charter school in South Dallas – began the school year with empty seats. Not enough parents applied to even fill the school.
No. 3. There is no magic to private schools. Voucher proponents love to deride "government schools" as hopeless and inept. They love to portray private schools as wholesome, sure-fire successes.
The truth is that, overall, there's very little difference. A huge federal study released this summer found that students of like economic backgrounds perform almost identically whether in public or private schools.
And those charter schools? They were supposed to be the magic solution, allowing private operation of tax-funded schools.
Results have been lackluster across the state. A few, like the KIPP schools, have been great. Most have been so-so. And far too many have been "academically unacceptable" – 13 percent of them last year, compared to just 4 percent of traditional public schools.
Listen, there is always room for improvement in our public schools. And we shouldn't be afraid of innovation.
But don't buy the baloney that all of public education is in disarray. Or that there are miracle fixes.
Quality public education has been one of our nation's greatest achievements. It's part of what has made us strong, united and truly a land of opportunity.
Let's build on that success, not dismantle it.
E-mail sblow@dallasnews.com
Online at: http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/localnews/columnists/sblow/stories/DN-blow_04met.ART.North.Edition1.3dd078a.html
05:27 AM CDT on Wednesday, October 4, 2006
To be honest, I'm not all that enthused about writing this column. Seems we've trod this ground before.
But when the opposition is so relentless and the stakes are so high, it's foolish to let tedium distract.
So let's take a moment to counter the $400,000 advertising campaign now aimed at you – the one touting "school choice." And, of course, that's code for "private school vouchers."
Once again, this is the high-dollar handiwork of San Antonio vouchers proponent – no, that's too mild – let's say "vouchers zealot" James Leininger.
This fellow just won't take "no" for an answer. Over and over, the Texas Legislature has rejected his voucher schemes – taking the wiser course of raising standards for public schools, not draining funds from them.
In the last legislative elections, you recall, Dr. Leininger tried an end run by pouring campaign money toward the defeat of five key voucher opponents.
His $2.5 million investment succeeded in ousting two of them.
The strategy this time is a little class warfare. In radio ads and on billboards, he's trying to stir up the wrath of poor folks.
I spotted one of the billboards on the edge of downtown yesterday. It shows a nice, upstanding black family and says: "All families deserve a choice, Not just the rich. Give parents a choice, Give children a chance."
That's the wedge Dr. Leininger and his Texans For School Choice hope to use in getting a voucher pilot project approved when the Legislature convenes in January. The plan would take money from public schools and give it to low-income families for private-school tuition.
But let's look at three significant issues overlooked by this latest campaign:
No. 1. Parents already have a choice. Every school district of any size offers a variety of options – magnet schools, specialty career or arts schools, talented-and-gifted schools, etc. Add to that the 313 charter public schools across the state, which offer free, open enrollment to students, no matter where they live.
And on top of all that, by law, no student is trapped in a low-performing school. Districts are required to offer transfers from any school that failed to meet federal academic standards for two years.
No. 2. Parents have choices, but few exercise them. So why gamble on vouchers? Where is this competitive pressure that is supposed to create great schools?
Nationally, only 1 to 2 percent of eligible students transfer from low-performing schools. It was 1.1 percent last year in Dallas and less than 1 percent in Fort Worth.
The excellent, rigorous KIPP TRUTH Academy – a free charter school in South Dallas – began the school year with empty seats. Not enough parents applied to even fill the school.
No. 3. There is no magic to private schools. Voucher proponents love to deride "government schools" as hopeless and inept. They love to portray private schools as wholesome, sure-fire successes.
The truth is that, overall, there's very little difference. A huge federal study released this summer found that students of like economic backgrounds perform almost identically whether in public or private schools.
And those charter schools? They were supposed to be the magic solution, allowing private operation of tax-funded schools.
Results have been lackluster across the state. A few, like the KIPP schools, have been great. Most have been so-so. And far too many have been "academically unacceptable" – 13 percent of them last year, compared to just 4 percent of traditional public schools.
Listen, there is always room for improvement in our public schools. And we shouldn't be afraid of innovation.
But don't buy the baloney that all of public education is in disarray. Or that there are miracle fixes.
Quality public education has been one of our nation's greatest achievements. It's part of what has made us strong, united and truly a land of opportunity.
Let's build on that success, not dismantle it.
E-mail sblow@dallasnews.com
Online at: http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/localnews/columnists/sblow/stories/DN-blow_04met.ART.North.Edition1.3dd078a.html
Charters on Rise; Quality Unequal
Charters on Rise; Quality Unequal
Officials Told to Consider Closing Low-Performing Facilities
By Theola Labbé
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, October 3, 2006; B05
The number of District charter schools has grown dramatically in the past 10 years, but the quality has been uneven, and officials should consider closing low-performing schools, according to findings in a study to be released today.
"The State of the District of Columbia Charter School Sector 2006: A Ten-Year Review," reports that charter schools are performing slightly better than traditional D.C. public schools on national standardized tests. However, only a small percentage of charter school students are scoring at proficient or advanced levels, the study says.
The study challenges the various city and federal entities responsible for District education to work together to improve student performance.
"Can the charter sector be satisfied to perform only somewhat better than a school district that has been struggling for decades and widely known to be lagging [behind] so many other large urban districts?" asks Gregg Vanourek, the independent researcher who completed the study.
"Charter schools, if they are to fulfill their promise, must do better -- much better," he says in the study.
Vanourek used feedback from a 40-question survey sent to charter schools; existing research; and interviews with District education leaders in charter and traditional public schools to deliver his assessment of the education landscape since Congress authorized charter schools in the District in 1996.
The study was sponsored by Fight for Children, a District-based nonprofit group that funds programs in traditional public and charter schools and also supports vouchers as an alternative for parents.
The study was based on the District's 51 charter schools, which had 17,419 students on 62 campuses in the 2005-2006 school year. About 25 percent of District students attend a charter school, the third-highest percentage in the nation, the study says.
The study was completed before the release of recent test scores on a standardized test that show D.C. students in traditional public schools doing slightly better than charter students. However, more than 80 percent of traditional and charter schools failed to reach yearly academic benchmarks.
Based on the falling enrollment of students in the public school system and the growing student enrollment in charter schools, the study concludes that should those trends continue, 51 percent of public school students in the District would be attending charter schools by 2014.
Charter schools are publicly funded and open to students citywide. Two groups are authorized in the District to open new charter schools and close schools that are not performing: The D.C. Public Charter School Board and the D.C. Board of Education.
Thomas A. Nida, chairman of the charter board, said the seven-member appointed panel has not been timid about revoking school charters. But he said the board is looking at other ways to intervene earlier at schools that are struggling.
For example, it has spoken with D.C. Council members about expanding the charter board's authority to remove individual members of a school's board of trustees and to allow high-performing schools to merge with struggling ones.
"You can't just simply wield the hammer of revocation at every misstep," Nida said.
The findings will be discussed at 3:30 p.m. today at a public forum at the Hilton Washington, 1919 Connecticut Ave. NW. Participants will include charter leaders and D.C. Schools Superintendent Clifford B. Janey.
The report also says that among the two chartering boards, there is no uniform means to collect data on high school graduation rates, another important measure of school success.
On the availability of facilities for charter schools, the report says charter schools have had limited access to empty or underused District public school buildings. But according to a Master Facilities Plan recently released by Janey, 21 charter schools are operating in current or former District school buildings, either through ownership or a lease.
© 2006 The Washington Post Company
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10/02/AR2006100201125.html
Officials Told to Consider Closing Low-Performing Facilities
By Theola Labbé
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, October 3, 2006; B05
The number of District charter schools has grown dramatically in the past 10 years, but the quality has been uneven, and officials should consider closing low-performing schools, according to findings in a study to be released today.
"The State of the District of Columbia Charter School Sector 2006: A Ten-Year Review," reports that charter schools are performing slightly better than traditional D.C. public schools on national standardized tests. However, only a small percentage of charter school students are scoring at proficient or advanced levels, the study says.
The study challenges the various city and federal entities responsible for District education to work together to improve student performance.
"Can the charter sector be satisfied to perform only somewhat better than a school district that has been struggling for decades and widely known to be lagging [behind] so many other large urban districts?" asks Gregg Vanourek, the independent researcher who completed the study.
"Charter schools, if they are to fulfill their promise, must do better -- much better," he says in the study.
Vanourek used feedback from a 40-question survey sent to charter schools; existing research; and interviews with District education leaders in charter and traditional public schools to deliver his assessment of the education landscape since Congress authorized charter schools in the District in 1996.
The study was sponsored by Fight for Children, a District-based nonprofit group that funds programs in traditional public and charter schools and also supports vouchers as an alternative for parents.
The study was based on the District's 51 charter schools, which had 17,419 students on 62 campuses in the 2005-2006 school year. About 25 percent of District students attend a charter school, the third-highest percentage in the nation, the study says.
The study was completed before the release of recent test scores on a standardized test that show D.C. students in traditional public schools doing slightly better than charter students. However, more than 80 percent of traditional and charter schools failed to reach yearly academic benchmarks.
Based on the falling enrollment of students in the public school system and the growing student enrollment in charter schools, the study concludes that should those trends continue, 51 percent of public school students in the District would be attending charter schools by 2014.
Charter schools are publicly funded and open to students citywide. Two groups are authorized in the District to open new charter schools and close schools that are not performing: The D.C. Public Charter School Board and the D.C. Board of Education.
Thomas A. Nida, chairman of the charter board, said the seven-member appointed panel has not been timid about revoking school charters. But he said the board is looking at other ways to intervene earlier at schools that are struggling.
For example, it has spoken with D.C. Council members about expanding the charter board's authority to remove individual members of a school's board of trustees and to allow high-performing schools to merge with struggling ones.
"You can't just simply wield the hammer of revocation at every misstep," Nida said.
The findings will be discussed at 3:30 p.m. today at a public forum at the Hilton Washington, 1919 Connecticut Ave. NW. Participants will include charter leaders and D.C. Schools Superintendent Clifford B. Janey.
The report also says that among the two chartering boards, there is no uniform means to collect data on high school graduation rates, another important measure of school success.
On the availability of facilities for charter schools, the report says charter schools have had limited access to empty or underused District public school buildings. But according to a Master Facilities Plan recently released by Janey, 21 charter schools are operating in current or former District school buildings, either through ownership or a lease.
© 2006 The Washington Post Company
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10/02/AR2006100201125.html
Tuesday, October 03, 2006
THE EDUCATION ISSUE
This article details the mismanagement of Reading First funds that come out of the DOE as part of NCLB. Corruption abounds. -Angela
THE EDUCATION ISSUE
By Michael Grunwald
Sunday, October 1, 2006; B01
President Bush's No Child Left Behind Act was premised on three revolutionary goals. The first was to focus on low-performing schools and students; hence, No Child Left Behind. The second was to beef up the federal role in education, enforcing national standards through testing. The third was to bring facts and evidence to the notoriously squishy world of education policy, promoting teaching methods backed by "scientifically based research" instead of instinct and fad. This was the least-publicized goal, but arguably the most vital; the phrase "scientifically based research" appeared more than 100 times in the landmark 2001 law.
The centerpiece of the new research-based approach was Reading First, a $1 billion-a-year effort to help low-income schools adopt strategies "that have been proven to prevent or remediate reading failure" through rigorous peer-reviewed studies. "Quite simply, Reading First focuses on what works, and will support proven methods of early reading instruction," the Education Department promised.
Five years later, an accumulating mound of evidence from reports, interviews and program documents suggests that Reading First has had little to do with science or rigor. Instead, the billions have gone to what is effectively a pilot project for untested programs with friends in high places.
Department officials and a small group of influential contractors have strong-armed states and local districts into adopting a small group of unproved textbooks and reading programs with almost no peer-reviewed research behind them. The commercial interests behind those textbooks and programs have paid royalties and consulting fees to the key Reading First contractors, who also served as consultants for states seeking grants and chaired the panels approving the grants. Both the architect of Reading First and former education secretary Roderick R. Paige have gone to work for the owner of one of those programs, who is also a top Bush fundraiser.
On Sept. 22, the department's inspector general released a report exposing some of Reading First's favoritism and mismanagement. The highlights were internal e-mails from then-program director Chris Doherty, vowing to deny funding to programs that weren't part of the department's in-crowd: "They are trying to crash our party and we need to beat the [expletive] out of them in front of all the other would-be party crashers who are standing on the front lawn waiting to see how we welcome these dirtbags."
Doherty has since resigned, and Education Secretary Margaret Spellings has pledged to review Reading First, emphasizing that the "individual mistakes" detailed in the report occurred before she became secretary. Still, Spellings expressed full confidence in the overall program: "Thanks to Reading First, struggling students are far more likely to get the help they need from teachers using scientifically based classroom reading instruction."
But the report barely scratched the surface of the incestuous process that dominated the formation of Reading First. The initiative didn't promote scientifically based reading instruction, the third goal of No Child Left Behind. And it's providing ammunition to critics of the second goal, strong national standards. The billion-dollar question is whether it may imperil the first goal: Will some children get left behind?
Bush administration officials frequently say that Reading First does not play favorites or intrude on local control, that states and districts are free to choose their own textbooks and programs -- as long as they're backed by sound science. But aggressive muckraking by the newsletter Title 1 Monitor and reading advocates at the Success for All Foundation have eviscerated those claims, and the inspector general's report officially contradicted them, accusing the department of breaking the law by promoting its pet programs and squelching others. In his internal e-mails, Doherty frequently admitted using "extralegal" tactics to force states and local districts to do the department's bidding. A report by Success for All documented how state applications for Reading First grants that promoted the preferred programs were the only ones approved.
