By ERICKA MELLON | Houston Chronicle
June 13, 2008
Texas Education Commissioner Robert Scott faced a historic decision this month: What should he do with four schools that had failed for so long that the law required drastic action?
Legislators had given him two options: Close the schools or let an outside group — either a nonprofit or another school district — take them over.
The catch: No nonprofit had applied to the Texas Education Agency for a shot at the task.
"It would have been nice to have had that option," said Scott, whose agency first solicited applications via the Internet last July.
Instead, Scott found another option: Using little-known rules written by TEA officials, he announced last week that the Houston and Austin school districts could have a chance to redesign the schools they had repeatedly failed to raise to acceptable levels.
This week, Scott waived the harsh sanctions against a Waco middle school after it barely missed the acceptable mark. He has yet to say whether Oak Village Middle School in North Forest cleared the bar.
The long-troubled campuses, including Sam Houston High School in the Houston Independent School District, are the first in Texas to reach the end of the line in the state's accountability system, falling short of minimum academic standards since at least 2004.
Many more schools could land in a similar fix in coming years, raising questions about the state's ability to better serve students when outside groups are unable to help and when displacing thousands of children by closing a neighborhood school is not practical.
"There isn't the capacity on the part of states or private groups to bring about large-scale change," said Jack Jennings, president of the Center on Education Policy, which studies reform efforts nationwide. "The hopeful thing is that states and school districts are taking this task much more seriously than in the past."
Meeting standards
One driver is the federal No Child Left Behind Act, which like Texas' accountability system, orders escalating sanctions against schools each year they fail to meet standards.
In Texas, schools that have unacceptable test scores and dropout rates for five straight years must be closed or put under alternative management.
State Sen. Florence Shapiro, who chairs the Senate Education Committee, defended the state's school accountability system, which lawmakers toughened in 2006.
"For the first time in quite a long time, we're no longer just talking with an idle threat; we're actually acting," the Plano Republican said.
HISD and Austin officials said they appreciate the flexibility that allows them to reinvent their own schools.
Under the TEA's rules, the new schools must have a different academic program, a new name and principal, plus at least 75 percent of the instructional staff and 50 percent of the students must be new.
"We tried to make rules that allowed the building to be used, or repurposed, but would still result in the children getting a better quality of education," Scott said.
HISD Superintendent Abelardo Saavedra said he is thrilled Sam Houston likely will remain under his control, especially because the school would have made the acceptable mark this year had about a dozen more students passed the math exam.
"I don't think we ever as a staff felt we would turn our back on that school," Saavedra said.
Unreasonable action
Closing schools, based on a few students' test scores at a campus that is making progress, is unreasonable, he said. Half the students at Sam Houston passed the math exam this year, compared with 41 percent five years ago.
"No Child Left Behind says, by 2014, every school in this country is going to meet a level of proficiency in every (student) subgroup," Saavedra said. "Is the nation ready to close every single school that doesn't meet that? I can tell you the answer is, 'No way.' The system's got to be fair and recognize progress."
HISD's $3.4 million plan for reforming Sam Houston would split the school in two. Ninth-graders would have their own school on the same campus and would remain in class for an extra hour a day. The school for upperclassmen would encourage students to focus on careers in engineering, information technology or the automotive industry.
State Rep. Rob Eissler, who chairs the House Public Education Committee, said he was only slightly surprised the state has not received any applications from nonprofit school managers.
"Often, alternative managers want to come in, and they want to be successful so they kind of size up what those chances would be," said Eissler, R-The Woodlands. "Maybe that is part of their reticence."
After striking out last summer, the TEA posted another request for proposals in November. Two undisclosed entities have expressed interest, said agency spokeswoman Suzanne Marchman, and have until July 2 to apply.
Monday, June 16, 2008
Sunday, June 15, 2008
Students likely to fail high school exit exam can be identified as early as 4th grade, study says
Check out the full report: "Predicting Success, Preventing Failure: An Investigation of the California High School Exit Exam".
I'm a little concerned with how this study places an emphasis on providing additional resources (tutoring) at earlier grades as a solution and also by its analysis that downplays the statistically significant evidence showing an association between unqualified teachers and the passage of CAHSEE, calling it "very small". I think it warrants a closer look.
Also, there's a section stating: "A student who is still an English Learner in grade 9 is indeed less likely than other students to pass the CAHSEE. But EL students in grade 4 are, on average, no less likely than others to pass the CAHSEE by grade 12. Thus, teachers should be quite concerned about a student who is still an English Learner in grade 9, for there is not much time to catch up. " -- what does this say for English learners who enter California High Schools for the first time beginning in the 9th grade?
-Patricia
The authors use the findings to question the wisdom of spending millions to tutor older students struggling with the test.
By Seema Mehta, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
June 11, 2008
As early as fourth grade, students who will be at risk of failing the high school exit exam -- a state requirement to earn a diploma -- can be identified based on grades, classroom behavior and test scores, according to a new study released Tuesday.
The findings, based on an extensive study of student achievement in San Diego schools, call into question the effectiveness of aiming significant efforts and tens of millions of dollars at struggling high school seniors and older students to help them pass the exam.
"From a political standpoint, such spending seems necessary. However, our results strongly suggest that these 11th-hour interventions by themselves are unlikely to yield the intended results," according to the report by the Public Policy Institute of California.
Instead, the authors suggested, "moving a portion of these tutoring dollars to struggling students in earlier grades -- when the students are still in school -- could be a wise choice. An ounce of prevention could indeed be worth a pound of cure."
Assemblyman Pedro Nava (D-Santa Barbara), who wrote legislation that provides more than $72 million annually for two years to tutor seniors who couldn't pass the exam, said it would be unfair to reduce support for older students to pay for increased support for younger ones.
"I suppose they should sit down with the parents of these kids who are looking at failing the [exit] exam and persuade these parents that they don't need the money," Nava said. "Inherent in the conclusion of the report is that education needs help at all levels. We shouldn't be put in a position where we are pitting the outcomes of seniors against the future of preschoolers. That makes no sense."
State Supt. of Public Instruction Jack O'Connell said school districts ought to have greater flexibility in how they spend such funds.
"We need to have comprehensive intervention and not wait till 12th grade," he said.
Additionally, he said, the study underscored the need for universal preschool, as well as expanding the state's class-size reduction efforts.
The exit exam was created by state legislators in an effort to standardize the achievement of high school graduates across the state's 1,053 school districts. Students in the class of 2006 were the first who were required to pass the exam to receive diplomas.
From their sophomore through senior years, students have six chances to take the exam, which includes math and English. Students must score at least 55% on the math portion, which is eighth-grade level, and 60% on the English part, which is ninth- or 10th-grade level. More than 93% of students pass the exam by the end of their senior year.
Educators said the study results are buttressed by earlier research that shows early academic achievement, the mastering of basic math skills and reading comprehension, is a building block for future success.
"We've recognized for a long time that performance in the earlier grades is one of the best indicators of success later in school and in life," said Chris Eftychiou, spokesman for the Long Beach Unified School District.
At Pasadena High School, guidance counselor Allison Steppes said she worried that social promotion and lack of parental involvement led to some students passing through elementary schools without mastering basic skills.
"I don't think we're doing enough at the elementary stages because it's ridiculous to get to 12th grade, take the [exit exam] six times and still not pass it," she said.
But she questioned the validity of a student retaking the test after failing it half a dozen times. Steppes said she advised students who repeatedly failed the exam but finished 12th grade to get their high school degree at a community college, which does not require students to pass the exam.
"I want the student to move on with life," she said.
I'm a little concerned with how this study places an emphasis on providing additional resources (tutoring) at earlier grades as a solution and also by its analysis that downplays the statistically significant evidence showing an association between unqualified teachers and the passage of CAHSEE, calling it "very small". I think it warrants a closer look.
Also, there's a section stating: "A student who is still an English Learner in grade 9 is indeed less likely than other students to pass the CAHSEE. But EL students in grade 4 are, on average, no less likely than others to pass the CAHSEE by grade 12. Thus, teachers should be quite concerned about a student who is still an English Learner in grade 9, for there is not much time to catch up. " -- what does this say for English learners who enter California High Schools for the first time beginning in the 9th grade?
-Patricia
The authors use the findings to question the wisdom of spending millions to tutor older students struggling with the test.
By Seema Mehta, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
June 11, 2008
As early as fourth grade, students who will be at risk of failing the high school exit exam -- a state requirement to earn a diploma -- can be identified based on grades, classroom behavior and test scores, according to a new study released Tuesday.
The findings, based on an extensive study of student achievement in San Diego schools, call into question the effectiveness of aiming significant efforts and tens of millions of dollars at struggling high school seniors and older students to help them pass the exam.
"From a political standpoint, such spending seems necessary. However, our results strongly suggest that these 11th-hour interventions by themselves are unlikely to yield the intended results," according to the report by the Public Policy Institute of California.
Instead, the authors suggested, "moving a portion of these tutoring dollars to struggling students in earlier grades -- when the students are still in school -- could be a wise choice. An ounce of prevention could indeed be worth a pound of cure."
Assemblyman Pedro Nava (D-Santa Barbara), who wrote legislation that provides more than $72 million annually for two years to tutor seniors who couldn't pass the exam, said it would be unfair to reduce support for older students to pay for increased support for younger ones.
"I suppose they should sit down with the parents of these kids who are looking at failing the [exit] exam and persuade these parents that they don't need the money," Nava said. "Inherent in the conclusion of the report is that education needs help at all levels. We shouldn't be put in a position where we are pitting the outcomes of seniors against the future of preschoolers. That makes no sense."
State Supt. of Public Instruction Jack O'Connell said school districts ought to have greater flexibility in how they spend such funds.
"We need to have comprehensive intervention and not wait till 12th grade," he said.
Additionally, he said, the study underscored the need for universal preschool, as well as expanding the state's class-size reduction efforts.
The exit exam was created by state legislators in an effort to standardize the achievement of high school graduates across the state's 1,053 school districts. Students in the class of 2006 were the first who were required to pass the exam to receive diplomas.
From their sophomore through senior years, students have six chances to take the exam, which includes math and English. Students must score at least 55% on the math portion, which is eighth-grade level, and 60% on the English part, which is ninth- or 10th-grade level. More than 93% of students pass the exam by the end of their senior year.