In fact, the vast majority of the 4,800 Reading First schools have now adopted one of the five or six top-selling commercial textbooks, even though none of them has been evaluated in a peer-reviewed study against a control group. Most of the schools also use the same assessment program, the same instructional model, and one of three training programs developed by Reading First insiders -- with little research backing.
"They kept denying it, but everybody knew the department had a list," said Jady Johnson, director of the Reading Recovery Council of North America. "They're forcing schools to spend millions on ineffective programs."
To some extent, the controversy over Reading First reflects an older controversy over reading, pitting "phonics" advocates such as Doherty against "whole language" practitioners such as Johnson.
The administration believes in phonics, which emphasizes repetitive drills that teach children to sound out words. Johnson and other phonics skeptics try to teach the meaning and context of words as well. Reading First money has been steered toward states and local districts that go the phonics route, largely because the Reading First panels that oversaw state applications were stacked with department officials and other phonics fans. "Stack the panel?" Doherty joked in one e-mail. "I have never *heard* of such a thing . . .." When Reid Lyon, who designed Reading First, complained that a whole-language proponent had received an invitation to participate on an evaluation panel, a top department official replied: "We can't un-invite her. Just make sure she is on a panel with one of our barracuda types."
Doherty bragged to Lyon about pressuring Maine, Mississippi and New Jersey to reverse decisions to allow whole-language programs in their schools: "This is for your FYI, as I think this program-bashing is best done off or under the major radar screens." Massachusetts and North Dakota were also told to drop whole-language programs such as Rigby Literacy, and districts that didn't do so lost funding. "Ha, ha--Rigby as a CORE program?" Doherty wrote in one internal e-mail. "When pigs fly!"
Said Bruce Hunter, a lobbyist for the American Association of School Administrators: "It's been obvious all along that the administration knew exactly what it wanted."
But it wasn't just about phonics.
Success for All is the phonics program with the strongest record of scientifically proved results, backed by 31 studies rated "conclusive" by the American Institutes for Research. And it has been shut out of Reading First. The nonprofit Success for All Foundation has shed 60 percent of its staff since Reading First began; the program had been growing rapidly, but now 300 schools have dropped it. Betsy Ammons, a principal in North Carolina, watched Success for All improve reading scores at her school, but state officials made her switch to traditional textbooks to qualify for the new grants.
"You can't afford to turn down the federal money," Ammons said. "But why should we have to give up on something that works?"
The answer lies in the Reading First grant process, which was almost comically skewed. Michigan was the first state approved, after it simply proposed to adopt the five best-selling textbooks. But when Rhode Island officials proposed to require "high-quality reading programs that meet the test of having a scientific research base," they were rejected. Doherty told them to check out Michigan's list, so they cut and pasted it into their application, while suggesting that districts could still adopt other programs justified by research. They were rejected again. So they limited their program to the textbooks. Only then were they approved. Similarly, Oklahoma unsuccessfully proposed to require reading programs backed by three years of longitudinal data before it got the hint and proposed the Michigan list.
So instead of advocating scientifically based reading programs, Reading First has promoted programs with "key elements" endorsed by a national reading panel, which could describe almost any program. It may not be a coincidence that the initiative was essentially outsourced to a few experts with a dizzying array of apparent conflicts of interest.
For example, when the department needed reviewers to evaluate reading assessment programs, it contracted with a University of Oregon team led by Edward Kame'enui, Roland Good and Deborah Simmons. Good had developed an assessment called Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills (DIBELS), and Kame'enui, Good and Simmons had all served on the design team for Voyager Passport, a remedial program built around DIBELS. Ultimately, DIBELS was the only assessment used in Reading First, and Voyager was the most popular supplemental program.
Similarly, the department steered states to just three providers of professional development services: Kame'enui and Simmons at Oregon, Louisa C. Moats at the for-profit Sopris West, and Sharon Vaughn at the University of Texas at Austin. Vaughn was the other member of the Voyager Passport design team, and one of the four chairmen of the secretary's Reading Leadership Academy, which exerted enormous influence over Reading First; the others were Moats, Kame'enui and his Oregon colleague Douglas Carnine. States such as Alabama, North Carolina and Washington specified in their Reading First grants that every one of their reviewers for local proposals would have to be approved by one of those chairmen.
Kame'enui and Simmons also wrote the "Consumer's Guide" that most states agreed to use to evaluate Reading First programs, and ran one of Reading First's three "technical assistance centers" at Oregon. They co-wrote one Reading First textbook, and Kame'enui earned more than $100,000 last year from royalties on another, according to his financial disclosure when he moved to an Education Department job. In her 2004 book "In Defense of Our Children: When Politics, Profit, and Education Collide," Elaine Garan recalled color-coding the various financial connections running through Reading First; when it came to Kame'enui, she wrote, "I ran out of colors."
The department declined a request to interview Kame'enui, but Undersecretary Henry Johnson said the department takes conflicts of interest seriously, and will adopt all the inspector general's recommendations. "We're going to dig into this," he said.
But Johnson said states are ultimately responsible for making sure their programs are scientifically based, which is small comfort for applicants pressured into adopting programs they didn't want. "It's been very frustrating for those of us who really believe in evidence-based programs," said Richard Long, a lobbyist for the International Reading Association, which represents 90,000 reading teachers and specialists nationwide.
Then again, Long thinks spending $1 billion a year on reading is a great idea. And he thinks it's helping kids to read: "Have there been mistakes in implementation? Oh yeah. But teachers in Reading First schools believe progress is being made."
The bottom line, Johnson said, is that Reading First works. A department report found that teachers in Reading First schools spent 19 minutes more per day on reading than teachers in other schools, and were more likely to place struggling students in reading intervention programs. A new report by the nonpartisan Center on Education Policy suggested that Reading First is having a positive effect on state reading scores, although Johnson said much more needs to be done.
"Despite all the problems with Reading First, there's evidence that it's helping states," said Jack Jennings, the center's president.
Of course, $5 billion over five years ought to help states; the question is whether it's helping as much as it should. Without the kind of rigorous studies the law promised but the implementers failed to deliver, it's not clear.
But it is clear that Reading First has been a terrific boon for the textbook publishing industry, and for the department's favored programs. For example, the company that developed Voyager Passport was valued at about $5 million in a newspaper article before Reading First; founder Randy Best, whose Republican fundraising made him a Bush Pioneer, eventually sold it for $380 million. He then put Lyon and Paige on his payroll.
Local domination of education is an American tradition, and Bush took up a storied cause in challenging it; reformers since Horace Mann have promoted national education policy as a way to encourage common culture and equal opportunity. But local-control advocates have always warned that empowering heavy-handed federal bureaucrats would breed self-serving, one-size-fits-all solutions. Now, Reading First is making them look like prophets.
grunwaldmr@washpost.com
Michael Grunwald is a Washington Post staff writer.
© 2006 The Washington Post Company
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/09/29/AR2006092901333.html?referrer=emailarticle
THE EDUCATION ISSUE
By Michael Grunwald
Sunday, October 1, 2006; B01
President Bush's No Child Left Behind Act was premised on three revolutionary goals. The first was to focus on low-performing schools and students; hence, No Child Left Behind. The second was to beef up the federal role in education, enforcing national standards through testing. The third was to bring facts and evidence to the notoriously squishy world of education policy, promoting teaching methods backed by "scientifically based research" instead of instinct and fad. This was the least-publicized goal, but arguably the most vital; the phrase "scientifically based research" appeared more than 100 times in the landmark 2001 law.
The centerpiece of the new research-based approach was Reading First, a $1 billion-a-year effort to help low-income schools adopt strategies "that have been proven to prevent or remediate reading failure" through rigorous peer-reviewed studies. "Quite simply, Reading First focuses on what works, and will support proven methods of early reading instruction," the Education Department promised.
Five years later, an accumulating mound of evidence from reports, interviews and program documents suggests that Reading First has had little to do with science or rigor. Instead, the billions have gone to what is effectively a pilot project for untested programs with friends in high places.
Department officials and a small group of influential contractors have strong-armed states and local districts into adopting a small group of unproved textbooks and reading programs with almost no peer-reviewed research behind them. The commercial interests behind those textbooks and programs have paid royalties and consulting fees to the key Reading First contractors, who also served as consultants for states seeking grants and chaired the panels approving the grants. Both the architect of Reading First and former education secretary Roderick R. Paige have gone to work for the owner of one of those programs, who is also a top Bush fundraiser.
On Sept. 22, the department's inspector general released a report exposing some of Reading First's favoritism and mismanagement. The highlights were internal e-mails from then-program director Chris Doherty, vowing to deny funding to programs that weren't part of the department's in-crowd: "They are trying to crash our party and we need to beat the [expletive] out of them in front of all the other would-be party crashers who are standing on the front lawn waiting to see how we welcome these dirtbags."
Doherty has since resigned, and Education Secretary Margaret Spellings has pledged to review Reading First, emphasizing that the "individual mistakes" detailed in the report occurred before she became secretary. Still, Spellings expressed full confidence in the overall program: "Thanks to Reading First, struggling students are far more likely to get the help they need from teachers using scientifically based classroom reading instruction."
But the report barely scratched the surface of the incestuous process that dominated the formation of Reading First. The initiative didn't promote scientifically based reading instruction, the third goal of No Child Left Behind. And it's providing ammunition to critics of the second goal, strong national standards. The billion-dollar question is whether it may imperil the first goal: Will some children get left behind?
Bush administration officials frequently say that Reading First does not play favorites or intrude on local control, that states and districts are free to choose their own textbooks and programs -- as long as they're backed by sound science. But aggressive muckraking by the newsletter Title 1 Monitor and reading advocates at the Success for All Foundation have eviscerated those claims, and the inspector general's report officially contradicted them, accusing the department of breaking the law by promoting its pet programs and squelching others. In his internal e-mails, Doherty frequently admitted using "extralegal" tactics to force states and local districts to do the department's bidding. A report by Success for All documented how state applications for Reading First grants that promoted the preferred programs were the only ones approved.
In fact, the vast majority of the 4,800 Reading First schools have now adopted one of the five or six top-selling commercial textbooks, even though none of them has been evaluated in a peer-reviewed study against a control group. Most of the schools also use the same assessment program, the same instructional model, and one of three training programs developed by Reading First insiders -- with little research backing.
"They kept denying it, but everybody knew the department had a list," said Jady Johnson, director of the Reading Recovery Council of North America. "They're forcing schools to spend millions on ineffective programs."
To some extent, the controversy over Reading First reflects an older controversy over reading, pitting "phonics" advocates such as Doherty against "whole language" practitioners such as Johnson.
The administration believes in phonics, which emphasizes repetitive drills that teach children to sound out words. Johnson and other phonics skeptics try to teach the meaning and context of words as well. Reading First money has been steered toward states and local districts that go the phonics route, largely because the Reading First panels that oversaw state applications were stacked with department officials and other phonics fans. "Stack the panel?" Doherty joked in one e-mail. "I have never *heard* of such a thing . . .
Doherty bragged to Lyon about pressuring Maine, Mississippi and New Jersey to reverse decisions to allow whole-language programs in their schools: "This is for your FYI, as I think this program-bashing is best done off or under the major radar screens." Massachusetts and North Dakota were also told to drop whole-language programs such as Rigby Literacy, and districts that didn't do so lost funding. "Ha, ha--Rigby as a CORE program?" Doherty wrote in one internal e-mail. "When pigs fly!"
Said Bruce Hunter, a lobbyist for the American Association of School Administrators: "It's been obvious all along that the administration knew exactly what it wanted."
But it wasn't just about phonics.
Success for All is the phonics program with the strongest record of scientifically proved results, backed by 31 studies rated "conclusive" by the American Institutes for Research. And it has been shut out of Reading First. The nonprofit Success for All Foundation has shed 60 percent of its staff since Reading First began; the program had been growing rapidly, but now 300 schools have dropped it. Betsy Ammons, a principal in North Carolina, watched Success for All improve reading scores at her school, but state officials made her switch to traditional textbooks to qualify for the new grants.
"You can't afford to turn down the federal money," Ammons said. "But why should we have to give up on something that works?"
The answer lies in the Reading First grant process, which was almost comically skewed. Michigan was the first state approved, after it simply proposed to adopt the five best-selling textbooks. But when Rhode Island officials proposed to require "high-quality reading programs that meet the test of having a scientific research base," they were rejected. Doherty told them to check out Michigan's list, so they cut and pasted it into their application, while suggesting that districts could still adopt other programs justified by research. They were rejected again. So they limited their program to the textbooks. Only then were they approved. Similarly, Oklahoma unsuccessfully proposed to require reading programs backed by three years of longitudinal data before it got the hint and proposed the Michigan list.
So instead of advocating scientifically based reading programs, Reading First has promoted programs with "key elements" endorsed by a national reading panel, which could describe almost any program. It may not be a coincidence that the initiative was essentially outsourced to a few experts with a dizzying array of apparent conflicts of interest.
For example, when the department needed reviewers to evaluate reading assessment programs, it contracted with a University of Oregon team led by Edward Kame'enui, Roland Good and Deborah Simmons. Good had developed an assessment called Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills (DIBELS), and Kame'enui, Good and Simmons had all served on the design team for Voyager Passport, a remedial program built around DIBELS. Ultimately, DIBELS was the only assessment used in Reading First, and Voyager was the most popular supplemental program.