Educators said the study results are buttressed by earlier research that shows early academic achievement, the mastering of basic math skills and reading comprehension, is a building block for future success.
"We've recognized for a long time that performance in the earlier grades is one of the best indicators of success later in school and in life," said Chris Eftychiou, spokesman for the Long Beach Unified School District.
At Pasadena High School, guidance counselor Allison Steppes said she worried that social promotion and lack of parental involvement led to some students passing through elementary schools without mastering basic skills.
"I don't think we're doing enough at the elementary stages because it's ridiculous to get to 12th grade, take the [exit exam] six times and still not pass it," she said.
But she questioned the validity of a student retaking the test after failing it half a dozen times. Steppes said she advised students who repeatedly failed the exam but finished 12th grade to get their high school degree at a community college, which does not require students to pass the exam.
"I want the student to move on with life," she said.
Most struggling Texas kids are veterans of U.S. classrooms
By KATHERINE LEAL UNMUTH / The Dallas Morning News
June 10, 2008
Educators often point out the obstacles new immigrants face in graduating on time. But they aren't the only kids learning English who are struggling to graduate.
Statewide, about 60 percent of high school students classified as having limited English proficiency – called LEP in education circles – have been in U.S. schools five years or more, according to a Dallas Morning News analysis of state test data.
Most were born in the United States, often to immigrant parents, or immigrated at an earlier age. While some do well in school, others struggle for years.
Experts say this can happen for several reasons. Some children get poor bilingual or English as a second language instruction in early grades. Some students change schools often because their families move around. They may get classes taught mostly in Spanish at one school, mostly in English at the next and bilingual classes at a third.
Such students get to high school way behind. In Irving, several hundred LEP high school students are taking reading classes because they still read at an elementary level. "They can say the words, but they don't know what it means," reading coordinator Paula Dugger said.
Many LEP students can speak conversational English without having mastered the vocabulary necessary to understand textbooks or to pass the graduation TAKS exams. "It's not that they don't know English," said Isabella Piña-Hinojosa, bilingual director in the Carrollton-Farmers Branch school district. "They need a teacher to help them understand the academic language."
Because that puts LEP students at risk of dropping out, advocates say more services focused on English literacy are needed.
Texas opens high school ESL classes only to immigrants. The state sets no restriction on how long they have lived in the U.S., though some districts limit the classes to recent arrivals. Most other students classified as still learning English, including those born in the U.S., take regular courses.
Schools are supposed to supplement those regular classes with services designed to make sure students understand the work. But those services can vary widely from school to school.
"One problem is the programs are all so different," said Yvonne Freeman, a bilingual education professor at the University of Texas-Brownsville.
David Freeman, a bilingual education professor at UT-Brownsville, said principals and all teachers should be trained to work with students learning English.
"Biology or math teachers don't really pay as much attention to the language needs of the kids," he said. "They don't see themselves as reading or writing teachers."
Dr. Piña-Hinojosa tracks students in her district who have been in the country more than four years separately from those who arrived more recently to assess how each group progresses academically. She believes the state should use a similar approach.
The Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund lost a federal lawsuit last year in which it argued that the state often provided an inferior education for students with limited English, particularly in middle and high schools. Plaintiffs also argued that the state failed to monitor programs adequately for quality.
"Many students have been in the program for a number of years and are still performing at very low levels," MALDEF attorney David Hinojosa said. "That's where the tragedy truly lies."
Georgina Gonzalez, bilingual director at the Texas Education Agency, said the state is trying to provide more training for secondary teachers. But she acknowledges TEA has not closely analyzed data based on when students arrived. She said officials are working on a new data system.
"If we find out how they are doing," she said, "then we could address their needs and bring attention to how many students we have in that situation."
June 10, 2008
Educators often point out the obstacles new immigrants face in graduating on time. But they aren't the only kids learning English who are struggling to graduate.
Statewide, about 60 percent of high school students classified as having limited English proficiency – called LEP in education circles – have been in U.S. schools five years or more, according to a Dallas Morning News analysis of state test data.
Most were born in the United States, often to immigrant parents, or immigrated at an earlier age. While some do well in school, others struggle for years.
Experts say this can happen for several reasons. Some children get poor bilingual or English as a second language instruction in early grades. Some students change schools often because their families move around. They may get classes taught mostly in Spanish at one school, mostly in English at the next and bilingual classes at a third.
Such students get to high school way behind. In Irving, several hundred LEP high school students are taking reading classes because they still read at an elementary level. "They can say the words, but they don't know what it means," reading coordinator Paula Dugger said.
Many LEP students can speak conversational English without having mastered the vocabulary necessary to understand textbooks or to pass the graduation TAKS exams. "It's not that they don't know English," said Isabella Piña-Hinojosa, bilingual director in the Carrollton-Farmers Branch school district. "They need a teacher to help them understand the academic language."
Because that puts LEP students at risk of dropping out, advocates say more services focused on English literacy are needed.
Texas opens high school ESL classes only to immigrants. The state sets no restriction on how long they have lived in the U.S., though some districts limit the classes to recent arrivals. Most other students classified as still learning English, including those born in the U.S., take regular courses.
Schools are supposed to supplement those regular classes with services designed to make sure students understand the work. But those services can vary widely from school to school.
"One problem is the programs are all so different," said Yvonne Freeman, a bilingual education professor at the University of Texas-Brownsville.
David Freeman, a bilingual education professor at UT-Brownsville, said principals and all teachers should be trained to work with students learning English.
"Biology or math teachers don't really pay as much attention to the language needs of the kids," he said. "They don't see themselves as reading or writing teachers."
Dr. Piña-Hinojosa tracks students in her district who have been in the country more than four years separately from those who arrived more recently to assess how each group progresses academically. She believes the state should use a similar approach.
The Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund lost a federal lawsuit last year in which it argued that the state often provided an inferior education for students with limited English, particularly in middle and high schools. Plaintiffs also argued that the state failed to monitor programs adequately for quality.
"Many students have been in the program for a number of years and are still performing at very low levels," MALDEF attorney David Hinojosa said. "That's where the tragedy truly lies."
Georgina Gonzalez, bilingual director at the Texas Education Agency, said the state is trying to provide more training for secondary teachers. But she acknowledges TEA has not closely analyzed data based on when students arrived. She said officials are working on a new data system.
"If we find out how they are doing," she said, "then we could address their needs and bring attention to how many students we have in that situation."
No Child Left Behind: Doomed to Fail?
Check out the full report: "A Broader, Bolder Approach to Education and listen to the conference call with Task Force co-chairs Helen F. Ladd, Pedro Noguera, and Tom Payzant. -Patricia
By CLAUDIA WALLIS | Time.com
June 8, 2008
There was always something slightly insane about No Child Left Behind (NCLB), the ambitious education law often described as the Bush Administration's signature domestic achievement. For one thing, in the view of many educators, the law's 2014 goal — which calls for all public school students in grades 4 through 8 to be achieving on grade level in reading and math — is something no educational system anywhere on earth has ever accomplished. Even more unrealistic: every kid (except for 3% with serious handicaps or other issues) is supposed to be achieving on grade level every year, climbing in lockstep up an ever more challenging ladder. This flies in the face of all sorts of research showing that children start off in different places academically and grow at different rates.
Add to the mix the fact that much of the promised funding failed to materialize and many early critics insisted that No Child Left Behind was nothing more than a cynical plan to destroy American faith in public education and open the way to vouchers and school choice.
Now a former official in Bush's Education department is giving at least some support to that notion. Susan Neuman, a professor of education at the University Michigan who served as Assistant Secretary for Elementary and Secondary Education during George W. Bush's first term, was and still is a fervent believer in the goals of NCLB. And she says the President and then Secretary of Education Rod Paige were too. But there were others in the department, according to Neuman, who saw NCLB as a Trojan horse for the choice agenda — a way to expose the failure of public education and "blow it up a bit," she says. "There were a number of people pushing hard for market forces and privatization."
Tensions between NCLB believers and the blow-up-the-schools group were one reason the Bush Department of Education felt like "a pressure cooker," says Neuman, who left the Administration in early 2003. Another reason was political pressure to take the hardest possible line on school accountability in order to avoid looking lax — like the Clinton Administration. Thus, when Neuman and others argued that many schools would fail to reach the NCLB goals and needed more flexibility while making improvements, they were ignored. "We had this no-waiver policy," says Neuman. "The feeling was that the prior administration had given waivers willy-nilly."
It was only in Bush's second term that the hard line began to succumb to reality. Margaret Spellings, who replaced Paige as Secretary of Education in 2005, gradually opened the door to a more flexible and realistic approach to school accountability. Instead of demanding lockstep, grade-level achievement, schools in some states could meet the NCLB goals by demonstrating adequate student growth. (In this "growth model" approach, a student who was three years behind in reading and ended the year only one year behind would not be viewed as a failure.) "Going to the growth models is the right way to go," says Neuman. "I wish it had come earlier. It didn't because we were trying to be tough."
Neuman also regrets the Administration's use of humiliation and shame as a lever for school reform. Failure to meet NCLB's inflexible goals meant schools would be publicly labeled as failures. Neuman now sees this as a mistake: "Vilifying teachers and saying we are going to shame them was not the right approach."
The combination of inflexibility and public humiliation for those not meeting federal goals ignited so much frustration among educators that NCLB now appears to be an irreparably damaged brand. "The problems lingered long enough and there's so much anger that it may not be fixable," says Neuman. While the American Federation of Teachers was once on board with the NCLB goals, she notes, the union has turned against it. "Teachers hate NCLB because they feel like they've been picked on."
Is there a way out of the mess? Neuman still supports school accountability and the much-maligned annual tests mandated by the law. But she now believes that the nation has to look beyond the schoolroom, if it wishes to leave no child behind.
Along with 59 other top educators, policymakers and health officials--including three former surgeon generals, she's put her name to a nonpartisan document to be released on Tuesday by the Economic Policy Institute, a Washington think tank. Titled "A Broader, Bolder Approach to Education," it lays out an expansive vision for leveling the playing field for low-income kids, one that looks toward new policies on child health and support for parents and communities. The document states that much of the achievement gap between rich and poor "is rooted in what occurs outside of formal schooling," and therefore calls on policymakers to "rethink their assumptions" about what it will take to close that gap. Neuman says that money she's seen wasted on current programs, including much of the massive Title 1 spending should be reallocated according to this broader approach. "Pinning all our hopes on schools will never change the odds for kids."
By CLAUDIA WALLIS | Time.com
June 8, 2008
There was always something slightly insane about No Child Left Behind (NCLB), the ambitious education law often described as the Bush Administration's signature domestic achievement. For one thing, in the view of many educators, the law's 2014 goal — which calls for all public school students in grades 4 through 8 to be achieving on grade level in reading and math — is something no educational system anywhere on earth has ever accomplished. Even more unrealistic: every kid (except for 3% with serious handicaps or other issues) is supposed to be achieving on grade level every year, climbing in lockstep up an ever more challenging ladder. This flies in the face of all sorts of research showing that children start off in different places academically and grow at different rates.
Add to the mix the fact that much of the promised funding failed to materialize and many early critics insisted that No Child Left Behind was nothing more than a cynical plan to destroy American faith in public education and open the way to vouchers and school choice.
Now a former official in Bush's Education department is giving at least some support to that notion. Susan Neuman, a professor of education at the University Michigan who served as Assistant Secretary for Elementary and Secondary Education during George W. Bush's first term, was and still is a fervent believer in the goals of NCLB. And she says the President and then Secretary of Education Rod Paige were too. But there were others in the department, according to Neuman, who saw NCLB as a Trojan horse for the choice agenda — a way to expose the failure of public education and "blow it up a bit," she says. "There were a number of people pushing hard for market forces and privatization."
Tensions between NCLB believers and the blow-up-the-schools group were one reason the Bush Department of Education felt like "a pressure cooker," says Neuman, who left the Administration in early 2003. Another reason was political pressure to take the hardest possible line on school accountability in order to avoid looking lax — like the Clinton Administration. Thus, when Neuman and others argued that many schools would fail to reach the NCLB goals and needed more flexibility while making improvements, they were ignored. "We had this no-waiver policy," says Neuman. "The feeling was that the prior administration had given waivers willy-nilly."
It was only in Bush's second term that the hard line began to succumb to reality. Margaret Spellings, who replaced Paige as Secretary of Education in 2005, gradually opened the door to a more flexible and realistic approach to school accountability. Instead of demanding lockstep, grade-level achievement, schools in some states could meet the NCLB goals by demonstrating adequate student growth. (In this "growth model" approach, a student who was three years behind in reading and ended the year only one year behind would not be viewed as a failure.) "Going to the growth models is the right way to go," says Neuman. "I wish it had come earlier. It didn't because we were trying to be tough."
Neuman also regrets the Administration's use of humiliation and shame as a lever for school reform. Failure to meet NCLB's inflexible goals meant schools would be publicly labeled as failures. Neuman now sees this as a mistake: "Vilifying teachers and saying we are going to shame them was not the right approach."
The combination of inflexibility and public humiliation for those not meeting federal goals ignited so much frustration among educators that NCLB now appears to be an irreparably damaged brand. "The problems lingered long enough and there's so much anger that it may not be fixable," says Neuman. While the American Federation of Teachers was once on board with the NCLB goals, she notes, the union has turned against it. "Teachers hate NCLB because they feel like they've been picked on."
Is there a way out of the mess? Neuman still supports school accountability and the much-maligned annual tests mandated by the law. But she now believes that the nation has to look beyond the schoolroom, if it wishes to leave no child behind.
Along with 59 other top educators, policymakers and health officials--including three former surgeon generals, she's put her name to a nonpartisan document to be released on Tuesday by the Economic Policy Institute, a Washington think tank. Titled "A Broader, Bolder Approach to Education," it lays out an expansive vision for leveling the playing field for low-income kids, one that looks toward new policies on child health and support for parents and communities. The document states that much of the achievement gap between rich and poor "is rooted in what occurs outside of formal schooling," and therefore calls on policymakers to "rethink their assumptions" about what it will take to close that gap. Neuman says that money she's seen wasted on current programs, including much of the massive Title 1 spending should be reallocated according to this broader approach. "Pinning all our hopes on schools will never change the odds for kids."
Study of Small High Schools Yields Little on Achievement
Download the full report here.
Some of the Implementation Findings:
* The most prevalent SLC structures were freshman and career academies.
* Most participating schools chose to implement one or more SLC strategies, with block scheduling and teacher teams the most popular choices.
* Smaller Learning Community-related professional development, although provided by nearly all schools, was not very extensive.
* Most schools reported they applied for SLC funds to increase overall student academic achievement, academic achievement of at-risk students and student motivation.
* Schools reported a number of factors limiting effective SLC implementation, including scheduling and logistical issues, physical space, lack of teacher SLC professional development, and school staffing needs, especially in terms of core academic teachers and guidance counselors.
Additional outcomes from the Annual Performance Reports:
* The data suggest an upward trend in student extracurricular participation before and after program participation.
* There was a statistically significant positive trend in the percentage of 9th-grade students being promoted to 10th grade during the post-grant period.
* There was also a downward trend in the incidence of violence in SLC schools over time.
* The data suggest increases in the percentage of graduating students who reported they planed to attend either two- or four-year colleges.
* There were no significant trends observed in academic achievement, as measured by either scores on statewide assessments or college entrance exams over the short period of the study.
-Patricia
By David J. Hoff | Ed Week
May 16, 2008
High schools receiving $80 million in annual federal funding to support “smaller learning communities” can document that they are taking steps to establish learning environments more intimate than found in the typical comprehensive high school.
But, according to a federal study, such smaller schools can’t answer the most significant question: Is student achievement improving in the smaller settings?
The evaluation of the 8-year-old program found that schools participating in it show signs of success. In the schools, the proportion of students being promoted from 9th to 10th grade increases, participation in extracurricular activities rises, and the rate of violent incidents declines.
But the evaluation found “no significant trends” in achievement on state tests or college-entrance exams, says the report, which was prepared by a private contractor and released by the U.S. Department of Education last week.
Read On...
Some of the Implementation Findings:
* The most prevalent SLC structures were freshman and career academies.
* Most participating schools chose to implement one or more SLC strategies, with block scheduling and teacher teams the most popular choices.
* Smaller Learning Community-related professional development, although provided by nearly all schools, was not very extensive.
* Most schools reported they applied for SLC funds to increase overall student academic achievement, academic achievement of at-risk students and student motivation.
* Schools reported a number of factors limiting effective SLC implementation, including scheduling and logistical issues, physical space, lack of teacher SLC professional development, and school staffing needs, especially in terms of core academic teachers and guidance counselors.
Additional outcomes from the Annual Performance Reports:
* The data suggest an upward trend in student extracurricular participation before and after program participation.
* There was a statistically significant positive trend in the percentage of 9th-grade students being promoted to 10th grade during the post-grant period.
* There was also a downward trend in the incidence of violence in SLC schools over time.
* The data suggest increases in the percentage of graduating students who reported they planed to attend either two- or four-year colleges.
* There were no significant trends observed in academic achievement, as measured by either scores on statewide assessments or college entrance exams over the short period of the study.
-Patricia
By David J. Hoff | Ed Week
May 16, 2008
High schools receiving $80 million in annual federal funding to support “smaller learning communities” can document that they are taking steps to establish learning environments more intimate than found in the typical comprehensive high school.
But, according to a federal study, such smaller schools can’t answer the most significant question: Is student achievement improving in the smaller settings?
The evaluation of the 8-year-old program found that schools participating in it show signs of success. In the schools, the proportion of students being promoted from 9th to 10th grade increases, participation in extracurricular activities rises, and the rate of violent incidents declines.
But the evaluation found “no significant trends” in achievement on state tests or college-entrance exams, says the report, which was prepared by a private contractor and released by the U.S. Department of Education last week.
Read On...
Saturday, June 14, 2008
$6 million state grant aims to move students from dropout to graduate
$6 million state grant aims to move students from
dropout to graduate
By Kate Alexander
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Saturday, June 14, 2008
A Texas Education Agency grant program may open the
door for private schools to get public dollars to help
dropouts finish high school.
The $6 million grant, part of an effort to improve the
state's high schools, will provide money for programs
tailored to students who have dropped out of Texas
public schools. The objective is to help the students
earn a diploma or meet an alternative standard of
showing "college readiness."
The grant is open to public school districts, charter
schools, colleges and other education providers as
well as nonprofit organizations with experience in
providing educational programs.
That last category of eligible applicants allows for
nonprofit private schools to compete for the public
grant and has made the relatively small program the
focus of intense scrutiny. Religious schools are
eligible to apply, but the money cannot be used for
religious instruction.
As much as $150,000 in startup money is available for
each grantee, and additional money will be disbursed
based on each student's progress.
A private school, for example, could get as much as
$6,000 per student after the student passes certain
benchmarks, such as earning the credits to advance a
grade or getting a diploma, according to rules
proposed this week by the Texas Education Agency.
A public hearing on the proposal will be held at 9
a.m. June 25 at the Capitol Extension Auditorium.
Robert Aguirre, a San Antonio businessman who was a
founder of a $50 million privately funded voucher
program in San Antonio, said that private schools
should have a chance to compete but that they might
not jump at the opportunity.
He was asked by the state to pull together some
private schools and nonprofit organizations that might
want to apply for the grant.
Although the schools were interested in helping the
students, they could not make the financing work
because the money would come too late, he said.
"It was so bureaucratic and tenuous in terms of the
funding," Aguirre said. "It was a huge missed
opportunity by the State of Texas to really do
something meaningful to help some kids."
Public school advocates say that taxpayer money should
remain in schools with public accountability and that
the inclusion of private schools is an effort to
circumvent the Legislature's repeated rejection of
school voucher plans.
State Education Commissioner Robert Scott "has
basically thumbed his nose at the Legislature," said
Rep. Scott Hochberg, D-Houston.
He questioned why the state should put public money
toward unproven private school programs when "we have
districts and schools who are successful that are
crying out for money to enroll additional students."
Districts have only recently been given more
flexibility to work with dropouts by holding
after-hours classes and serving older students,
Hochberg said.
Scott, who has dismissed critics' contentions that he
is trying to slip through a voucher program, said at a
recent legislative hearing that private schools and
nonprofit groups bring more people to the table to
address a dire situation.
"We have a tremendous dropout problem, and we need all
hands on deck to try to fix it," Scott told the House
Public Education Committee.