Similarly, the department steered states to just three providers of professional development services: Kame'enui and Simmons at Oregon, Louisa C. Moats at the for-profit Sopris West, and Sharon Vaughn at the University of Texas at Austin. Vaughn was the other member of the Voyager Passport design team, and one of the four chairmen of the secretary's Reading Leadership Academy, which exerted enormous influence over Reading First; the others were Moats, Kame'enui and his Oregon colleague Douglas Carnine. States such as Alabama, North Carolina and Washington specified in their Reading First grants that every one of their reviewers for local proposals would have to be approved by one of those chairmen.
Kame'enui and Simmons also wrote the "Consumer's Guide" that most states agreed to use to evaluate Reading First programs, and ran one of Reading First's three "technical assistance centers" at Oregon. They co-wrote one Reading First textbook, and Kame'enui earned more than $100,000 last year from royalties on another, according to his financial disclosure when he moved to an Education Department job. In her 2004 book "In Defense of Our Children: When Politics, Profit, and Education Collide," Elaine Garan recalled color-coding the various financial connections running through Reading First; when it came to Kame'enui, she wrote, "I ran out of colors."
The department declined a request to interview Kame'enui, but Undersecretary Henry Johnson said the department takes conflicts of interest seriously, and will adopt all the inspector general's recommendations. "We're going to dig into this," he said.
But Johnson said states are ultimately responsible for making sure their programs are scientifically based, which is small comfort for applicants pressured into adopting programs they didn't want. "It's been very frustrating for those of us who really believe in evidence-based programs," said Richard Long, a lobbyist for the International Reading Association, which represents 90,000 reading teachers and specialists nationwide.
Then again, Long thinks spending $1 billion a year on reading is a great idea. And he thinks it's helping kids to read: "Have there been mistakes in implementation? Oh yeah. But teachers in Reading First schools believe progress is being made."
The bottom line, Johnson said, is that Reading First works. A department report found that teachers in Reading First schools spent 19 minutes more per day on reading than teachers in other schools, and were more likely to place struggling students in reading intervention programs. A new report by the nonpartisan Center on Education Policy suggested that Reading First is having a positive effect on state reading scores, although Johnson said much more needs to be done.
"Despite all the problems with Reading First, there's evidence that it's helping states," said Jack Jennings, the center's president.
Of course, $5 billion over five years ought to help states; the question is whether it's helping as much as it should. Without the kind of rigorous studies the law promised but the implementers failed to deliver, it's not clear.
But it is clear that Reading First has been a terrific boon for the textbook publishing industry, and for the department's favored programs. For example, the company that developed Voyager Passport was valued at about $5 million in a newspaper article before Reading First; founder Randy Best, whose Republican fundraising made him a Bush Pioneer, eventually sold it for $380 million. He then put Lyon and Paige on his payroll.
Local domination of education is an American tradition, and Bush took up a storied cause in challenging it; reformers since Horace Mann have promoted national education policy as a way to encourage common culture and equal opportunity. But local-control advocates have always warned that empowering heavy-handed federal bureaucrats would breed self-serving, one-size-fits-all solutions. Now, Reading First is making them look like prophets.
grunwaldmr@washpost.com
Michael Grunwald is a Washington Post staff writer.
© 2006 The Washington Post Company
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/09/29/AR2006092901333.html?referrer=emailarticle
Monday, October 02, 2006
Student Context, Student Attitudes and Behavior, and Academic Achievement
This study underscores the importance of caring teachers who can help boost students' academic self confidence. -Click here to get a PDF file of this report.
-Angela
January 2006
Student Context, Student Attitudes and Behavior, and Academic Achievement
An Exploratory Analysis
Theresa M. Akey
What are the key factors that promote academic success among students whose demographic characteristics and school circumstances place them at high risk of failure? This paper provides highly suggestive, although not conclusive, answers to this question. Through path analysis modeling techniques applied to data collected in MDRC’s evaluation of the First Things First school reform initiative in a large urban school district, the paper explores the influence of two psychological variables — student engagement and perceived academic competence — on achievement in reading and mathematics.
This study’s findings may have important implications for understanding how students learn in the classroom. Consonant with previous research, they indicate that both engagement in school and students’ perception of their own academic competence influence achievement in mathematics for high school students. But the study departs from earlier work in suggesting that perceived academic competence may be more influential than engagement in boosting achievement in both mathematics and reading. Indeed, analyses indicate that perceived competence had a stronger influence on subsequent engagement than engagement had on students’ perceptions of themselves as competent learners.
The findings also make clear that supportive teachers and clear and high expectations about behavior are key to the development of both student engagement and perceived competence. This study suggests that the earlier schools and teachers begin to build students’ confidence in their ability to do well, the better off students will be. Because students’ perceptions of their capacity for success are key to their engagement in school and learning, schools should be designed to enhance students’ feelings of accomplishment. Teachers whom students see as supportive and who set clear expectations about behavior help create an atmosphere in which students feel in control and confident about their ability to succeed in future educational endeavors.
-Angela
January 2006
Student Context, Student Attitudes and Behavior, and Academic Achievement
An Exploratory Analysis
Theresa M. Akey
What are the key factors that promote academic success among students whose demographic characteristics and school circumstances place them at high risk of failure? This paper provides highly suggestive, although not conclusive, answers to this question. Through path analysis modeling techniques applied to data collected in MDRC’s evaluation of the First Things First school reform initiative in a large urban school district, the paper explores the influence of two psychological variables — student engagement and perceived academic competence — on achievement in reading and mathematics.
This study’s findings may have important implications for understanding how students learn in the classroom. Consonant with previous research, they indicate that both engagement in school and students’ perception of their own academic competence influence achievement in mathematics for high school students. But the study departs from earlier work in suggesting that perceived academic competence may be more influential than engagement in boosting achievement in both mathematics and reading. Indeed, analyses indicate that perceived competence had a stronger influence on subsequent engagement than engagement had on students’ perceptions of themselves as competent learners.
The findings also make clear that supportive teachers and clear and high expectations about behavior are key to the development of both student engagement and perceived competence. This study suggests that the earlier schools and teachers begin to build students’ confidence in their ability to do well, the better off students will be. Because students’ perceptions of their capacity for success are key to their engagement in school and learning, schools should be designed to enhance students’ feelings of accomplishment. Teachers whom students see as supportive and who set clear expectations about behavior help create an atmosphere in which students feel in control and confident about their ability to succeed in future educational endeavors.
Record number of Hispanic and African American students enrolled for 2006 fall semester at UT
Good news about racial & ethnic diversity at The University of Texas at Austin. -Angela
Record number of Hispanic and African American students
enrolled for 2006 fall semester
September 21, 2006
AUSTIN, Texas—A record high number of Hispanic and African American students are enrolled and attending classes at The University of Texas at Austin for the 2006 fall semester, according to a preliminary report by the university’s Office of Institutional Research.
Total enrollment of all students of all ethnic groups this fall is 49,738, slightly higher than the 49,696 recorded for the 2005 fall semester. This total, based on preliminary figures, includes 37,069 undergraduate, 11,361 graduate and 1,427 law students, said Maryann Ruddock, associate vice president and director of institutional research.
Included in the 2006 total fall enrollment are the highest numbers ever recorded for Hispanic and African American student populations on campus—7,453 Hispanics (15 percent of the student population) and 1,939 African Americans (3.9 percent of the student population). The previous record high enrollments for these two ethnic groups were 7,013 Hispanics in 2005 and 1,911 African Americans in 1996.
The 15 percent Hispanic figure for the 2006 fall semester reflects a 6.3 percent increase over fall 2005, when 7,013 Hispanics accounted for 14.1 percent of the student population.
The preliminary fall 2006 figures show a 5.2 percent increase in African American students over fall 2005, when 1,843 African Americans accounted for 3.7 percent of the student population.
White students remain a majority on campus, accounting for 56.6 percent of the student population. The 28,132 white student enrollment total for fall 2006 reflects a 1.4 percent decrease from fall 2005, when 28,537 were enrolled.
The 7,181 Asian American students enrolled this fall semester represent 14.4 percent of the student population, a 0.8 percent increase over fall 2005.
The enrollment statistics for other ethnic groups include:
The 231 American Indians enrolled represent 0.5 percent of the student population, a 6 percent increase.
There are 4,432 foreign students representing 8.9 percent of the student population, a 0.2 percent increase.
The preliminary report reflects a planned increase in the number of first-time freshmen (up by 509 to 7,421). This figure includes freshmen who entered in the summer and continued this fall, as well as new entrants. In the entering class from Texas high schools, about 71 percent were admitted under House Bill 588, better known as the Top 10 Percent Law. This is an increase from the 69 percent in fall 2005.
First-time freshman enrollment by ethnicity counting fall/summer entrants includes 54.3 percent white, 0.5 percent American Indian, 5.2 percent African American, 17.9 percent Asian American, 18.7 percent Hispanic and 3.4 percent foreign.
Total enrollment in the School of Law decreased by 119 students (8.3 percent), and new law school enrollment decreased by 69 students (12 percent).
Trends reflected by the preliminary report include undergraduate enrollment increases for schools and colleges, including: Fine Arts (1.4 percent), the new Jackson School of Geosciences (19.5 percent), Natural Sciences (3.9 percent), Nursing (6.1 percent) and Social Work (1.8 percent). Enrollment in all other schools and colleges decreased or remained stable.
Graduate enrollment increased for Communication (1.4 percent), Engineering (1.9 percent), Fine Arts (3.2 percent), Geosciences (16.7 percent), Intercollegial Programs (5.0 percent), Nursing (8.5 percent), Pharmacy (4.0 percent), Public Affairs (5.4 percent) and Social Work (3.8 percent). Graduate enrollment in all other schools and colleges decreased or remained stable.
Ruddock said these data are preliminary 12th class day numbers issued by the Office of Institutional Research. Final figures for the 12th class day will be available in October, but usually there is little variation from preliminary figures.
For more information contact: Robert D. Meckel, Office of Public Affairs, 512-475-7847.
Updated 2006 September 21
Comments to utopa@www.utexas.edu
Record number of Hispanic and African American students
enrolled for 2006 fall semester
September 21, 2006
AUSTIN, Texas—A record high number of Hispanic and African American students are enrolled and attending classes at The University of Texas at Austin for the 2006 fall semester, according to a preliminary report by the university’s Office of Institutional Research.
Total enrollment of all students of all ethnic groups this fall is 49,738, slightly higher than the 49,696 recorded for the 2005 fall semester. This total, based on preliminary figures, includes 37,069 undergraduate, 11,361 graduate and 1,427 law students, said Maryann Ruddock, associate vice president and director of institutional research.
Included in the 2006 total fall enrollment are the highest numbers ever recorded for Hispanic and African American student populations on campus—7,453 Hispanics (15 percent of the student population) and 1,939 African Americans (3.9 percent of the student population). The previous record high enrollments for these two ethnic groups were 7,013 Hispanics in 2005 and 1,911 African Americans in 1996.
The 15 percent Hispanic figure for the 2006 fall semester reflects a 6.3 percent increase over fall 2005, when 7,013 Hispanics accounted for 14.1 percent of the student population.
The preliminary fall 2006 figures show a 5.2 percent increase in African American students over fall 2005, when 1,843 African Americans accounted for 3.7 percent of the student population.
White students remain a majority on campus, accounting for 56.6 percent of the student population. The 28,132 white student enrollment total for fall 2006 reflects a 1.4 percent decrease from fall 2005, when 28,537 were enrolled.
The 7,181 Asian American students enrolled this fall semester represent 14.4 percent of the student population, a 0.8 percent increase over fall 2005.
The enrollment statistics for other ethnic groups include:
The 231 American Indians enrolled represent 0.5 percent of the student population, a 6 percent increase.
There are 4,432 foreign students representing 8.9 percent of the student population, a 0.2 percent increase.
The preliminary report reflects a planned increase in the number of first-time freshmen (up by 509 to 7,421). This figure includes freshmen who entered in the summer and continued this fall, as well as new entrants. In the entering class from Texas high schools, about 71 percent were admitted under House Bill 588, better known as the Top 10 Percent Law. This is an increase from the 69 percent in fall 2005.
First-time freshman enrollment by ethnicity counting fall/summer entrants includes 54.3 percent white, 0.5 percent American Indian, 5.2 percent African American, 17.9 percent Asian American, 18.7 percent Hispanic and 3.4 percent foreign.
Total enrollment in the School of Law decreased by 119 students (8.3 percent), and new law school enrollment decreased by 69 students (12 percent).
Trends reflected by the preliminary report include undergraduate enrollment increases for schools and colleges, including: Fine Arts (1.4 percent), the new Jackson School of Geosciences (19.5 percent), Natural Sciences (3.9 percent), Nursing (6.1 percent) and Social Work (1.8 percent). Enrollment in all other schools and colleges decreased or remained stable.
Graduate enrollment increased for Communication (1.4 percent), Engineering (1.9 percent), Fine Arts (3.2 percent), Geosciences (16.7 percent), Intercollegial Programs (5.0 percent), Nursing (8.5 percent), Pharmacy (4.0 percent), Public Affairs (5.4 percent) and Social Work (3.8 percent). Graduate enrollment in all other schools and colleges decreased or remained stable.
Ruddock said these data are preliminary 12th class day numbers issued by the Office of Institutional Research. Final figures for the 12th class day will be available in October, but usually there is little variation from preliminary figures.
For more information contact: Robert D. Meckel, Office of Public Affairs, 512-475-7847.