Scott noted that the dropout program is different from
a voucher program because the money goes to the
school, not to the student or his or her parents, and
does not reduce money going to the student's public
school district.
The Texas Education Agency is tackling a new and
complicated challenge by focusing on students who have
dropped out of school, and the state needs to corral
all resources and expertise to succeed, said Jan
Lindsey, the agency's senior director for college and
career readiness initiatives.
About 20 potential grantees have indicated that they
intend to apply for the one-year pilot program.
The application deadline is July 1.
Lindsey did not know if any of the likely applicants
were private schools. She said the agency is looking
at how to address the private schools' desire to have
the money made available earlier while also requiring
proof that progress is being made.
The Rev. Jayme Mathias, president of San Juan Diego
Catholic High School in Austin, said his school would
not apply for the grant. Though the grant's mission
fits well with that of his school, Mathias said, it
would be difficult to make it work with the school's
required theology curriculum and its work-study
program.
kalexander@statesman.com; 445-3618
dropout to graduate
By Kate Alexander
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Saturday, June 14, 2008
A Texas Education Agency grant program may open the
door for private schools to get public dollars to help
dropouts finish high school.
The $6 million grant, part of an effort to improve the
state's high schools, will provide money for programs
tailored to students who have dropped out of Texas
public schools. The objective is to help the students
earn a diploma or meet an alternative standard of
showing "college readiness."
The grant is open to public school districts, charter
schools, colleges and other education providers as
well as nonprofit organizations with experience in
providing educational programs.
That last category of eligible applicants allows for
nonprofit private schools to compete for the public
grant and has made the relatively small program the
focus of intense scrutiny. Religious schools are
eligible to apply, but the money cannot be used for
religious instruction.
As much as $150,000 in startup money is available for
each grantee, and additional money will be disbursed
based on each student's progress.
A private school, for example, could get as much as
$6,000 per student after the student passes certain
benchmarks, such as earning the credits to advance a
grade or getting a diploma, according to rules
proposed this week by the Texas Education Agency.
A public hearing on the proposal will be held at 9
a.m. June 25 at the Capitol Extension Auditorium.
Robert Aguirre, a San Antonio businessman who was a
founder of a $50 million privately funded voucher
program in San Antonio, said that private schools
should have a chance to compete but that they might
not jump at the opportunity.
He was asked by the state to pull together some
private schools and nonprofit organizations that might
want to apply for the grant.
Although the schools were interested in helping the
students, they could not make the financing work
because the money would come too late, he said.
"It was so bureaucratic and tenuous in terms of the
funding," Aguirre said. "It was a huge missed
opportunity by the State of Texas to really do
something meaningful to help some kids."
Public school advocates say that taxpayer money should
remain in schools with public accountability and that
the inclusion of private schools is an effort to
circumvent the Legislature's repeated rejection of
school voucher plans.
State Education Commissioner Robert Scott "has
basically thumbed his nose at the Legislature," said
Rep. Scott Hochberg, D-Houston.
He questioned why the state should put public money
toward unproven private school programs when "we have
districts and schools who are successful that are
crying out for money to enroll additional students."
Districts have only recently been given more
flexibility to work with dropouts by holding
after-hours classes and serving older students,
Hochberg said.
Scott, who has dismissed critics' contentions that he
is trying to slip through a voucher program, said at a
recent legislative hearing that private schools and
nonprofit groups bring more people to the table to
address a dire situation.
"We have a tremendous dropout problem, and we need all
hands on deck to try to fix it," Scott told the House
Public Education Committee.
Scott noted that the dropout program is different from
a voucher program because the money goes to the
school, not to the student or his or her parents, and
does not reduce money going to the student's public
school district.
The Texas Education Agency is tackling a new and
complicated challenge by focusing on students who have
dropped out of school, and the state needs to corral
all resources and expertise to succeed, said Jan
Lindsey, the agency's senior director for college and
career readiness initiatives.
About 20 potential grantees have indicated that they
intend to apply for the one-year pilot program.
The application deadline is July 1.
Lindsey did not know if any of the likely applicants
were private schools. She said the agency is looking
at how to address the private schools' desire to have
the money made available earlier while also requiring
proof that progress is being made.
The Rev. Jayme Mathias, president of San Juan Diego
Catholic High School in Austin, said his school would
not apply for the grant. Though the grant's mission
fits well with that of his school, Mathias said, it
would be difficult to make it work with the school's
required theology curriculum and its work-study
program.
kalexander@statesman.com; 445-3618
$6 million state grant aims to move students from
by Kate Alexander
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Saturday, June 14, 2008
A Texas Education Agency grant program may open the
door for private schools to get public dollars to help
dropouts finish high school.
The $6 million grant, part of an effort to improve the
state's high schools, will provide money for programs
tailored to students who have dropped out of Texas
public schools. The objective is to help the students
earn a diploma or meet an alternative standard of
showing "college readiness."
The grant is open to public school districts, charter
schools, colleges and other education providers as
well as nonprofit organizations with experience in
providing educational programs.
That last category of eligible applicants allows for
nonprofit private schools to compete for the public
grant and has made the relatively small program the
focus of intense scrutiny. Religious schools are
eligible to apply, but the money cannot be used for
religious instruction.
As much as $150,000 in startup money is available for
each grantee, and additional money will be disbursed
based on each student's progress.
A private school, for example, could get as much as
$6,000 per student after the student passes certain
benchmarks, such as earning the credits to advance a
grade or getting a diploma, according to rules
proposed this week by the Texas Education Agency.
A public hearing on the proposal will be held at 9
a.m. June 25 at the Capitol Extension Auditorium.
Robert Aguirre, a San Antonio businessman who was a
founder of a $50 million privately funded voucher
program in San Antonio, said that private schools
should have a chance to compete but that they might
not jump at the opportunity.
He was asked by the state to pull together some
private schools and nonprofit organizations that might
want to apply for the grant.
Although the schools were interested in helping the
students, they could not make the financing work
because the money would come too late, he said.
"It was so bureaucratic and tenuous in terms of the
funding," Aguirre said. "It was a huge missed
opportunity by the State of Texas to really do
something meaningful to help some kids."
Public school advocates say that taxpayer money should
remain in schools with public accountability and that
the inclusion of private schools is an effort to
circumvent the Legislature's repeated rejection of
school voucher plans.
State Education Commissioner Robert Scott "has
basically thumbed his nose at the Legislature," said
Rep. Scott Hochberg, D-Houston.
He questioned why the state should put public money
toward unproven private school programs when "we have
districts and schools who are successful that are
crying out for money to enroll additional students."
Districts have only recently been given more
flexibility to work with dropouts by holding
after-hours classes and serving older students,
Hochberg said.
Scott, who has dismissed critics' contentions that he
is trying to slip through a voucher program, said at a
recent legislative hearing that private schools and
nonprofit groups bring more people to the table to
address a dire situation.
"We have a tremendous dropout problem, and we need all
hands on deck to try to fix it," Scott told the House
Public Education Committee.
Scott noted that the dropout program is different from
a voucher program because the money goes to the
school, not to the student or his or her parents, and
does not reduce money going to the student's public
school district.
The Texas Education Agency is tackling a new and
complicated challenge by focusing on students who have
dropped out of school, and the state needs to corral
all resources and expertise to succeed, said Jan
Lindsey, the agency's senior director for college and
career readiness initiatives.
About 20 potential grantees have indicated that they
intend to apply for the one-year pilot program.
The application deadline is July 1.
Lindsey did not know if any of the likely applicants
were private schools. She said the agency is looking
at how to address the private schools' desire to have
the money made available earlier while also requiring
proof that progress is being made.
The Rev. Jayme Mathias, president of San Juan Diego
Catholic High School in Austin, said his school would
not apply for the grant. Though the grant's mission
fits well with that of his school, Mathias said, it
would be difficult to make it work with the school's
required theology curriculum and its work-study
program.
kalexander@statesman.com; 445-3618
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Saturday, June 14, 2008
A Texas Education Agency grant program may open the
door for private schools to get public dollars to help
dropouts finish high school.
The $6 million grant, part of an effort to improve the
state's high schools, will provide money for programs
tailored to students who have dropped out of Texas
public schools. The objective is to help the students
earn a diploma or meet an alternative standard of
showing "college readiness."
The grant is open to public school districts, charter
schools, colleges and other education providers as
well as nonprofit organizations with experience in
providing educational programs.
That last category of eligible applicants allows for
nonprofit private schools to compete for the public
grant and has made the relatively small program the
focus of intense scrutiny. Religious schools are
eligible to apply, but the money cannot be used for
religious instruction.
As much as $150,000 in startup money is available for
each grantee, and additional money will be disbursed
based on each student's progress.
A private school, for example, could get as much as
$6,000 per student after the student passes certain
benchmarks, such as earning the credits to advance a
grade or getting a diploma, according to rules
proposed this week by the Texas Education Agency.
A public hearing on the proposal will be held at 9
a.m. June 25 at the Capitol Extension Auditorium.
Robert Aguirre, a San Antonio businessman who was a
founder of a $50 million privately funded voucher
program in San Antonio, said that private schools
should have a chance to compete but that they might
not jump at the opportunity.
He was asked by the state to pull together some
private schools and nonprofit organizations that might
want to apply for the grant.
Although the schools were interested in helping the
students, they could not make the financing work
because the money would come too late, he said.
"It was so bureaucratic and tenuous in terms of the
funding," Aguirre said. "It was a huge missed
opportunity by the State of Texas to really do
something meaningful to help some kids."
Public school advocates say that taxpayer money should
remain in schools with public accountability and that
the inclusion of private schools is an effort to
circumvent the Legislature's repeated rejection of
school voucher plans.
State Education Commissioner Robert Scott "has
basically thumbed his nose at the Legislature," said
Rep. Scott Hochberg, D-Houston.
He questioned why the state should put public money
toward unproven private school programs when "we have
districts and schools who are successful that are
crying out for money to enroll additional students."
Districts have only recently been given more
flexibility to work with dropouts by holding
after-hours classes and serving older students,
Hochberg said.
Scott, who has dismissed critics' contentions that he
is trying to slip through a voucher program, said at a
recent legislative hearing that private schools and
nonprofit groups bring more people to the table to
address a dire situation.
"We have a tremendous dropout problem, and we need all
hands on deck to try to fix it," Scott told the House
Public Education Committee.
Scott noted that the dropout program is different from
a voucher program because the money goes to the
school, not to the student or his or her parents, and
does not reduce money going to the student's public
school district.
The Texas Education Agency is tackling a new and
complicated challenge by focusing on students who have
dropped out of school, and the state needs to corral
all resources and expertise to succeed, said Jan
Lindsey, the agency's senior director for college and
career readiness initiatives.
About 20 potential grantees have indicated that they
intend to apply for the one-year pilot program.
The application deadline is July 1.
Lindsey did not know if any of the likely applicants
were private schools. She said the agency is looking
at how to address the private schools' desire to have
the money made available earlier while also requiring
proof that progress is being made.
The Rev. Jayme Mathias, president of San Juan Diego
Catholic High School in Austin, said his school would
not apply for the grant. Though the grant's mission
fits well with that of his school, Mathias said, it
would be difficult to make it work with the school's
required theology curriculum and its work-study
program.
kalexander@statesman.com; 445-3618
Thursday, June 12, 2008
Bush Loyalist Fights Foes of ‘No Child’ Law
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG
Published: June 12, 2008
NEWPORT, Ky. — Margaret Spellings is not running for office — at least, not yet. But in the waning days of the Bush presidency, she is running one last campaign.
On a cold and soggy morning in March, Ms. Spellings, the relentlessly cheery and sometimes sassy United States secretary of education, turned up here, at a little brick elementary school across the Ohio River from Cincinnati. She had been on the road for months, promoting President Bush’s beleaguered education initiative, No Child Left Behind, delivering one sales pitch after another.
“I’m pretty sure that the new president, whoever it is, will not show up and work on George Bush’s domestic achievement on Day 1,” she told a group of civic leaders and educators, promising to do “everything in my power” to improve the law before the White House changes hands.
For Ms. Spellings, a longtime and exceedingly loyal member of the Bush inner circle, it was a startling, if tacit, admission that the president’s education legacy is in danger. No Child Left Behind — the signature domestic achievement, beyond tax cuts, of the entire Bush presidency — has changed the lives of millions of American students, parents, teachers and school administrators. Yet its future is in grave doubt.
Adopted by Congress on a wave of bipartisan unity that followed the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the law imposed unprecedented testing requirements and tough expectations on the nation’s nearly 99,000 public schools. But despite rising test scores, there is no hard-and-fast evidence, most experts say, that it is actually improving student achievement.
Today, roughly 11 percent of schools do not meet the law’s standards — a figure that is expected to climb sharply as more schools struggle to meet the demand that all students be proficient in reading and math by 2014. The bill is so deeply unpopular that Representative George Miller, the California Democrat who was its chief sponsor, often calls No Child Left Behind “the most negative brand in the country.”
The White House had hoped Congress would revisit the bill this year, but on Capitol Hill, prospects for updating the legislation are virtually dead. On the presidential campaign trail, the presumptive Democratic nominee, Senator Barack Obama of Illinois, vows to overhaul it. The presumptive Republican nominee, Senator John McCain of Arizona, supports the law, though Ms. Spellings knows his priorities are elsewhere.
“It’s not his passion,” she said. “It’s George Bush’s passion.”
And so, the education secretary has hit the road. She has visited more than 20 states this year, testifying in capitals from Tallahassee to Topeka, trying to gin up support for the measure while announcing administrative changes intended to make it more palatable — an insurance policy, of sorts, to help it withstand an assault after Mr. Bush leaves office.
She carts her own roller bag, changing into blue jeans in airline frequent-flyer lounges, so as not to rumple her business suits. She has slogged through inclement weather, flight delays and bad airport food.
“This is my child, my baby,” she said over dinner in Maysville, Ky., referring to the No Child law.
And with seven months left to go, she is not prepared to let it slip away.
A Triumph
The story of how No Child Left Behind morphed from a bipartisan legislative triumph into a laugh line on the Democratic campaign trail is, in part, the larger story of the Bush domestic policy agenda, of a Texas governor who came to Washington vowing to be “the education president” and wound up consumed with fighting terrorism and two wars.
But it is also the story of “little old Margaret Spellings,” as she sometimes calls herself, and her personal journey with Mr. Bush.
They met in the early 1990s — a mutual friend, the political strategist Karl Rove, introduced them — when Mr. Bush was toying with running for governor and she was still Margaret LaMontagne, the chief lobbyist for the Texas Association of School Boards. She helped run the campaign, became a top aide in Austin and, after a divorce, followed Mr. Bush to Washington, a single mother raising two daughters with a big new title: chief of domestic policy.
Today, Secretary Spellings (she married Robert Spellings, an Austin lawyer, in August 2001, and became education secretary in January 2005) is one of a handful of the so-called original Texans still working for Mr. Bush. At 50, she is viewed as a potential candidate for Texas governor and is also one of several determined women, among them Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who count Mr. Bush as a boss and a friend.
“She and Bush have a special relationship, a camaraderie,” Mr. Spellings said of his wife, adding, “She trusts him, and she loves him.”
Perhaps more than any other adviser, Ms. Spellings helped shape the Bush education philosophy: a strict emphasis on standards and accountability, intended to close the “achievement gap” between black and white, rich and poor. While other Republicans talked of dismantling the federal Department of Education, Mr. Bush cast education as a civil rights issue, challenging “the soft bigotry of low expectations.”
These were the foundations of No Child Left Behind. The law’s cornerstone is its requirement that states set targets and issue detailed reports on student performance. Schools must improve the performance of subgroups, including minority, low-income and disabled students. Schools that repeatedly fail to report progress are deemed “in need of improvement,” the law’s term for failing. Students may transfer out of failing schools, and the schools risk being shut down.
On a wall in a hallway outside her office in Washington — a spacious affair with huge glass windows overlooking the Capitol and paintings on loan from the Smithsonian — Ms. Spellings keeps framed mementos of the passage of the bill: The Senate vote roster, 87 to 10; a congratulatory note from Representative John A. Boehner of Ohio, a key Republican sponsor; a schedule from Mr. Bush’s bill-signing tour, a bipartisan road show featuring Senator Edward M. Kennedy, the Massachusetts Democrat.
Ms. Spellings was still so new to Washington, so green, that she did not realize how extraordinary it all was — or how quickly the relationship between the Bush White House and Congress would sour.
“We were used to doing business like that in Texas,” she said. “We just thought that’s how it was done.”
The Criticism
The backlash was swift.
States that did not use annual tests to assess progress scrambled to meet the law’s requirement for testing students in third through eighth grades every year. Even states that did rely on testing, like Kentucky, protested what officials saw as the heavy hand of the federal government.
Kentucky already had what its education commissioner, Jon Draud, calls a “high-stakes accountability program.” But meshing the two “was like putting a slightly round peg into a slightly square hole,” said Lisa Gross, a spokeswoman for Mr. Draud’s agency.
Kentucky assessed student achievement every two years; No Child demanded it every year. Kentucky tested seven subject areas; the federal law required just reading and math. Kentucky marked progress based on a school’s growth; under No Child Left Behind, a school either passed or failed.
So schools could pass by Kentucky’s standards, but fail by Washington’s. The state pushed back, to no avail. “We said, ‘What you’re proposing is very similar to what Kentucky is already doing, and we have found that it is a much stronger, more reliable system if you do two years’ worth of data as an average, and give schools a little more flexibility,’ ” Ms. Gross said. “They say, ‘Well, that’s not how we want to do it.’ ”
Back in Washington, the Education Department, under Secretary Rod Paige, struggled to issue the regulations states needed to put the law into effect, said Gene Hickok, a former deputy secretary. Mr. Hickok remembers “an ongoing sense of tension” between Mr. Paige and Ms. Spellings, who from her perch at the White House pushed for faster action. Mr. Hickok said both he and Ms. Spellings urged a firm stand against states seeking exemptions — a rigid approach that critics say helped undermine support for the law.
To make matters worse, Mr. Hickok said, the department had no public relations strategy to counter the burgeoning opposition. (The strategy it ultimately adopted — secretly paying Armstrong Williams, a conservative commentator, to promote the bill — backfired badly. The Government Accountability Office concluded it violated federal law.)
On Capitol Hill, Mr. Boehner was up in arms.
“There was just silence coming out of the department, the regulations were slow in coming and there wasn’t as much discussion with the states as there should have been,” he said, calling the department’s efforts “a fiasco.”
As the law identified schools in trouble, Democrats like Mr. Kennedy began accusing Mr. Bush of reneging on a promise of more federal money to help struggling schools right themselves. “We had reform,” the senator said. “What we needed were resources.”
In 2003, the National Education Association, one of the nation’s two biggest teachers’ unions, surveyed its members, laying the groundwork for a major message campaign that would denounce No Child Left Behind as “a one-size-fits-all approach to learning.” The union’s president, Reg Weaver, said, “We needed to galvanize our members as well as the public around a law that was not doing what it was intended to do.”
By the time Mr. Bush replaced the much-criticized Mr. Paige with Ms. Spellings in 2005, thousands of schools were being declared failing, and states were in open rebellion. Utah threatened to opt out. Connecticut eventually sued.
“No Child Left Behind, as implemented, has not passed the common sense or the fairness test,” said Joe Nathan, director of the Center for School Change at the University of Minnesota. “It did not make sense to citizens or legislators to say that this school is going to have to be closed or reorganized because kids who may have been disabled are not achieving standards.”
It was against such opposition that Ms. Spellings arrived at the Fourth Street Elementary School, the little brick building in Newport, on that soggy March day.
The school is a showcase, a model of a thriving urban school. Roughly 85 percent of pupils at Fourth Street received free or reduced meals — a barometer of economic disadvantage that can indicate poor performance. But through aggressive efforts to hire math and reading specialists, Fourth Street is making the grade under No Child Left Behind.
On the day Ms. Spellings visited, a 28-year veteran math teacher named Lynn Roberts was teaching first-graders about money — not an easy task when students rarely see money at home.
“I want you to see if you can make 28 cents,” Ms. Roberts announced brightly, as little hands began sifting through piles of coins.
A little boy named Tahj shot his arm up in the air. “Two nickels, two dimes and three pennies,” Tahj declared, for a total of 33 cents. The teacher gently corrected him; Ms. Spellings left impressed.