Updated 2006 September 21
Comments to utopa@www.utexas.edu
Teacher-Pay Incentives Popular But Unproven
September 27, 2006
Teacher-Pay Incentives Popular But Unproven
By Linda Jacobson, EDWEEK.ORG
The idea, in various forms, has become a popular refrain among politicians.
“I ask you to support my proposal to offer more-competitive salaries to teachers across the state,” Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco, a Democrat, implored lawmakers in March.
“Combat pay” is the term Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger gave his plan to attract well-qualified teachers to California’s toughest schools. While that phrase offended some educators, and the plan was eventually dropped last year, his meaning was clear: Reward teachers with bonuses or other financial advantages if they agree to teach in schools that other teachers want to leave.
But as pressure grows to use research-based practices to improve schools, it’s almost a wonder policymakers are so quick to join the trend. States have little evidence that using financial incentives to entice teachers to certain jobs actually reduces turnover or raises student achievement.
Nonetheless, a 2005 review by the Education Commission of the States found that at least 30 states offer such incentives—which can include housing benefits, loan forgiveness, and scholarships, as well as yearly bonuses and salary increases—to address teacher shortages in certain subjects and geographical areas. And 17 states offer incentives specifically for teachers who work in hard-to-staff schools.
Looking for Data
Tricia Coulter, the director of the Teaching Quality and Leadership Institute at the Denver-based ECS, said that policy analysts and others following such initiatives get frustrated when lawmakers approve incentives for teachers but don’t require any evaluation or data collection to determine the effectiveness of the policies.
Attracting Teachers
Here are some examples of incentives that states offer to lure teachers to hard-to-staff schools.
• Arkansas: Gives $4,000 bonuses to teachers—not currently employed by the district—who sign a contract to work in a high-priority district, and $3,000 each of the next two years if they stay employed in that district.
• California: Teachers who are certified by the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards are eligible to receive a $20,000 bonus over four years if they agree to teach in a high-priority school for at least four years.
• Hawaii: Offers $3,000 per year, for up to three years, for licensed special education or general education teachers who agree to work in hard-to-fill locations.
• Illinois: The state’s Golden Apple Scholar program offers $5,000 a year for four years of college for minority and low-income high school seniors who agree to teach in a poor or low-performing school for five years after graduating from college.
• Mississippi: Licensed teachers who buy a home and move into one of the state’s geographical critical-shortage areas can receive a home loan of up to $6,000
SOURCE: Education Commission of the States
For example, when Julia E. Koppich, a San Francisco-based author and consultant specializing in teacher issues, began investigating whether California’s $20,000 incentive to draw teachers with National Board for Professional Teaching Standards certification to high-needs schools was paying off, she found that the state wasn’t keeping data that would enable her to find out.
“That was annoying,” she said.
Margaret Gaston, the executive director of the Center for the Future of Teaching and Learning, located in Santa Cruz, Calif., had similar questions when she wanted to know whether a slew of incentives instituted during former Gov. Gray Davis’ administration—such as college loans and targeted teacher-training programs focusing on high-poverty schools—helped in the recruitment and retention of teachers.
Ms. Gaston said that those programs probably contributed to a significant drop in the number of “underprepared” teachers in the state—from about 42,000 in 2002 to fewer than 20,000 last year. But the data to prove her hypothesis aren’t available.
The center’s 2003 report on the state’s workforce said, “Given the scant reporting requirement of some of these programs, it is difficult to ascertain exactly how much of the money was spent.”
Other researchers have also encountered barriers when trying to study teacher-incentive policies.
“Many of the most ambitious and interesting reforms have collapsed within a few years under pressure from political opposition or fiscal constraints, and attempts to study the few reforms that stayed afloat have yielded little fruit to date,” Steven Glazerman, a researcher at Mathematica Policy Research’s office in Washington, wrote in a paper earlier this year.
Promising Results
States, however, are likely to begin taking a closer look at whether their efforts to draw teachers to hard-to-staff schools and subjects are working. A provision of the federal No Child Left Behind Act requires that “highly qualified” teachers be equally distributed in high-poverty and high-minority schools, not concentrated in those serving predominantly white and better-off students. States had to detail those efforts this summer in “equity plans” submitted to the U.S. Department of Education. Some observers suggest data collection could begin to improve as a result.
“Now states are saying, ‘If we’re going to put in place an equity plan, then we better start doing a better job of monitoring whether some of these strategies are effective,’ ” said Sabrina W.M. Laine, the director of the Washington-based National Comprehensive Center for Teacher Quality, which was launched last year with funding from the U.S. Department of Education and is a national resource center on such policies.
For example, Virginia is documenting the effectiveness of a pilot incentive program launched in 2004 that awarded bonuses to highly qualified teachers who went to work in Caroline County and the city of Franklin. Four schools are involved—a middle school and a high school in each district. Under the plan, the highly qualified teachers each received a one-time $15,000 “relocation” bonus, and the highly qualified teachers already in those schools each received a $3,000 retention bonus.
After the first year, 2004-05, teacher attrition dropped in both sites, but test scores increased only in the high schools. Preliminary data from last school year, though, seem to show even more improvement in all schools and in both areas, said Connie Fisher, a special-projects coordinator for teacher quality at the Virginia Department of Education.
“The legislature is looking at it, and is looking for results,” she said.
She added that the districts are drawing more applicants than before, and those applicants are more qualified. “So they have a better pool,” Ms. Fisher said.
Mississippi has also closely followed its 8-year-old effort to draw new teachers into 47 “critical shortage” geographic areas—primarily in the Mississippi Delta region—through a combination of college scholarships and housing assistance programs.
According to recent data from the state’s student- and teacher-information system, of the 332 teachers who completed the state’s Critical Needs Teacher Scholarship Program since it began in 1998, 254 are still teaching. And of those, 165—or 65 percent—are still teaching in a critical shortage area.
“That’s a powerful retention percentage,” said Wesley Williams II, the director of the Mississippi education department’s Teacher Center, which focuses on recruiting and retaining teachers.
Models to Follow
California may soon have a database similar to Mississippi’s. A bill waiting to be signed by Gov. Schwarzenegger would create a teacher-workforce data system, which could be used to determine which teachers have taken advantage of certain incentives, where teachers are moving, and whether they are staying in those schools. The fiscal 2007 budget includes nearly $1 million for the project.
“It would make our job so much easier,” said Ms. Gaston of the Center for the Future of Teaching and Learning, which recommended such a system.
Whatever the evidence, or lack of it, on whether financial and other incentives attract talented teachers to challenging schools, the officials implementing such programs concede that money alone won’t keep teachers in those jobs.
“Many policymakers hear ‘financial incentives’ and think a lump sum of money can attract a lot of people,” said Ben Schaefer, a program manager at the Washington-based National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future, a nonprofit organization that promotes high-quality teaching. “But it might not retain them.”
One model that should not be followed, most experts say, comes from Massachusetts, which in 1999 began offering $20,000 bonuses to attract new teachers to the state. But after one year, one-fifth of the teachers who took the bonuses left the classroom, and many of the others found different teaching positions in suburban schools.
Mr. Schaefer says that experience suggests that states need to target their incentive programs to specific needs.
Other experts say incentives such as mentoring, professional development, strong leadership, and even ongoing bonuses for raising achievement are also needed to keep teachers in hard-to-staff schools and fields.
One model being used in 13 states is the Teacher Advancement Program, which was launched in 1999 by the Milken Family Foundation. Now administered by the Santa Monica, Calif.-based National Institute for Excellence in Teaching, the program has four primary elements: multiple career paths for teachers, ongoing school-based professional development, evaluations tied to student performance, and performance-based compensation. The program can also include incentives for teachers who transfer into low-performing schools.
“Signing bonuses,” says Lewis C. Solmon, the president of the institute, won’t be enough to improve student learning if they aren’t coupled with pay that is based on whether teachers are making a difference in the classroom.
“You don’t want just any teacher to come,” he said, “you want effective teachers.”
Vol. 26, Issue 05, Pages 1,20
“Report Faults Ed. Dept., States on Teacher-Quality Rule,” July 12, 2006.
“Commentary: Teacher Pay for Performance: Another Fad or a Sound and Lasting Policy?,” April 5, 2006.
“Commentary: Aligning the System: The Case for Linking Teacher Pay to Student Learning,” March 29, 2006.
“Groups Tackle Teacher Quality in Needy Schools,” February 16, 2005.
“Mass. Bonus Program To Favor Ed. Schools,” December 4, 2002.
“Delta Blues,” May 26, 1999.
Read a transcript of our exclusive online chat, Education Week/ERS Report on Salary and Wages.
For more stories on this topic see Teaching and Learning.
For background, previous stories, and Web links, read Teacher Quality.
View resources and get information on how states are handling teacher compensation from the Education Commission of the States. Also, read the November 2005 report, "Eight Questions on Teacher Recruitment and Retention: What Does the Research Say?"
Learn more about the four elements of the Teacher Advancement Program, which is administered by the National Institute for Excellence in Teaching.
The National Comprehensive Center for Teacher Quality offers resources on recruitment and retention, including databases on state policies and regional and national recruitment and retention initiatives.
© 2006 Editorial Projects in Education
Teacher-Pay Incentives Popular But Unproven
By Linda Jacobson, EDWEEK.ORG
The idea, in various forms, has become a popular refrain among politicians.
“I ask you to support my proposal to offer more-competitive salaries to teachers across the state,” Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco, a Democrat, implored lawmakers in March.
“Combat pay” is the term Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger gave his plan to attract well-qualified teachers to California’s toughest schools. While that phrase offended some educators, and the plan was eventually dropped last year, his meaning was clear: Reward teachers with bonuses or other financial advantages if they agree to teach in schools that other teachers want to leave.
But as pressure grows to use research-based practices to improve schools, it’s almost a wonder policymakers are so quick to join the trend. States have little evidence that using financial incentives to entice teachers to certain jobs actually reduces turnover or raises student achievement.
Nonetheless, a 2005 review by the Education Commission of the States found that at least 30 states offer such incentives—which can include housing benefits, loan forgiveness, and scholarships, as well as yearly bonuses and salary increases—to address teacher shortages in certain subjects and geographical areas. And 17 states offer incentives specifically for teachers who work in hard-to-staff schools.
Looking for Data
Tricia Coulter, the director of the Teaching Quality and Leadership Institute at the Denver-based ECS, said that policy analysts and others following such initiatives get frustrated when lawmakers approve incentives for teachers but don’t require any evaluation or data collection to determine the effectiveness of the policies.
Attracting Teachers
Here are some examples of incentives that states offer to lure teachers to hard-to-staff schools.
• Arkansas: Gives $4,000 bonuses to teachers—not currently employed by the district—who sign a contract to work in a high-priority district, and $3,000 each of the next two years if they stay employed in that district.
• California: Teachers who are certified by the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards are eligible to receive a $20,000 bonus over four years if they agree to teach in a high-priority school for at least four years.
• Hawaii: Offers $3,000 per year, for up to three years, for licensed special education or general education teachers who agree to work in hard-to-fill locations.
• Illinois: The state’s Golden Apple Scholar program offers $5,000 a year for four years of college for minority and low-income high school seniors who agree to teach in a poor or low-performing school for five years after graduating from college.
• Mississippi: Licensed teachers who buy a home and move into one of the state’s geographical critical-shortage areas can receive a home loan of up to $6,000
SOURCE: Education Commission of the States
For example, when Julia E. Koppich, a San Francisco-based author and consultant specializing in teacher issues, began investigating whether California’s $20,000 incentive to draw teachers with National Board for Professional Teaching Standards certification to high-needs schools was paying off, she found that the state wasn’t keeping data that would enable her to find out.
“That was annoying,” she said.
Margaret Gaston, the executive director of the Center for the Future of Teaching and Learning, located in Santa Cruz, Calif., had similar questions when she wanted to know whether a slew of incentives instituted during former Gov. Gray Davis’ administration—such as college loans and targeted teacher-training programs focusing on high-poverty schools—helped in the recruitment and retention of teachers.
Ms. Gaston said that those programs probably contributed to a significant drop in the number of “underprepared” teachers in the state—from about 42,000 in 2002 to fewer than 20,000 last year. But the data to prove her hypothesis aren’t available.
The center’s 2003 report on the state’s workforce said, “Given the scant reporting requirement of some of these programs, it is difficult to ascertain exactly how much of the money was spent.”
Other researchers have also encountered barriers when trying to study teacher-incentive policies.
“Many of the most ambitious and interesting reforms have collapsed within a few years under pressure from political opposition or fiscal constraints, and attempts to study the few reforms that stayed afloat have yielded little fruit to date,” Steven Glazerman, a researcher at Mathematica Policy Research’s office in Washington, wrote in a paper earlier this year.
Promising Results
States, however, are likely to begin taking a closer look at whether their efforts to draw teachers to hard-to-staff schools and subjects are working. A provision of the federal No Child Left Behind Act requires that “highly qualified” teachers be equally distributed in high-poverty and high-minority schools, not concentrated in those serving predominantly white and better-off students. States had to detail those efforts this summer in “equity plans” submitted to the U.S. Department of Education. Some observers suggest data collection could begin to improve as a result.
“Now states are saying, ‘If we’re going to put in place an equity plan, then we better start doing a better job of monitoring whether some of these strategies are effective,’ ” said Sabrina W.M. Laine, the director of the Washington-based National Comprehensive Center for Teacher Quality, which was launched last year with funding from the U.S. Department of Education and is a national resource center on such policies.