“These are not people who are sitting around whining about No Child Left Behind,” Ms. Spellings said. “These are people who are hard at work.”
In fact, Ms. Roberts and other Fourth Street teachers have serious concerns about No Child Left Behind. “My concern is that there is such pressure on assessment,” Ms. Roberts said in a later interview, “that oftentimes people are working hard to pass the test, and not to gain real understanding.”
Ms. Spellings often says the bill requires just one test a year, and here in Kentucky, the same test is used for both state and federal assessments. But Doug Alpiger, the Fourth Street principal, said tests beget more tests, because school districts want proof their students are on track.
At Fourth Street Elementary, the signs are everywhere. Classroom doors are posted with pie charts and bar graphs showing test results, though not by name. Hallways are lined with hand-made posters exhorting students to “Try your best!” on standardized tests.
“Assessments are very important, and I said that to the secretary,” Mr. Alpiger said. “It’s important for us to use data to drive our instruction. But the emphasis appears to be so much on assessment that, I’m telling you, at times during the year, our kids are being formally assessed for a month straight.”
Repair Efforts
As she travels the country, Ms. Spellings talks up efforts to use her executive powers to address concerns like Mr. Alpiger’s. For instance, she has begun a pilot program allowing certain states to measure progress using a “growth model,” a technique similar to the one that Kentucky was forced to abandon.
As to whether the law has truly narrowed the achievement gap, the secretary promotes studies showing math and reading scores improving. “I like to say we are pleased, but not satisfied,” Ms. Spellings said here in Newport.
But the Center on Education Policy, a research organization in Washington, concluded in a 2007 study that it is “very difficult, if not impossible” to draw a cause-and-effect relationship, in part because scores were going up before the bill was passed. The center’s director, Jack Jennings, says Ms. Spellings’ initiatives are too narrowly written to make real change, and faults her spending more time being “a political operative” than listening to teachers.
“All these complaints aren’t silly,” Mr. Jennings said. “There’s substance to them.”
On Capitol Hill, Mr. Miller complains that he proposed similar fixes, but was rebuffed by the White House. “They sabotaged the reauthorization,” he said, “and now she’s running around trying to salvage a legacy that can’t be salvaged.”
Yet others, like Gene Wilhoit, a former Kentucky education commissioner who now runs the Council of Chief State School Officers, praise Ms. Spellings for trying to repair relations with states.
“My question,” Mr. Wilhoit says, “is: ‘Is it too late?’ ”
For Ms. Spellings, it may not be; her travels have raised her profile, building a network of connections that could prove useful if she runs for public office. She says she views the churning around No Child Left Behind as “a badge of honor,” the price Mr. Bush had to pay for making what she calls “powerful and profound” reform.
Both supporters and detractors of No Child Left Behind agree that when the history of the Bush administration is written, the president will have succeeded, at least, in changing the American conversation about education.
As Mr. Wilhoit said, accountability “is now anchored into the process.”
Yet many say Mr. Bush’s promise to be “the education president” has gone unfulfilled.
To Mr. Kennedy, Mr. Bush squandered an opportunity to have “a legacy as great as Medicare.” Mr. Weaver, the union official, gives Mr. Bush a D. Jim Hunt, the former Democratic governor of North Carolina, who is close to Ms. Spellings and backs the law, blames the president for the erosion in support.
“He didn’t stick with it,” Mr. Hunt said. Ms. Spellings, upon hearing this, drew in a deep breath.
She was sitting in her Washington office, the one with the Smithsonian paintings, drinking coffee from a porcelain cup, a long way from Texas. She paused a moment and then, in her own loyal way, effectively conceded Mr. Hunt’s point.
“Well, you know, obviously, absent 9/11 and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, I think the whole domestic agenda would have been different,” she said. “He ended up being a wartime president and as such has devoted — appropriately so — time and energy to those issues. But with respect to how education fares compared with other domestic priorities, I think we’ve done well.”
Published: June 12, 2008
NEWPORT, Ky. — Margaret Spellings is not running for office — at least, not yet. But in the waning days of the Bush presidency, she is running one last campaign.
On a cold and soggy morning in March, Ms. Spellings, the relentlessly cheery and sometimes sassy United States secretary of education, turned up here, at a little brick elementary school across the Ohio River from Cincinnati. She had been on the road for months, promoting President Bush’s beleaguered education initiative, No Child Left Behind, delivering one sales pitch after another.
“I’m pretty sure that the new president, whoever it is, will not show up and work on George Bush’s domestic achievement on Day 1,” she told a group of civic leaders and educators, promising to do “everything in my power” to improve the law before the White House changes hands.
For Ms. Spellings, a longtime and exceedingly loyal member of the Bush inner circle, it was a startling, if tacit, admission that the president’s education legacy is in danger. No Child Left Behind — the signature domestic achievement, beyond tax cuts, of the entire Bush presidency — has changed the lives of millions of American students, parents, teachers and school administrators. Yet its future is in grave doubt.
Adopted by Congress on a wave of bipartisan unity that followed the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the law imposed unprecedented testing requirements and tough expectations on the nation’s nearly 99,000 public schools. But despite rising test scores, there is no hard-and-fast evidence, most experts say, that it is actually improving student achievement.
Today, roughly 11 percent of schools do not meet the law’s standards — a figure that is expected to climb sharply as more schools struggle to meet the demand that all students be proficient in reading and math by 2014. The bill is so deeply unpopular that Representative George Miller, the California Democrat who was its chief sponsor, often calls No Child Left Behind “the most negative brand in the country.”
The White House had hoped Congress would revisit the bill this year, but on Capitol Hill, prospects for updating the legislation are virtually dead. On the presidential campaign trail, the presumptive Democratic nominee, Senator Barack Obama of Illinois, vows to overhaul it. The presumptive Republican nominee, Senator John McCain of Arizona, supports the law, though Ms. Spellings knows his priorities are elsewhere.
“It’s not his passion,” she said. “It’s George Bush’s passion.”
And so, the education secretary has hit the road. She has visited more than 20 states this year, testifying in capitals from Tallahassee to Topeka, trying to gin up support for the measure while announcing administrative changes intended to make it more palatable — an insurance policy, of sorts, to help it withstand an assault after Mr. Bush leaves office.
She carts her own roller bag, changing into blue jeans in airline frequent-flyer lounges, so as not to rumple her business suits. She has slogged through inclement weather, flight delays and bad airport food.
“This is my child, my baby,” she said over dinner in Maysville, Ky., referring to the No Child law.
And with seven months left to go, she is not prepared to let it slip away.
A Triumph
The story of how No Child Left Behind morphed from a bipartisan legislative triumph into a laugh line on the Democratic campaign trail is, in part, the larger story of the Bush domestic policy agenda, of a Texas governor who came to Washington vowing to be “the education president” and wound up consumed with fighting terrorism and two wars.
But it is also the story of “little old Margaret Spellings,” as she sometimes calls herself, and her personal journey with Mr. Bush.
They met in the early 1990s — a mutual friend, the political strategist Karl Rove, introduced them — when Mr. Bush was toying with running for governor and she was still Margaret LaMontagne, the chief lobbyist for the Texas Association of School Boards. She helped run the campaign, became a top aide in Austin and, after a divorce, followed Mr. Bush to Washington, a single mother raising two daughters with a big new title: chief of domestic policy.
Today, Secretary Spellings (she married Robert Spellings, an Austin lawyer, in August 2001, and became education secretary in January 2005) is one of a handful of the so-called original Texans still working for Mr. Bush. At 50, she is viewed as a potential candidate for Texas governor and is also one of several determined women, among them Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who count Mr. Bush as a boss and a friend.
“She and Bush have a special relationship, a camaraderie,” Mr. Spellings said of his wife, adding, “She trusts him, and she loves him.”
Perhaps more than any other adviser, Ms. Spellings helped shape the Bush education philosophy: a strict emphasis on standards and accountability, intended to close the “achievement gap” between black and white, rich and poor. While other Republicans talked of dismantling the federal Department of Education, Mr. Bush cast education as a civil rights issue, challenging “the soft bigotry of low expectations.”
These were the foundations of No Child Left Behind. The law’s cornerstone is its requirement that states set targets and issue detailed reports on student performance. Schools must improve the performance of subgroups, including minority, low-income and disabled students. Schools that repeatedly fail to report progress are deemed “in need of improvement,” the law’s term for failing. Students may transfer out of failing schools, and the schools risk being shut down.
On a wall in a hallway outside her office in Washington — a spacious affair with huge glass windows overlooking the Capitol and paintings on loan from the Smithsonian — Ms. Spellings keeps framed mementos of the passage of the bill: The Senate vote roster, 87 to 10; a congratulatory note from Representative John A. Boehner of Ohio, a key Republican sponsor; a schedule from Mr. Bush’s bill-signing tour, a bipartisan road show featuring Senator Edward M. Kennedy, the Massachusetts Democrat.
Ms. Spellings was still so new to Washington, so green, that she did not realize how extraordinary it all was — or how quickly the relationship between the Bush White House and Congress would sour.
“We were used to doing business like that in Texas,” she said. “We just thought that’s how it was done.”
The Criticism
The backlash was swift.
States that did not use annual tests to assess progress scrambled to meet the law’s requirement for testing students in third through eighth grades every year. Even states that did rely on testing, like Kentucky, protested what officials saw as the heavy hand of the federal government.
Kentucky already had what its education commissioner, Jon Draud, calls a “high-stakes accountability program.” But meshing the two “was like putting a slightly round peg into a slightly square hole,” said Lisa Gross, a spokeswoman for Mr. Draud’s agency.
Kentucky assessed student achievement every two years; No Child demanded it every year. Kentucky tested seven subject areas; the federal law required just reading and math. Kentucky marked progress based on a school’s growth; under No Child Left Behind, a school either passed or failed.
So schools could pass by Kentucky’s standards, but fail by Washington’s. The state pushed back, to no avail. “We said, ‘What you’re proposing is very similar to what Kentucky is already doing, and we have found that it is a much stronger, more reliable system if you do two years’ worth of data as an average, and give schools a little more flexibility,’ ” Ms. Gross said. “They say, ‘Well, that’s not how we want to do it.’ ”
Back in Washington, the Education Department, under Secretary Rod Paige, struggled to issue the regulations states needed to put the law into effect, said Gene Hickok, a former deputy secretary. Mr. Hickok remembers “an ongoing sense of tension” between Mr. Paige and Ms. Spellings, who from her perch at the White House pushed for faster action. Mr. Hickok said both he and Ms. Spellings urged a firm stand against states seeking exemptions — a rigid approach that critics say helped undermine support for the law.