For example, Virginia is documenting the effectiveness of a pilot incentive program launched in 2004 that awarded bonuses to highly qualified teachers who went to work in Caroline County and the city of Franklin. Four schools are involved—a middle school and a high school in each district. Under the plan, the highly qualified teachers each received a one-time $15,000 “relocation” bonus, and the highly qualified teachers already in those schools each received a $3,000 retention bonus.
After the first year, 2004-05, teacher attrition dropped in both sites, but test scores increased only in the high schools. Preliminary data from last school year, though, seem to show even more improvement in all schools and in both areas, said Connie Fisher, a special-projects coordinator for teacher quality at the Virginia Department of Education.
“The legislature is looking at it, and is looking for results,” she said.
She added that the districts are drawing more applicants than before, and those applicants are more qualified. “So they have a better pool,” Ms. Fisher said.
Mississippi has also closely followed its 8-year-old effort to draw new teachers into 47 “critical shortage” geographic areas—primarily in the Mississippi Delta region—through a combination of college scholarships and housing assistance programs.
According to recent data from the state’s student- and teacher-information system, of the 332 teachers who completed the state’s Critical Needs Teacher Scholarship Program since it began in 1998, 254 are still teaching. And of those, 165—or 65 percent—are still teaching in a critical shortage area.
“That’s a powerful retention percentage,” said Wesley Williams II, the director of the Mississippi education department’s Teacher Center, which focuses on recruiting and retaining teachers.
Models to Follow
California may soon have a database similar to Mississippi’s. A bill waiting to be signed by Gov. Schwarzenegger would create a teacher-workforce data system, which could be used to determine which teachers have taken advantage of certain incentives, where teachers are moving, and whether they are staying in those schools. The fiscal 2007 budget includes nearly $1 million for the project.
“It would make our job so much easier,” said Ms. Gaston of the Center for the Future of Teaching and Learning, which recommended such a system.
Whatever the evidence, or lack of it, on whether financial and other incentives attract talented teachers to challenging schools, the officials implementing such programs concede that money alone won’t keep teachers in those jobs.
“Many policymakers hear ‘financial incentives’ and think a lump sum of money can attract a lot of people,” said Ben Schaefer, a program manager at the Washington-based National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future, a nonprofit organization that promotes high-quality teaching. “But it might not retain them.”
One model that should not be followed, most experts say, comes from Massachusetts, which in 1999 began offering $20,000 bonuses to attract new teachers to the state. But after one year, one-fifth of the teachers who took the bonuses left the classroom, and many of the others found different teaching positions in suburban schools.
Mr. Schaefer says that experience suggests that states need to target their incentive programs to specific needs.
Other experts say incentives such as mentoring, professional development, strong leadership, and even ongoing bonuses for raising achievement are also needed to keep teachers in hard-to-staff schools and fields.
One model being used in 13 states is the Teacher Advancement Program, which was launched in 1999 by the Milken Family Foundation. Now administered by the Santa Monica, Calif.-based National Institute for Excellence in Teaching, the program has four primary elements: multiple career paths for teachers, ongoing school-based professional development, evaluations tied to student performance, and performance-based compensation. The program can also include incentives for teachers who transfer into low-performing schools.
“Signing bonuses,” says Lewis C. Solmon, the president of the institute, won’t be enough to improve student learning if they aren’t coupled with pay that is based on whether teachers are making a difference in the classroom.
“You don’t want just any teacher to come,” he said, “you want effective teachers.”
Vol. 26, Issue 05, Pages 1,20
“Report Faults Ed. Dept., States on Teacher-Quality Rule,” July 12, 2006.
“Commentary: Teacher Pay for Performance: Another Fad or a Sound and Lasting Policy?,” April 5, 2006.
“Commentary: Aligning the System: The Case for Linking Teacher Pay to Student Learning,” March 29, 2006.
“Groups Tackle Teacher Quality in Needy Schools,” February 16, 2005.
“Mass. Bonus Program To Favor Ed. Schools,” December 4, 2002.
“Delta Blues,” May 26, 1999.
Read a transcript of our exclusive online chat, Education Week/ERS Report on Salary and Wages.
For more stories on this topic see Teaching and Learning.
For background, previous stories, and Web links, read Teacher Quality.
View resources and get information on how states are handling teacher compensation from the Education Commission of the States. Also, read the November 2005 report, "Eight Questions on Teacher Recruitment and Retention: What Does the Research Say?"
Learn more about the four elements of the Teacher Advancement Program, which is administered by the National Institute for Excellence in Teaching.
The National Comprehensive Center for Teacher Quality offers resources on recruitment and retention, including databases on state policies and regional and national recruitment and retention initiatives.
© 2006 Editorial Projects in Education
Political Shift Could Temper NCLB Resolve
Published: September 27, 2006
Political Shift Could Temper NCLB Resolve
If Democrats Take House or Senate, Uncertainty Ahead
By Alyson Klein
The two top Democratic lawmakers on education policy have signaled that if their party regains control of one or both houses of Congress in November, they will seek to retain the core accountability features of the federal No Child Left Behind Act.
Sen. Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts and Rep. George Miller of California would likely support more funding for the law, while seeking to keep its requirements that schools test students annually and be held accountable for the results.
The two, who were among the architects of the bipartisan law five years ago, have continued to champion its central provisions in the face of vocal opposition. A big question is whether rank-and-file Democrats, as well as some senior members who would likely assume other key education posts in a Democratic takeover, share Sen. Kennedy’s and Rep. Miller’s commitment to keeping the law largely intact.
“The bloom has come off the rose for many Democrats and Republicans since the law was signed” by President Bush in January 2002, said Michael D. Casserly, the executive director of the Council of the Great City Schools, a Washington group representing more than 60 large urban school districts. “Support for the legislation in Congress appears to be not as great as it was when the initial votes were taken.”
Party’s Prospects
Political analysts suggest that the 2006 midterm elections offer Democrats their best chance in years of retaking one or both chambers of Congress. If the Democrats assume control of the House of Representatives or the Senate, these members are poised to take on leadership roles on education policy over the next two years.
SENATE
Sen. Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts
In line to become: Chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee
Would replace: Sen. Michael B. Enzi, R-Wyo.
Priorities: A key architect of the No Child Left Behind Act, Sen. Kennedy wants to bolster resources for schools in need of improvement under the law and improve tests used to measure students’ progress. He would also like to make it easier for graduates working in public-service fields to repay their student loans.
Sen. Christopher J. Dodd of Connecticut
In line to become: Chairman of the Senate Subcommittee on Education and Early Childhood Development
Would replace: Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn.
Priorities: Sen. Dodd has introduced a bill that would change the way adequate yearly progress is calculated under the No Child Left Behind law, giving schools credit for meeting benchmarks other than simply bringing students to proficiency on mathematics and reading tests. He is also interested in boosting Pell Grants for college students.
HOUSE
Rep. George Miller of California
In line to become: Chairman of the House Education and the Workforce Committee
Would replace: Rep. Howard P. “Buck” McKeon, R-Calif.
Priorities: Rep. Miller, along with Sen. Kennedy, has introduced a bill, called the Teach Act, aimed at improving teacher quality and encouraging effective teachers to work in high-need schools. He would like to cut interest rates on student loans in half.
Rep. Lynn Woolsey of California
In line to become: Chairwoman of the House Subcommittee on Education Reform
Would replace: Rep. Michael N. Castle, R-Del.
Priorities: Rep. Woolsey would like to see the No Child Left Behind law become more flexible, possibly by using measurements other than tests to determine a school’s progress. She would like to see the law encourage schools to educate “the whole child,” in part by bolstering classes in subjects such as art and music.
SOURCE: Education Week
Political analysts give the Democrats their best chance in years for retaking one or both chambers in this fall’s midterm elections. The party needs a net gain of 15 seats to retake the House. In the Senate, they would need to pick up six seats. Republicans have dominated Congress for most of the time since their dramatic takeover in the 1994 elections.
At a panel discussion in Washington last week, Rep. Miller said that he and other Democratic leaders would continue to work in a bipartisan way to maintain the “core concepts” of the No Child Left Behind law, which was championed by President Bush.
“I don’t see there’s any likelihood that Congress goes back on them,” said Rep. Miller, who as the ranking Democrat on the House Education and the Workforce Committee is in line to become its chairman if his party wins a majority.
A Kennedy Fine-Tune
Sen. Kennedy, who was the chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee when the law passed in late 2001 as a reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, says that if he reclaims that position, he will push for changes that would help foundering schools meet the goals of the law.
“Schools need better solutions to respond to the challenges identified by the No Child Left Behind Act,” Sen. Kennedy said on Sept. 19 in comments provided to Education Week.
“We also need to fine-tune the act to make it more effective in assisting struggling schools by providing new federal funds for advisers and teacher coaches who are experienced in turning low student achievement around, and by creating new partnerships between high-performing and lower-performing schools,” the senator said.
Under the law, states must test students annually in reading and math in grades 3-8 and once in high school. Students and districts must meet annual performance targets for their entire student populations, as well as for subgroups of students, such as those who are learning to speak English, in order to make adequate yearly progress, or AYP. Schools and districts receiving federal Title I money that fail to make AYP for two years or more face increasingly serious consequences.
Additionally, the law requires schools to employ highly qualified teachers, defined as those with state certification and knowledge of the subject they teach.
The law is due for reauthorization in 2007, although many observers doubt that Congress will meet that target.
Stronger Oversight?
Sen. Kennedy says he would seek to channel resources to helping states design better assessments and data systems. He may consider trying to add NCLB provisions to improve high schools, such as dropout-prevention measures, and work to provide schools with parent-outreach coordinators.
He and Rep. Miller have also co-sponsored a bill that would authorize money to boost the salaries of educators who work as mentor or master teachers, or in high-needs districts. The measure would give schools resources to develop a “transition year” for new teachers and overhaul state certification process, among other provisions.
For the past two years, Republicans have provided level funding for the Title I compensatory education program for poor children—a major part of the ESEA in its various versions—and grants to states for students in special education, under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. Democrats are more disposed to boost spending levels for those programs.
They are also more likely to spare, or even boost, K-12 programs perennially slated for elimination under President Bush’s budget proposals, such as the Upward Bound program, which prepares disadvantaged high school students for college.
“Congress has walked away from its obligation for funding the law,” Rep. Miller said last week at the discussion on the No Child Left Behind law sponsored by the Business Roundtable.
Democrats say they would keep a closer eye than the Republicans have on how the Department of Education is implementing parts of the law, including the management of the teacher-quality provisions as well as the testing of children with limited English skills and students in special education.
Because the law has been a centerpiece of President Bush’s domestic-policy agenda, the administration and current congressional leaders have a disincentive to identify school districts “that are not performing very well, but are putting forth good statistics,” Rep. Robert E. Andrews, D-N.J., a member of the House education committee, said in an interview. “We would be much more clinical about this and find districts that are gaming the system.”
Though Sen. Kennedy and Rep. Miller may not be eager to change much in the No Child Left Behind law, other members of their party, including high-ranking lawmakers on both the House and the Senate education committees, appear poised to push for more substantial revisions.
Attempts to change the direction of the law could be bolstered by Democrats—and Republicans—on Capitol Hill who have fielded complaints about the law from teachers, administrators, and parents in their constituencies. Dissatisfaction has centered on such provisions as the law’s reliance on standardized tests to measure progress and requirements for teachers to become highly qualified.
Sen. Christopher J. Dodd, D-Conn., whose home state is suing the federal Education Department over what Connecticut contends is inadequate funding for the law, would be in line to chair the Senate Education and Early Childhood Development Subcommittee, which oversees K-12 policy.
Last year, Sen. Dodd introduced a bill that would make changes to the way states calculate AYP under the federal law, among other provisions.
Under Sen. Dodd’s legislation, schools and states would be able to get credit for showing improvement on measures other than standardized tests, such as dropout rates, the number of students who take Advanced Placement courses, and individual student improvement over time. The measure has not advanced very far.
In the House, Rep. Lynn Woolsey, D-Calif., would be in line to chair the key Education Reform Subcommittee after a Democratic victory. She said in an interview this month that, while she supports the concept of the No Child Left Behind law, she has reservations about some of its major provisions, including its reliance on “narrowly focused standardized tests.”
She said the law should give credit for educating “the whole child. … There’s a lot that’s being left out,” Rep. Woolsey said, citing some schools’ lack of emphasis on subjects like art, music, and geography.
At least two Democrats on the House education committee, Reps. Betty McCollum of Minnesota and David Wu of Oregon, have put forth their own proposals for reauthorizing the law, both of which focus on providing more flexibility to the states, partly by allowing them to get credit for improving individual student performance through different types of growth models.
Rep. Miller said he would support including additional measures for determining whether schools and districts make adequate yearly progress under the law. Currently, schools must meet achievement levels on state tests and attendance goals. High schools also must meet targets for graduation rates.
But Rep. Miller said any new measures must be valid and academically challenging.
“It can’t be pass-fail, have a portfolio, do some art work, and tell us the history of your life,” Mr. Miller said at the Business Roundtable forum.
Miller the Maverick?
Whether any significant changes to the No Child Left Behind Act make their way into a reauthorization may depend on the leanings of not-yet-elected Democrats who would take the place of GOP lawmakers next year, said Jack Jennings, the president of the Center on Education Policy, a Washington-based research and advocacy organization.
Those members would likely be in the House of Representatives, which political analysts suggest is more likely to change hands than the Senate, said Mr. Jennings, who was an aide to Democrats on the House education committee from 1967 to 1994.
Freshman House Democrats could come from swing districts, where they would need the support of the 2.8 million-member National Education Association to get re-elected two years from now, Mr. Jennings said. The NEA has criticized many aspects of the federal education law and mounted a lawsuit over its funding provisions.
In maintaining strong support for the federal school improvement law, Rep. Miller has bucked key Democratic constituencies, such as the NEA, said Michael J. Petrilli, the vice president for national programs and policy at the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, a research and advocacy group in Washington, and a former Education Department official under President Bush.
“It might be easier for [Rep. Miller] to continue to play the maverick role as a ranking member than as chairman,” Mr. Petrilli said. In the event of a Democratic takeover of the House, he said, “Miller will be expected to come and write NCLB version 2.0, and he’s going to have to decide how bold he’s willing to be. There’s going to be a real war within the Democratic Party.”
If new members or rank-and-file Democrats hear concerns from their constituents about the No Child Left Behind law, they could press for changes, appealing to Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., who will likely become the speaker of the House if the Democrats retake the chamber. But Rep. Pelosi and Rep. Miller have a close working relationship, Mr. Jennings said.
“I find it hard to believe she would propose something much different from what he would want, unless she has newly minted members of Congress who want change,” Mr. Jennings said.
Some observers do not expect a groundswell of opposition to the school law to materialize in Congress.
“There’s not going to be tremendous pressure to gut this law,” said Ross Wiener, the policy director of Education Trust, a Washington-based organization that supports the law for its emphasis on raising the achievement of all students.
“The critics are obviously the most vocal, but there really is a silent majority in the middle,” he said, who feel the law is the right direction for K-12 education.
Associate Editor David J. Hoff contributed to this story.
Vol. 26, Issue 05, Pages 1,24-25
Political Shift Could Temper NCLB Resolve
If Democrats Take House or Senate, Uncertainty Ahead
By Alyson Klein
The two top Democratic lawmakers on education policy have signaled that if their party regains control of one or both houses of Congress in November, they will seek to retain the core accountability features of the federal No Child Left Behind Act.
Sen. Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts and Rep. George Miller of California would likely support more funding for the law, while seeking to keep its requirements that schools test students annually and be held accountable for the results.
The two, who were among the architects of the bipartisan law five years ago, have continued to champion its central provisions in the face of vocal opposition. A big question is whether rank-and-file Democrats, as well as some senior members who would likely assume other key education posts in a Democratic takeover, share Sen. Kennedy’s and Rep. Miller’s commitment to keeping the law largely intact.
“The bloom has come off the rose for many Democrats and Republicans since the law was signed” by President Bush in January 2002, said Michael D. Casserly, the executive director of the Council of the Great City Schools, a Washington group representing more than 60 large urban school districts. “Support for the legislation in Congress appears to be not as great as it was when the initial votes were taken.”
Party’s Prospects
Political analysts suggest that the 2006 midterm elections offer Democrats their best chance in years of retaking one or both chambers of Congress. If the Democrats assume control of the House of Representatives or the Senate, these members are poised to take on leadership roles on education policy over the next two years.
SENATE
Sen. Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts
In line to become: Chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee
Would replace: Sen. Michael B. Enzi, R-Wyo.
Priorities: A key architect of the No Child Left Behind Act, Sen. Kennedy wants to bolster resources for schools in need of improvement under the law and improve tests used to measure students’ progress. He would also like to make it easier for graduates working in public-service fields to repay their student loans.
Sen. Christopher J. Dodd of Connecticut
In line to become: Chairman of the Senate Subcommittee on Education and Early Childhood Development
Would replace: Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn.
Priorities: Sen. Dodd has introduced a bill that would change the way adequate yearly progress is calculated under the No Child Left Behind law, giving schools credit for meeting benchmarks other than simply bringing students to proficiency on mathematics and reading tests. He is also interested in boosting Pell Grants for college students.
HOUSE
Rep. George Miller of California
In line to become: Chairman of the House Education and the Workforce Committee
Would replace: Rep. Howard P. “Buck” McKeon, R-Calif.
Priorities: Rep. Miller, along with Sen. Kennedy, has introduced a bill, called the Teach Act, aimed at improving teacher quality and encouraging effective teachers to work in high-need schools. He would like to cut interest rates on student loans in half.
Rep. Lynn Woolsey of California
In line to become: Chairwoman of the House Subcommittee on Education Reform
Would replace: Rep. Michael N. Castle, R-Del.
Priorities: Rep. Woolsey would like to see the No Child Left Behind law become more flexible, possibly by using measurements other than tests to determine a school’s progress. She would like to see the law encourage schools to educate “the whole child,” in part by bolstering classes in subjects such as art and music.
SOURCE: Education Week
Political analysts give the Democrats their best chance in years for retaking one or both chambers in this fall’s midterm elections. The party needs a net gain of 15 seats to retake the House. In the Senate, they would need to pick up six seats. Republicans have dominated Congress for most of the time since their dramatic takeover in the 1994 elections.
At a panel discussion in Washington last week, Rep. Miller said that he and other Democratic leaders would continue to work in a bipartisan way to maintain the “core concepts” of the No Child Left Behind law, which was championed by President Bush.
“I don’t see there’s any likelihood that Congress goes back on them,” said Rep. Miller, who as the ranking Democrat on the House Education and the Workforce Committee is in line to become its chairman if his party wins a majority.
A Kennedy Fine-Tune
Sen. Kennedy, who was the chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee when the law passed in late 2001 as a reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, says that if he reclaims that position, he will push for changes that would help foundering schools meet the goals of the law.
“Schools need better solutions to respond to the challenges identified by the No Child Left Behind Act,” Sen. Kennedy said on Sept. 19 in comments provided to Education Week.
“We also need to fine-tune the act to make it more effective in assisting struggling schools by providing new federal funds for advisers and teacher coaches who are experienced in turning low student achievement around, and by creating new partnerships between high-performing and lower-performing schools,” the senator said.
Under the law, states must test students annually in reading and math in grades 3-8 and once in high school. Students and districts must meet annual performance targets for their entire student populations, as well as for subgroups of students, such as those who are learning to speak English, in order to make adequate yearly progress, or AYP. Schools and districts receiving federal Title I money that fail to make AYP for two years or more face increasingly serious consequences.
Additionally, the law requires schools to employ highly qualified teachers, defined as those with state certification and knowledge of the subject they teach.
The law is due for reauthorization in 2007, although many observers doubt that Congress will meet that target.
Stronger Oversight?
Sen. Kennedy says he would seek to channel resources to helping states design better assessments and data systems. He may consider trying to add NCLB provisions to improve high schools, such as dropout-prevention measures, and work to provide schools with parent-outreach coordinators.
He and Rep. Miller have also co-sponsored a bill that would authorize money to boost the salaries of educators who work as mentor or master teachers, or in high-needs districts. The measure would give schools resources to develop a “transition year” for new teachers and overhaul state certification process, among other provisions.
For the past two years, Republicans have provided level funding for the Title I compensatory education program for poor children—a major part of the ESEA in its various versions—and grants to states for students in special education, under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. Democrats are more disposed to boost spending levels for those programs.
They are also more likely to spare, or even boost, K-12 programs perennially slated for elimination under President Bush’s budget proposals, such as the Upward Bound program, which prepares disadvantaged high school students for college.
“Congress has walked away from its obligation for funding the law,” Rep. Miller said last week at the discussion on the No Child Left Behind law sponsored by the Business Roundtable.
Democrats say they would keep a closer eye than the Republicans have on how the Department of Education is implementing parts of the law, including the management of the teacher-quality provisions as well as the testing of children with limited English skills and students in special education.
Because the law has been a centerpiece of President Bush’s domestic-policy agenda, the administration and current congressional leaders have a disincentive to identify school districts “that are not performing very well, but are putting forth good statistics,” Rep. Robert E. Andrews, D-N.J., a member of the House education committee, said in an interview. “We would be much more clinical about this and find districts that are gaming the system.”
Though Sen. Kennedy and Rep. Miller may not be eager to change much in the No Child Left Behind law, other members of their party, including high-ranking lawmakers on both the House and the Senate education committees, appear poised to push for more substantial revisions.
Attempts to change the direction of the law could be bolstered by Democrats—and Republicans—on Capitol Hill who have fielded complaints about the law from teachers, administrators, and parents in their constituencies. Dissatisfaction has centered on such provisions as the law’s reliance on standardized tests to measure progress and requirements for teachers to become highly qualified.
Sen. Christopher J. Dodd, D-Conn., whose home state is suing the federal Education Department over what Connecticut contends is inadequate funding for the law, would be in line to chair the Senate Education and Early Childhood Development Subcommittee, which oversees K-12 policy.
Last year, Sen. Dodd introduced a bill that would make changes to the way states calculate AYP under the federal law, among other provisions.
Under Sen. Dodd’s legislation, schools and states would be able to get credit for showing improvement on measures other than standardized tests, such as dropout rates, the number of students who take Advanced Placement courses, and individual student improvement over time. The measure has not advanced very far.
In the House, Rep. Lynn Woolsey, D-Calif., would be in line to chair the key Education Reform Subcommittee after a Democratic victory. She said in an interview this month that, while she supports the concept of the No Child Left Behind law, she has reservations about some of its major provisions, including its reliance on “narrowly focused standardized tests.”
She said the law should give credit for educating “the whole child. … There’s a lot that’s being left out,” Rep. Woolsey said, citing some schools’ lack of emphasis on subjects like art, music, and geography.
At least two Democrats on the House education committee, Reps. Betty McCollum of Minnesota and David Wu of Oregon, have put forth their own proposals for reauthorizing the law, both of which focus on providing more flexibility to the states, partly by allowing them to get credit for improving individual student performance through different types of growth models.
Rep. Miller said he would support including additional measures for determining whether schools and districts make adequate yearly progress under the law. Currently, schools must meet achievement levels on state tests and attendance goals. High schools also must meet targets for graduation rates.
But Rep. Miller said any new measures must be valid and academically challenging.
“It can’t be pass-fail, have a portfolio, do some art work, and tell us the history of your life,” Mr. Miller said at the Business Roundtable forum.
Miller the Maverick?
Whether any significant changes to the No Child Left Behind Act make their way into a reauthorization may depend on the leanings of not-yet-elected Democrats who would take the place of GOP lawmakers next year, said Jack Jennings, the president of the Center on Education Policy, a Washington-based research and advocacy organization.
Those members would likely be in the House of Representatives, which political analysts suggest is more likely to change hands than the Senate, said Mr. Jennings, who was an aide to Democrats on the House education committee from 1967 to 1994.
Freshman House Democrats could come from swing districts, where they would need the support of the 2.8 million-member National Education Association to get re-elected two years from now, Mr. Jennings said. The NEA has criticized many aspects of the federal education law and mounted a lawsuit over its funding provisions.
In maintaining strong support for the federal school improvement law, Rep. Miller has bucked key Democratic constituencies, such as the NEA, said Michael J. Petrilli, the vice president for national programs and policy at the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, a research and advocacy group in Washington, and a former Education Department official under President Bush.
“It might be easier for [Rep. Miller] to continue to play the maverick role as a ranking member than as chairman,” Mr. Petrilli said. In the event of a Democratic takeover of the House, he said, “Miller will be expected to come and write NCLB version 2.0, and he’s going to have to decide how bold he’s willing to be. There’s going to be a real war within the Democratic Party.”
If new members or rank-and-file Democrats hear concerns from their constituents about the No Child Left Behind law, they could press for changes, appealing to Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., who will likely become the speaker of the House if the Democrats retake the chamber. But Rep. Pelosi and Rep. Miller have a close working relationship, Mr. Jennings said.
“I find it hard to believe she would propose something much different from what he would want, unless she has newly minted members of Congress who want change,” Mr. Jennings said.
Some observers do not expect a groundswell of opposition to the school law to materialize in Congress.
“There’s not going to be tremendous pressure to gut this law,” said Ross Wiener, the policy director of Education Trust, a Washington-based organization that supports the law for its emphasis on raising the achievement of all students.
“The critics are obviously the most vocal, but there really is a silent majority in the middle,” he said, who feel the law is the right direction for K-12 education.
Associate Editor David J. Hoff contributed to this story.
Vol. 26, Issue 05, Pages 1,24-25
Continuation of earlier posts regarding NCLR's position with respect to English language learners (ELLs). -Angela
Raul Gonzalez
Legislative Director
National Council of La Raza
Washington, DC
Dear Raul,
We are disappointed by your answer to our Sept. 20 message -- that, in your view, "an open conversation" among advocates for English language learners about No Child Left Behind would not be "productive" at this time. We are also surprised. You recently wrote that the National Council of La Raza would be "very open" to discussing its views on this critical subject. Indeed, it was in response to your implicit invitation that we elaborated a number of pressing concerns that educators and researchers have expressed about NCLB.
Again we invite you to engage in an e-mail exchange on this subject, in which a broad range of teachers, administrators, academic experts, and others concerned with the education of ELLs can participate. We believe that an open conversation would be more useful than the closed session of "Latino organizations" that you propose. In our view, it is critical to include those who are intimately familiar with the impact of NCLB in discussions on how the law should be reauthorized. We have no doubt that, if professionals who serve ELL students had been part of legislative deliberations back in 2001, the result would have been a far more workable accountability system. As Congress prepares to reauthorize NCLB in the coming months, advocates for ELLs need to engage in frank discussions about how to reform this law. We believed -- and continue to believe -- that such a dialogue would be productive.