To make matters worse, Mr. Hickok said, the department had no public relations strategy to counter the burgeoning opposition. (The strategy it ultimately adopted — secretly paying Armstrong Williams, a conservative commentator, to promote the bill — backfired badly. The Government Accountability Office concluded it violated federal law.)
On Capitol Hill, Mr. Boehner was up in arms.
“There was just silence coming out of the department, the regulations were slow in coming and there wasn’t as much discussion with the states as there should have been,” he said, calling the department’s efforts “a fiasco.”
As the law identified schools in trouble, Democrats like Mr. Kennedy began accusing Mr. Bush of reneging on a promise of more federal money to help struggling schools right themselves. “We had reform,” the senator said. “What we needed were resources.”
In 2003, the National Education Association, one of the nation’s two biggest teachers’ unions, surveyed its members, laying the groundwork for a major message campaign that would denounce No Child Left Behind as “a one-size-fits-all approach to learning.” The union’s president, Reg Weaver, said, “We needed to galvanize our members as well as the public around a law that was not doing what it was intended to do.”
By the time Mr. Bush replaced the much-criticized Mr. Paige with Ms. Spellings in 2005, thousands of schools were being declared failing, and states were in open rebellion. Utah threatened to opt out. Connecticut eventually sued.
“No Child Left Behind, as implemented, has not passed the common sense or the fairness test,” said Joe Nathan, director of the Center for School Change at the University of Minnesota. “It did not make sense to citizens or legislators to say that this school is going to have to be closed or reorganized because kids who may have been disabled are not achieving standards.”
It was against such opposition that Ms. Spellings arrived at the Fourth Street Elementary School, the little brick building in Newport, on that soggy March day.
The school is a showcase, a model of a thriving urban school. Roughly 85 percent of pupils at Fourth Street received free or reduced meals — a barometer of economic disadvantage that can indicate poor performance. But through aggressive efforts to hire math and reading specialists, Fourth Street is making the grade under No Child Left Behind.
On the day Ms. Spellings visited, a 28-year veteran math teacher named Lynn Roberts was teaching first-graders about money — not an easy task when students rarely see money at home.
“I want you to see if you can make 28 cents,” Ms. Roberts announced brightly, as little hands began sifting through piles of coins.
A little boy named Tahj shot his arm up in the air. “Two nickels, two dimes and three pennies,” Tahj declared, for a total of 33 cents. The teacher gently corrected him; Ms. Spellings left impressed.
“These are not people who are sitting around whining about No Child Left Behind,” Ms. Spellings said. “These are people who are hard at work.”
In fact, Ms. Roberts and other Fourth Street teachers have serious concerns about No Child Left Behind. “My concern is that there is such pressure on assessment,” Ms. Roberts said in a later interview, “that oftentimes people are working hard to pass the test, and not to gain real understanding.”
Ms. Spellings often says the bill requires just one test a year, and here in Kentucky, the same test is used for both state and federal assessments. But Doug Alpiger, the Fourth Street principal, said tests beget more tests, because school districts want proof their students are on track.
At Fourth Street Elementary, the signs are everywhere. Classroom doors are posted with pie charts and bar graphs showing test results, though not by name. Hallways are lined with hand-made posters exhorting students to “Try your best!” on standardized tests.
“Assessments are very important, and I said that to the secretary,” Mr. Alpiger said. “It’s important for us to use data to drive our instruction. But the emphasis appears to be so much on assessment that, I’m telling you, at times during the year, our kids are being formally assessed for a month straight.”
Repair Efforts
As she travels the country, Ms. Spellings talks up efforts to use her executive powers to address concerns like Mr. Alpiger’s. For instance, she has begun a pilot program allowing certain states to measure progress using a “growth model,” a technique similar to the one that Kentucky was forced to abandon.
As to whether the law has truly narrowed the achievement gap, the secretary promotes studies showing math and reading scores improving. “I like to say we are pleased, but not satisfied,” Ms. Spellings said here in Newport.
But the Center on Education Policy, a research organization in Washington, concluded in a 2007 study that it is “very difficult, if not impossible” to draw a cause-and-effect relationship, in part because scores were going up before the bill was passed. The center’s director, Jack Jennings, says Ms. Spellings’ initiatives are too narrowly written to make real change, and faults her spending more time being “a political operative” than listening to teachers.
“All these complaints aren’t silly,” Mr. Jennings said. “There’s substance to them.”
On Capitol Hill, Mr. Miller complains that he proposed similar fixes, but was rebuffed by the White House. “They sabotaged the reauthorization,” he said, “and now she’s running around trying to salvage a legacy that can’t be salvaged.”
Yet others, like Gene Wilhoit, a former Kentucky education commissioner who now runs the Council of Chief State School Officers, praise Ms. Spellings for trying to repair relations with states.
“My question,” Mr. Wilhoit says, “is: ‘Is it too late?’ ”
For Ms. Spellings, it may not be; her travels have raised her profile, building a network of connections that could prove useful if she runs for public office. She says she views the churning around No Child Left Behind as “a badge of honor,” the price Mr. Bush had to pay for making what she calls “powerful and profound” reform.
Both supporters and detractors of No Child Left Behind agree that when the history of the Bush administration is written, the president will have succeeded, at least, in changing the American conversation about education.
As Mr. Wilhoit said, accountability “is now anchored into the process.”
Yet many say Mr. Bush’s promise to be “the education president” has gone unfulfilled.
To Mr. Kennedy, Mr. Bush squandered an opportunity to have “a legacy as great as Medicare.” Mr. Weaver, the union official, gives Mr. Bush a D. Jim Hunt, the former Democratic governor of North Carolina, who is close to Ms. Spellings and backs the law, blames the president for the erosion in support.
“He didn’t stick with it,” Mr. Hunt said. Ms. Spellings, upon hearing this, drew in a deep breath.
She was sitting in her Washington office, the one with the Smithsonian paintings, drinking coffee from a porcelain cup, a long way from Texas. She paused a moment and then, in her own loyal way, effectively conceded Mr. Hunt’s point.
“Well, you know, obviously, absent 9/11 and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, I think the whole domestic agenda would have been different,” she said. “He ended up being a wartime president and as such has devoted — appropriately so — time and energy to those issues. But with respect to how education fares compared with other domestic priorities, I think we’ve done well.”
Democrats Offer Plans to Revamp Schools Law
By SAM DILLON | NY Times
June 12, 2008
Democrats are dividing into camps as they debate a new course for education policy after President Bush leaves office.
On Wednesday, a group of a dozen prominent educators and lawmakers, led by Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein of New York and the Rev. Al Sharpton, said the United States’ public schools shortchanged poor black and Latino children in a way that was “shameful,” and urged Washington to squeeze teachers and administrators harder to raise achievement among minorities.
On Tuesday, about 60 prominent educators and academics issued another manifesto, which criticized the federal No Child Left Behind law and argued that schools alone could not close a racial achievement gap rooted in economic inequality. They urged a new emphasis on health clinics and other antipoverty programs that could help poor students arrive at school ready to learn.
The groups issuing the statements were composed overwhelmingly of Democrats.
Mr. Klein and Mr. Sharpton’s statement argued that federal policy should continue to hold schools accountable for raising the achievement of poor African-American and Latino youths, which is a focus of the federal law, but should also seek to assign more effective teachers to the nation’s neediest classrooms. This is an area where the statement said the law had been weak.
Mayor Cory A. Booker of Newark, the president of the Colorado Senate and the leaders of the Washington and Baltimore school systems also signed the statement.
The statement included a passage labeling teachers union contracts a significant obstacle to increasing the achievement of poor students.
“We must insist that our elected officials confront and address head-on crucial issues that created this crisis: teachers’ contracts and state policies that keep ineffective teachers in classrooms and too often make it nearly impossible to get our best teachers paired up with the students who most need them,” it said.
The other manifesto was signed by two schools superintendents, Beverly L. Hall of Atlanta and Rudy Crew of Miami-Dade County, and Thomas W. Payzant, the former superintendent in Boston, as well as the civil rights leader Julian Bond and former Attorney General Janet Reno, among others.
It criticized the No Child Left Behind law, Mr. Bush’s signature domestic initiative, as narrowing instruction in some schools to little more than reading and math, and called for a “broader, bolder approach” that would increase investment in health and other services in poor communities and rely less exclusively on schools to solve the nation’s social problems.
“Some schools have demonstrated unusual effectiveness,” said the statement, published on Tuesday in paid space in The New York Times and The Washington Post. “But even they cannot, by themselves, close the entire gap between students from different backgrounds.”
“Reducing social and economic disadvantages can also improve achievement,” it said.
Neither document mentioned the presidential campaign, but signers of both said the documents were being made public now in hopes of generating more debate about education policies in the general election campaign than what had occurred during the primaries.
“With the Democratic primary ending and the general campaign starting, there’s the sense that now is the time to lay out different visions of what our education policy should be,” said Andrew Rotherham, a Democrat who is co-founder of Education Sector, a research group in Washington, and who co-signed the statement of principles issued by Mr. Klein and Mr. Sharpton. “Presidential campaigns are in many ways national conversations, so now is the time to lay out a new agenda."
An effort last year to reauthorize the federal law, which Congress passed in Mr. Bush’s first year with bipartisan majorities, fell apart. Congress is unlikely to try again to rewrite the legislation, the most important statement of federal policy toward public schools, until well after a new president takes office.
June 12, 2008
Democrats are dividing into camps as they debate a new course for education policy after President Bush leaves office.
On Wednesday, a group of a dozen prominent educators and lawmakers, led by Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein of New York and the Rev. Al Sharpton, said the United States’ public schools shortchanged poor black and Latino children in a way that was “shameful,” and urged Washington to squeeze teachers and administrators harder to raise achievement among minorities.
On Tuesday, about 60 prominent educators and academics issued another manifesto, which criticized the federal No Child Left Behind law and argued that schools alone could not close a racial achievement gap rooted in economic inequality. They urged a new emphasis on health clinics and other antipoverty programs that could help poor students arrive at school ready to learn.