You have also proposed that any discussion should consider ELL issues broadly rather than focus on specific provisions of No Child Left Behind. As you put it, "We should feel free to think outside the NCLB box." We believe this approach would be a mistake. Whether we like it or not, NCLB is the "box" that ELLs and their teachers find themselves in today. It dominates and, indeed, constrains what goes on in public schools like no other federal statute to date. As detailed in our previous message, NCLB is having numerous adverse effects on the children we serve. Unfortunately, certain policymakers and advocacy organizations -- including, we are sorry to say, the National Council of La Raza -- seem to disregard these concerns in their eagerness to promote a Stay the Course position on NCLB.
In our previous message, we posed a number of questions that we still hope will be answered. Here are a few more:
If the objective is to ensure that No Child Left Behind truly serves the needs of ELLs, what steps has your organization taken to investigate its effects on these students thus far?
Have you considered reports by ELL educators and researchers about NCLB, including those who do not share your position?
Do you have any basis to disagree with the list of negative consequences we have cited?
Why has the National Council of La Raza dropped its advocacy for bilingual education -- which is mentioned nowhere in your publications, including those on ELLs and NCLB?
Again, we would welcome a detailed response. In our view, all ELL advocates should try hard to achieve a unified position on NCLB so we don't end up working at cross purposes during the reauthorization process. For this to happen, however, we need to talk to each other -- not in carefully controlled private meetings, but in an inclusive discussion that's open to all who are working to promote equal educational opportunities for ELLs.
Sincerely,
James Crawford, Silver Spring, MD
Salvador Gabaldón, Tucson Unified School District
Stephen Krashen, University of Southern California
Kate Menken, Queens College, City University of New York
Raul Gonzalez
Legislative Director
National Council of La Raza
Washington, DC
Dear Raul,
We are disappointed by your answer to our Sept. 20 message -- that, in your view, "an open conversation" among advocates for English language learners about No Child Left Behind would not be "productive" at this time. We are also surprised. You recently wrote that the National Council of La Raza would be "very open" to discussing its views on this critical subject. Indeed, it was in response to your implicit invitation that we elaborated a number of pressing concerns that educators and researchers have expressed about NCLB.
Again we invite you to engage in an e-mail exchange on this subject, in which a broad range of teachers, administrators, academic experts, and others concerned with the education of ELLs can participate. We believe that an open conversation would be more useful than the closed session of "Latino organizations" that you propose. In our view, it is critical to include those who are intimately familiar with the impact of NCLB in discussions on how the law should be reauthorized. We have no doubt that, if professionals who serve ELL students had been part of legislative deliberations back in 2001, the result would have been a far more workable accountability system. As Congress prepares to reauthorize NCLB in the coming months, advocates for ELLs need to engage in frank discussions about how to reform this law. We believed -- and continue to believe -- that such a dialogue would be productive.
You have also proposed that any discussion should consider ELL issues broadly rather than focus on specific provisions of No Child Left Behind. As you put it, "We should feel free to think outside the NCLB box." We believe this approach would be a mistake. Whether we like it or not, NCLB is the "box" that ELLs and their teachers find themselves in today. It dominates and, indeed, constrains what goes on in public schools like no other federal statute to date. As detailed in our previous message, NCLB is having numerous adverse effects on the children we serve. Unfortunately, certain policymakers and advocacy organizations -- including, we are sorry to say, the National Council of La Raza -- seem to disregard these concerns in their eagerness to promote a Stay the Course position on NCLB.
In our previous message, we posed a number of questions that we still hope will be answered. Here are a few more:
If the objective is to ensure that No Child Left Behind truly serves the needs of ELLs, what steps has your organization taken to investigate its effects on these students thus far?
Have you considered reports by ELL educators and researchers about NCLB, including those who do not share your position?
Do you have any basis to disagree with the list of negative consequences we have cited?
Why has the National Council of La Raza dropped its advocacy for bilingual education -- which is mentioned nowhere in your publications, including those on ELLs and NCLB?
Again, we would welcome a detailed response. In our view, all ELL advocates should try hard to achieve a unified position on NCLB so we don't end up working at cross purposes during the reauthorization process. For this to happen, however, we need to talk to each other -- not in carefully controlled private meetings, but in an inclusive discussion that's open to all who are working to promote equal educational opportunities for ELLs.
Sincerely,
James Crawford, Silver Spring, MD
Salvador Gabaldón, Tucson Unified School District
Stephen Krashen, University of Southern California
Kate Menken, Queens College, City University of New York
Hispanics and the 2006 Election
Pew Hispanic Center Releases Latinos and the 2006 Election fact sheet
The Pew Hispanic Center released today a fact sheet on Latinos and the 2006 election. This fact sheet presents estimates for the number of Hispanics who will be U.S. citizens and at least 18 years old and thus eligible to vote as of November 2006. Estimates are computed for the nation, by state and by congressional district. Also included are estimates of the number of eligible voters based on three scenarios that weigh changes in the population and potential levels of political participation.
The fact sheet is entitled Hispanics and the 2006 Election and can be accessed on the Center's website.
The Pew Hispanic Center, a nonpartisan research organization, is a project of the Pew Research Center and is funded by The Pew Charitable Trusts.
The Pew Hispanic Center released today a fact sheet on Latinos and the 2006 election. This fact sheet presents estimates for the number of Hispanics who will be U.S. citizens and at least 18 years old and thus eligible to vote as of November 2006. Estimates are computed for the nation, by state and by congressional district. Also included are estimates of the number of eligible voters based on three scenarios that weigh changes in the population and potential levels of political participation.
The fact sheet is entitled Hispanics and the 2006 Election and can be accessed on the Center's website.
The Pew Hispanic Center, a nonpartisan research organization, is a project of the Pew Research Center and is funded by The Pew Charitable Trusts.
As 2 Bushes Try to Fix Schools, Tools Differ
September 28, 2006
As 2 Bushes Try to Fix Schools, Tools Differ
By SAM DILLON
DAYTONA BEACH, Fla.-- Gov. Jeb Bush of Florida has long played the dutiful younger brother.
Well before President Bush signed his No Child Left Behind law, Jeb Bush poured his own ideas into a school improvement program for Florida.
Over the years since, Governor Bush has mostly held his tongue about the president’s very different law, even as detractors of all stripes have attacked it.
But in recent weeks--perhaps seeking to cement his legacy as a school-policy expert as he prepares to leave office-- Governor Bush has been speaking out about the federal law, mixing dollops of praise with measured criticisms--and taking an occasional potshot. He has been caustic, for instance, about the requirement that 100 percent of the nation's students be proficient in reading and math by 2014.
"I mean perfection is not going to happen," Mr. Bush said Sept. 12 at a news conference in Orlando, arguing that achievement targets are important but that unrealistic ones discourage educators. "We're all imperfect under God's watchful eye, and it's impossible to achieve it."
He followed up in an interview with criticisms of other provisions.
"With all due respect to the federal system," the governor said, "our accountability system is really the better way to go."
Other figures also say the federal law, which comes up next year for Congressional reauthorization, could use some improvement. But Bush vs. Bush may be the most striking part of the debate.
It is natural, of course, that the brothers might feel a bit of fraternal rivalry on this topic, because each built a political career --George in Texas, Jeb in Florida--around promises to improve their states' schools.
Still, this is more than a brotherly squabble, as Governor Bush's comments could well provide the president's opponents with ammunition against his signature law.
No Child Left Behind and the Florida law, the A-Plus plan, differ in many ways. For one, the federal law grades schools pass-fail, while Florida’s gives schools A to F grades.
One reason the governor may be wading into the debate over the federal law is that every year since it took effect in 2002, the school-grading systems have contradicted each other. Hundreds of schools have received an A from Florida while flunking under the federal system, often because they narrowly missed testing targets.
At the Orlando news conference, Paul E. Peterson, a professor of government at Harvard, urged Congress to make the federal law more like Florida's.
"Florida's school-grading system is clearly superior to the one used under No Child Left Behind," said Dr. Peterson, who with a colleague, Martin R. West of Brown University, expands on that argument in the current issue of Education Next, an academic journal.
In the article, Drs. Peterson and West described the federal system as so "badly flawed" that it might err with nearly 3 of every 10 schools it classifies as low performing.
The federal law also puts sanctions on schools that do not meet testing goals, but does not reward ones that do. The Florida law, on the other hand, gives large cash bonuses to schools that help low-performing students improve their scores.
"Punitive actions don't work nearly as well," Governor Bush said in the interview. Accountability, he added, "works better when it’s viewed as a reward."
In criticizing No Child Left Behind, Governor Bush signaled disagreement with the position staked out by Education Secretary Margaret Spellings, who told reporters on Aug. 30, "There’s not much needed in the way of change."
"I talk about No Child Left Behind like Ivory Soap," Ms. Spellings said. "It’s 99.9 percent pure."
Governor Bush said that when he had lunch in early September with Ms. Spellings in Washington "I was loaded for bear, to go in and say, 'What was that quote about?'"
"But she disarmed me completely before I got around to my attack," he recalled. "She is eager to reform, to reauthorize N.C.L.B. There’s still work to do, and she knows it."
In an interview, Ms. Spellings said that in characterizing the law as "99.9 percent pure” she meant to convey only that no changes were needed to its “core principles.” She cited several changes she hoped for, including extending the reach of the law into high schools.
Months after Governor Bush took office in 1999, the Florida Legislature approved his education plan. It requires schools to administer tests in reading and mathematics every year in Grades 3 through 10 and assigns grades based mainly on the results.
Two years later, a legislative audit found that the A-Plus plan was improving student performance, but noted a weakness in its comparing scores at each grade with the previous year scores from the same grade, measuring a different set of students.
Florida overhauled the plan to track the achievement of individual students from grade to grade, allowing the state to calculate how much specific students had learned in a given year. That has made it possible for the state, for instance, to reward schools for raising the achievement of the lowest-performing 25 percent of students.
No Child Left Behind has broad similarities with the A-Plus plan, but the two plans also differ in important ways.
Rather than tracking individual students, the federal plan measures whether schools have made "adequate yearly progress," based on whether the percentage of students who demonstrate proficiency at each grade level, and within racial and other groups, increases by a required amount. For example, the system, like A-Plus before its revision, compares scores this year from fourth graders with those from last year. The federal law took effect just as Florida was rolling out its revised plan. Sharp contradictions emerged almost immediately in many states between the federal and state ratings given to local schools.
These contradictions became especially notable in Florida in the summer of 2003, when 1,200 of the state's 3,050 schools earned A’s from the state. At the same time, more than 950 of the top-rated schools failed to make adequate yearly progress under the federal law. Similar discrepancies re-emerged in 2004, 2005 and 2006.
R. J. Longstreet Elementary School here in Daytona Beach is an example. The tidy one-story building near the Atlantic Ocean has fallen short on the federal yardstick every year, but Florida has given it an A for five years straight.
It earned its latest A because on tests in spring 2006 tests 80 percent of students met “high standards” in reading, math and writing, and because 60 percent of students, and nearly 80 percent of the lowest-performing students, increased their scores. In August, the school received a $42,800 reward check.
"Congratulations on your outstanding performance," Governor Bush wrote to the school.
But it fell short on 2 of 17 federal requirements, and that was enough to fail under the federal system. On a writing test administered to 55 fourth-grade students, 50 needed to show proficiency; 48 did. On math tests administered to 42 disabled students, 21 needed to score at grade level; 20 did.
Having failed the school four years running, each time because it barely missed a target or two, the federal law requires the Volusia County District to make plans this year to replace the staff at Longstreet or to undertake another form of corrective action, said Chris Colwell, a deputy superintendent.
"We’re not opposed to measuring achievement in our schools, but our point is, measure accurately," Dr. Colwell said. "Longstreet has a high-performing faculty. Why would we change them?"
In their Education Next article, Drs. Peterson and West used test figures to calculate how much students learned, on average, in each school in Florida in the 2003-4 school year and compared the gains in schools with adequate yearly progress with those in schools that did not.
Their conclusion?
The federal accountability system does not perform as well as Florida's "in distinguishing schools where students are learning more from those where they are learning less," the professors wrote.
At the Sept. 12 news conference, called to publicize a broad review of education initiatives, Governor Bush listened approvingly as Dr. Peterson praised the A-Plus plan and criticized No Child Left Behind. But the governor has been careful to note what he considers to be the federal law’s contributions.
Florida, for instance, began focusing increased attention on disabled and limited-English students after the federal law required states to improve those students’ achievement, Governor Bush said.
He approaches the law, he said, "not from the standpoint of saying it's bad, but that it's good and needs to be better."
Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
Sunday, October 01, 2006
Rich and varied 'Hispanic heritage' not easy to define
Ok. These last two posts are really interesting with this one addressing the difficulties of defining identity and the earlier one referring to commonalities. These should provoke much discussion--particularly, it appears, for those in the business world who want to market better to this population. -Angela
Rich and varied 'Hispanic heritage' not easy to define
by Steven Winn
Wednesday, September 27, 2006
It's been nearly five months since the May 1 Day Without Immigrants rallies filled cities around the country with a mighty chorus of pleas for coherent government action on immigration. Now, as Congress prepares to adjourn for the midterm election campaigns, our bumbling leaders are hopelessly flummoxed on the issue. As the Senate mulls a House-passed bill mandating a 700-mile Mexican border fence that Kafka or Calvino might have dreamed up in one of their absurdist fictions, partisan divisions have all but doomed any meaningful legislation in the foreseeable future.
How fitting that this latest national stalemate should come in the heart of Hispanic Heritage Month, which runs through Oct. 15. In ways that transcend the question of what to do about the country's estimated 11 million to 12 million undocumented immigrants (about 78 percent of whom come from Mexico and Latin America, according to a Pew Hispanic Center report), U.S. culture gives off a jarring dissonance on Latino themes. In a country of 299 million with 43 million of them Latinos, a richly diverse population segment that exerts a rapidly expanding impact and influence, the tendency to think in reductive and monolithic terms remains pronounced.
Part of the problem comes from perceptions fostered in the press. A recent Harper's Index noted that 1 in 100 articles in last year's major U.S. news weeklies dealt with a Latino or Latinos. Two out of every 3 of those stories were about immigration.
Meanwhile, as if in some alternative parallel universe, we live in a country so profoundly and intimately shaped by Latino life at so many levels that we don't fully or consciously register it happening. And that's not just in border states such as California and Texas, where the influences are hard to miss. From children's TV (where the bilingual "Dora the Explorer" and "Go, Diego, Go!" are major fixtures in the preschool mind-set) to grocery stores in Michigan (where black beans have replaced white beans as that state's most popular legume, according to Hector Tobar's "Translation Nation") to movie theaters, concert halls and city halls, changes are at once substantive, subtle and fundamental.
A generation ago, it would have been far more noteworthy than it is now to have a Latino U.S. Attorney General (Alberto Gonzalez) or a mayor of Los Angeles (Antonio Villaraigosa) in office. Similarly, the flap over Arnold Schwarzenegger's remark about "hot" California Assemblywoman Bonnie Garcia (she's of Puerto Rican descent) would have echoed louder and longer than it has. The real chumps here weren't the governor or Garcia, who cheerfully labeled herself "hot-blooded," but rather the inept dirty tricksters in the Phil Angelides campaign who got caught scrounging around in Schwarzenegger computers for hot goods. Playing this kind of low-rent ethnic politics, in a state with a huge and increasingly sophisticated Latino electorate, is a fool's game in 2006. It's a different, more textured and demanding world.
That's just as true in the arts as in society at large. Latino musicians, writers, filmmakers, visual artists and choreographers have built an indisputable record of achievement and influence. From Carlos Santana to Christina Aguilera to Los Lonely Boys, Latin music has strengthened its hold as a major force, certified by its own awards ceremonies. The seventh annual Latin Grammy Awards show will be broadcast Nov. 2 from New York. A well-documented boom in Latino literature, famously fueled by "One Hundred Years of Solitude" author Gabriel Garcia Márquez's 1982 Nobel Prize, has helped bring mainstream attention to scores of writers, from Oscar Hijuelos to Guillermo Gómez-Peña to Isabel Allende, over the past quarter century. Fat new anthologies and encyclopedias devoted to new Latino writing and writers appear all the time. Some of the most vivid independent films of the past five years -- "Amores Perros," "Y Tu Mamá También," "Maria Full of Grace," "Quinceañera" -- have opened moviegoers' eyes to a range of Latino visions.
At the same time, and perhaps inevitably, the attention has created its own kind of distortions and blurring of effects. Even as Latino artists and art figure more prominently in the nation's cultural life, questions about intentions, audience, aesthetics and sensibility raise new challenges. To what degree does one Latino artist intrinsically share turf with another? Are there certain attributes or qualities that might be ascribed to a Latino sensibility? How do those values change from first- to second- or third-generation residents? Does it make sense, in a cultural patchwork that includes artists of Mexican, Peruvian, Salvadoran, Cuban and multiple other heritages, to assume or try to stake out an aesthetic common ground? Even the terminology -- "Latino," "Hispanic," "Chicano" -- provokes internal controversy and debate.
In his 2004 book, "Latino and Latina Writers," editor Alan West-Duran identified one through line -- "a willingness to explore and explicitly examine cross-cultural encounters." Call it border-think, an awareness of the geographical and metaphorical barriers of language and culture.
But no sooner does some thesis gain currency than the danger of it hardening into confining stereotype or proscriptive dogma lurks. Eduardo Machado, the Cuban American playwright and artistic director of New York's Intar theater company, put it this way in an interview with the New York Times: "When they did 'Raisin in the Sun' decades ago, it was considered a black play, but now it's just an American play." That, said Machado, was his aspiration for Latino playwrights: "To be part of this culture without being in the corner."
One of the things that makes "Quinceañera" such a winning film is its easy, unforced mingling of the culturally specific and the universal. A story about a Mexican American teenager's unplanned and somewhat magical-realist pregnancy slowly blooms from domestic drama to a meditation on the meaning of family, as the heroine (Emily Rios) knits new ties with an emotionally imploded gay cousin (Jesse Garcia) and their seraphic great-great uncle (Chalo González). The dialogue, details, pacing and performances feel so faithful to the integrity and subtle dislocations of Mexican American life in Los Angeles that "Quinceañera" both roots the viewer in that world and finds an authentic reverberation. The film is so true to its corner, in Machado's phrase, that the corner fills the room.
The wildly ambitious "Chicano" show at the de Young Museum (through Oct. 22), by contrast, aims to take the room, the house and the city by storm. There's something both wonderful and wearying about this three-part extravaganza, which supplements intensely colorful paintings from the collection of Cheech Marin with an exhibition of political posters and prints as well as a sprawling multimedia display of everything from food and photo albums to music, low riders and TV sitcom star George Lopez. This "Chicano Now: American Expressions" portion of the show may offer a certain broad-canvas appeal to a wide audience. But I wish the show's organizers (and corporate sponsor Target) had let the art speak for itself and not feel it had to be contextualized by this walk-through diorama of Latino life. As even a casual stroll through the show's painting galleries quickly proves, the invention, bristling energy, savagery, comic brio and sheer whirling drive of these "Chicano Visions" will resist any sweeping categorical perspective.
Painting after painting makes you look and look again without instructing you what to think or how to feel about it. Carlos Almaraz turns car crashes into gaudily combustive bursts of color. David Botello backs the posed figures in "Wedding Photos -- Hollenbeck Park" with a stretch of elevated freeway. Frank Romero sets a ghoulish make-out scene in the backseat of a comically foreshortened Dodge.
You could read these and other paintings in the show, I suppose, as some kind of key to the Latino automobile culture. Or you could go along for the ride and not try to plot out the route or destination in advance. By 2040, the statisticians say, half the population of California will be Latino. The view, between now and then, is sure to hold our attention.
E-mail Steven Winn at swinn@sfchronicle.com.
Page E – 1
©2006 San Francisco Chronicle
Rich and varied 'Hispanic heritage' not easy to define
by Steven Winn
Wednesday, September 27, 2006
It's been nearly five months since the May 1 Day Without Immigrants rallies filled cities around the country with a mighty chorus of pleas for coherent government action on immigration. Now, as Congress prepares to adjourn for the midterm election campaigns, our bumbling leaders are hopelessly flummoxed on the issue. As the Senate mulls a House-passed bill mandating a 700-mile Mexican border fence that Kafka or Calvino might have dreamed up in one of their absurdist fictions, partisan divisions have all but doomed any meaningful legislation in the foreseeable future.
How fitting that this latest national stalemate should come in the heart of Hispanic Heritage Month, which runs through Oct. 15. In ways that transcend the question of what to do about the country's estimated 11 million to 12 million undocumented immigrants (about 78 percent of whom come from Mexico and Latin America, according to a Pew Hispanic Center report), U.S. culture gives off a jarring dissonance on Latino themes. In a country of 299 million with 43 million of them Latinos, a richly diverse population segment that exerts a rapidly expanding impact and influence, the tendency to think in reductive and monolithic terms remains pronounced.
Part of the problem comes from perceptions fostered in the press. A recent Harper's Index noted that 1 in 100 articles in last year's major U.S. news weeklies dealt with a Latino or Latinos. Two out of every 3 of those stories were about immigration.
Meanwhile, as if in some alternative parallel universe, we live in a country so profoundly and intimately shaped by Latino life at so many levels that we don't fully or consciously register it happening. And that's not just in border states such as California and Texas, where the influences are hard to miss. From children's TV (where the bilingual "Dora the Explorer" and "Go, Diego, Go!" are major fixtures in the preschool mind-set) to grocery stores in Michigan (where black beans have replaced white beans as that state's most popular legume, according to Hector Tobar's "Translation Nation") to movie theaters, concert halls and city halls, changes are at once substantive, subtle and fundamental.
A generation ago, it would have been far more noteworthy than it is now to have a Latino U.S. Attorney General (Alberto Gonzalez) or a mayor of Los Angeles (Antonio Villaraigosa) in office. Similarly, the flap over Arnold Schwarzenegger's remark about "hot" California Assemblywoman Bonnie Garcia (she's of Puerto Rican descent) would have echoed louder and longer than it has. The real chumps here weren't the governor or Garcia, who cheerfully labeled herself "hot-blooded," but rather the inept dirty tricksters in the Phil Angelides campaign who got caught scrounging around in Schwarzenegger computers for hot goods. Playing this kind of low-rent ethnic politics, in a state with a huge and increasingly sophisticated Latino electorate, is a fool's game in 2006. It's a different, more textured and demanding world.
That's just as true in the arts as in society at large. Latino musicians, writers, filmmakers, visual artists and choreographers have built an indisputable record of achievement and influence. From Carlos Santana to Christina Aguilera to Los Lonely Boys, Latin music has strengthened its hold as a major force, certified by its own awards ceremonies. The seventh annual Latin Grammy Awards show will be broadcast Nov. 2 from New York. A well-documented boom in Latino literature, famously fueled by "One Hundred Years of Solitude" author Gabriel Garcia Márquez's 1982 Nobel Prize, has helped bring mainstream attention to scores of writers, from Oscar Hijuelos to Guillermo Gómez-Peña to Isabel Allende, over the past quarter century. Fat new anthologies and encyclopedias devoted to new Latino writing and writers appear all the time. Some of the most vivid independent films of the past five years -- "Amores Perros," "Y Tu Mamá También," "Maria Full of Grace," "Quinceañera" -- have opened moviegoers' eyes to a range of Latino visions.
At the same time, and perhaps inevitably, the attention has created its own kind of distortions and blurring of effects. Even as Latino artists and art figure more prominently in the nation's cultural life, questions about intentions, audience, aesthetics and sensibility raise new challenges. To what degree does one Latino artist intrinsically share turf with another? Are there certain attributes or qualities that might be ascribed to a Latino sensibility? How do those values change from first- to second- or third-generation residents? Does it make sense, in a cultural patchwork that includes artists of Mexican, Peruvian, Salvadoran, Cuban and multiple other heritages, to assume or try to stake out an aesthetic common ground? Even the terminology -- "Latino," "Hispanic," "Chicano" -- provokes internal controversy and debate.
In his 2004 book, "Latino and Latina Writers," editor Alan West-Duran identified one through line -- "a willingness to explore and explicitly examine cross-cultural encounters." Call it border-think, an awareness of the geographical and metaphorical barriers of language and culture.
But no sooner does some thesis gain currency than the danger of it hardening into confining stereotype or proscriptive dogma lurks. Eduardo Machado, the Cuban American playwright and artistic director of New York's Intar theater company, put it this way in an interview with the New York Times: "When they did 'Raisin in the Sun' decades ago, it was considered a black play, but now it's just an American play." That, said Machado, was his aspiration for Latino playwrights: "To be part of this culture without being in the corner."
One of the things that makes "Quinceañera" such a winning film is its easy, unforced mingling of the culturally specific and the universal. A story about a Mexican American teenager's unplanned and somewhat magical-realist pregnancy slowly blooms from domestic drama to a meditation on the meaning of family, as the heroine (Emily Rios) knits new ties with an emotionally imploded gay cousin (Jesse Garcia) and their seraphic great-great uncle (Chalo González). The dialogue, details, pacing and performances feel so faithful to the integrity and subtle dislocations of Mexican American life in Los Angeles that "Quinceañera" both roots the viewer in that world and finds an authentic reverberation. The film is so true to its corner, in Machado's phrase, that the corner fills the room.
The wildly ambitious "Chicano" show at the de Young Museum (through Oct. 22), by contrast, aims to take the room, the house and the city by storm. There's something both wonderful and wearying about this three-part extravaganza, which supplements intensely colorful paintings from the collection of Cheech Marin with an exhibition of political posters and prints as well as a sprawling multimedia display of everything from food and photo albums to music, low riders and TV sitcom star George Lopez. This "Chicano Now: American Expressions" portion of the show may offer a certain broad-canvas appeal to a wide audience. But I wish the show's organizers (and corporate sponsor Target) had let the art speak for itself and not feel it had to be contextualized by this walk-through diorama of Latino life. As even a casual stroll through the show's painting galleries quickly proves, the invention, bristling energy, savagery, comic brio and sheer whirling drive of these "Chicano Visions" will resist any sweeping categorical perspective.
Painting after painting makes you look and look again without instructing you what to think or how to feel about it. Carlos Almaraz turns car crashes into gaudily combustive bursts of color. David Botello backs the posed figures in "Wedding Photos -- Hollenbeck Park" with a stretch of elevated freeway. Frank Romero sets a ghoulish make-out scene in the backseat of a comically foreshortened Dodge.
You could read these and other paintings in the show, I suppose, as some kind of key to the Latino automobile culture. Or you could go along for the ride and not try to plot out the route or destination in advance. By 2040, the statisticians say, half the population of California will be Latino. The view, between now and then, is sure to hold our attention.
E-mail Steven Winn at swinn@sfchronicle.com.
Page E – 1
©2006 San Francisco Chronicle
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