The groups issuing the statements were composed overwhelmingly of Democrats.
Mr. Klein and Mr. Sharpton’s statement argued that federal policy should continue to hold schools accountable for raising the achievement of poor African-American and Latino youths, which is a focus of the federal law, but should also seek to assign more effective teachers to the nation’s neediest classrooms. This is an area where the statement said the law had been weak.
Mayor Cory A. Booker of Newark, the president of the Colorado Senate and the leaders of the Washington and Baltimore school systems also signed the statement.
The statement included a passage labeling teachers union contracts a significant obstacle to increasing the achievement of poor students.
“We must insist that our elected officials confront and address head-on crucial issues that created this crisis: teachers’ contracts and state policies that keep ineffective teachers in classrooms and too often make it nearly impossible to get our best teachers paired up with the students who most need them,” it said.
The other manifesto was signed by two schools superintendents, Beverly L. Hall of Atlanta and Rudy Crew of Miami-Dade County, and Thomas W. Payzant, the former superintendent in Boston, as well as the civil rights leader Julian Bond and former Attorney General Janet Reno, among others.
It criticized the No Child Left Behind law, Mr. Bush’s signature domestic initiative, as narrowing instruction in some schools to little more than reading and math, and called for a “broader, bolder approach” that would increase investment in health and other services in poor communities and rely less exclusively on schools to solve the nation’s social problems.
“Some schools have demonstrated unusual effectiveness,” said the statement, published on Tuesday in paid space in The New York Times and The Washington Post. “But even they cannot, by themselves, close the entire gap between students from different backgrounds.”
“Reducing social and economic disadvantages can also improve achievement,” it said.
Neither document mentioned the presidential campaign, but signers of both said the documents were being made public now in hopes of generating more debate about education policies in the general election campaign than what had occurred during the primaries.
“With the Democratic primary ending and the general campaign starting, there’s the sense that now is the time to lay out different visions of what our education policy should be,” said Andrew Rotherham, a Democrat who is co-founder of Education Sector, a research group in Washington, and who co-signed the statement of principles issued by Mr. Klein and Mr. Sharpton. “Presidential campaigns are in many ways national conversations, so now is the time to lay out a new agenda."
An effort last year to reauthorize the federal law, which Congress passed in Mr. Bush’s first year with bipartisan majorities, fell apart. Congress is unlikely to try again to rewrite the legislation, the most important statement of federal policy toward public schools, until well after a new president takes office.
Wednesday, June 11, 2008
Rural schools left behind federal mandate
Check out the entire report: "Some Perspectives from Rural School Districts on The No Child Left Behind Act" -Patricia
Federal mandate impossible to meet
Scott Stephens | Plain Dealer Reporter
June 11, 2008
Fresh air. Wide-open spaces. Inexpensive housing. Little crime.
The bucolic lures of teaching in a rural school district are considerable.
But there can be a down side: low salaries, larger class sizes and a greater likelihood of teaching a subject other than the one you were trained to teach.
The six-year-old federal No Child Left Behind law, which requires reading and math proficiency for all students by 2012 and a highly qualified teacher in every classroom, has had scant influence on the nation's rural schools, according to a report released today.
The report is significant in developing policy in states such as Ohio, which has the fifth-largest rural student population in the nation. It's also significant because enrollment in rural schools nationally is up 15 percent, including a 55 percent increase in rural minority students.
Even so, rural schools seem to get less attention than urban schools, which are in big media centers, and affluent suburban districts, which have vocal parent support.
And because they tend to be smaller, less racially and ethnically diverse, and generally post better test scores than urban districts, they are less influenced by the federal law.
"Rural districts do have problems," said Jack Jennings, president of the Center for Education Policy, the public school advocacy group that issued the report. "But the problems are quieter."
Among the report's findings:
Federal highly qualified requirements have little impact on teacher recruitment and retention in rural districts. Often because their salaries are not competitive, rural districts have trouble keeping good teachers, especially in hard-to-fill areas such as math and science.
Rural schools are struggling with academic achievement gaps between students from low-income households - as well as disabled students - and their peers.
Rural school leaders rated their own policies and programs more significant than No Child Left Behind regulations in raising student achievement. One exception: Reading First, the federally funded program designed to get children reading well by the end of third grade.
Not all rural school districts agreed with the report's findings. Maxwell Shoff, superintendent of the Firelands Local School District, said teachers in his district are highly qualified and often spend their entire careers in the southern Lorain County system.
"I don't agree with the notion that rural schools can't attract good teachers," Shoff said. "We're not losing them - they stay."
Others have struggled. George Wood, principal of Federal Hocking High School in Stewart, Ohio, said rural schools are often unable to pay the competitive salaries needed to retain the good teachers the federal law requires.
Wood's own district, in the tax-depleted Appalachian hills of southeast Ohio, is on the state's fiscal emergency list. The starting salary in the district is $26,000, and the top salary is $53,000 - even for teachers who have been there 30 years.
Wood said he lost one of his best, young science teachers last year because the teacher's debt from student loans was twice what he was making.
"The problem with No Child Left Behind is that it suddenly demanded highly qualified teachers, but didn't put any support in place to make that happen," Wood said.
Still, every senior at Federal Hocking who graduated this spring and who wanted to go to college was accepted. And the graduating class grossed about $900,000 in scholarships.
"Nothing in No Child Left Behind has helped us with the success of our students," Wood said.
Federal mandate impossible to meet
Scott Stephens | Plain Dealer Reporter
June 11, 2008
Fresh air. Wide-open spaces. Inexpensive housing. Little crime.
The bucolic lures of teaching in a rural school district are considerable.
But there can be a down side: low salaries, larger class sizes and a greater likelihood of teaching a subject other than the one you were trained to teach.
The six-year-old federal No Child Left Behind law, which requires reading and math proficiency for all students by 2012 and a highly qualified teacher in every classroom, has had scant influence on the nation's rural schools, according to a report released today.
The report is significant in developing policy in states such as Ohio, which has the fifth-largest rural student population in the nation. It's also significant because enrollment in rural schools nationally is up 15 percent, including a 55 percent increase in rural minority students.
Even so, rural schools seem to get less attention than urban schools, which are in big media centers, and affluent suburban districts, which have vocal parent support.
And because they tend to be smaller, less racially and ethnically diverse, and generally post better test scores than urban districts, they are less influenced by the federal law.
"Rural districts do have problems," said Jack Jennings, president of the Center for Education Policy, the public school advocacy group that issued the report. "But the problems are quieter."
Among the report's findings:
Federal highly qualified requirements have little impact on teacher recruitment and retention in rural districts. Often because their salaries are not competitive, rural districts have trouble keeping good teachers, especially in hard-to-fill areas such as math and science.
Rural schools are struggling with academic achievement gaps between students from low-income households - as well as disabled students - and their peers.
Rural school leaders rated their own policies and programs more significant than No Child Left Behind regulations in raising student achievement. One exception: Reading First, the federally funded program designed to get children reading well by the end of third grade.
Not all rural school districts agreed with the report's findings. Maxwell Shoff, superintendent of the Firelands Local School District, said teachers in his district are highly qualified and often spend their entire careers in the southern Lorain County system.
"I don't agree with the notion that rural schools can't attract good teachers," Shoff said. "We're not losing them - they stay."
Others have struggled. George Wood, principal of Federal Hocking High School in Stewart, Ohio, said rural schools are often unable to pay the competitive salaries needed to retain the good teachers the federal law requires.
Wood's own district, in the tax-depleted Appalachian hills of southeast Ohio, is on the state's fiscal emergency list. The starting salary in the district is $26,000, and the top salary is $53,000 - even for teachers who have been there 30 years.
Wood said he lost one of his best, young science teachers last year because the teacher's debt from student loans was twice what he was making.
"The problem with No Child Left Behind is that it suddenly demanded highly qualified teachers, but didn't put any support in place to make that happen," Wood said.
Still, every senior at Federal Hocking who graduated this spring and who wanted to go to college was accepted. And the graduating class grossed about $900,000 in scholarships.
"Nothing in No Child Left Behind has helped us with the success of our students," Wood said.
2 new schools proposed at Johnston site
District's plans emphasize technology, early college start.
By Molly Bloom
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Saturday, June 07, 2008
A proposal to be submitted to the Austin school board Monday calls for two new high schools on the campus of the former Johnston High School, which the state closed this week for failing to meet state academic standards for five years in a row.
Under the proposal, Johnston students would see few major changes during the 2008-09 school year. The new school would operate much as Johnston High did, with the addition of various support systems and an increased focus on individualized instruction. Significant changes would come the following year, when the new schools would open at the Johnston campus.
District officials say the two models that seem to best suit Johnston students are a technology-focused high school, in which students learn by working on projects rather than through lectures, and an "early college start" high school that allows students to earn college credits.
If trustees approve the proposal, the district will submit it to state Education Commissioner Robert Scott. District officials say they will flesh out the plan's details in the coming months.
Johnston was closed for repeatedly failing to meet state standards based on the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills and dropout rates. Scott said Thursday that he hoped to rule on the plan by the end of the month. Under the law, Scott also had the option of placing the school under alternative management. If Scott turns down the district's plan for reopening, the district can either let the campus sit vacant or open a school with different grade levels, such as elementary, at the site.
"We believe we have to get this right," said Patti Everitt, the district's director of operations and community engagement. "We have to match what we do to the needs of the students."
The district plans to ask struggling Johnston students and incoming freshmen who didn't do well on the TAKS in middle school to attend summer programs to bring them up to grade level. A college and career support center would help students plan their futures beyond high school graduation, according to the plan.
The district also could hire a contractor to run the schools, similar to the "in-district" charter school arrangements in Houston and San Antonio.
At such schools, an outside entity would act as the principal while the district paid for day-to-day operations and salaries.
Under state law, at least 75 percent of Johnston teachers must be reassigned; district officials have said that they will find other positions for teachers not returning to Johnston who want to stay in the district.
State law also requires that at least 50 percent of the students at any new schools on the Johnston campus must have not been previously served by the school.
However, the Austin school district has not proposed a dramatic change to the school's student body, and district officials say students who want to attend Johnston will not be reassigned to other schools.
The proposal does not specify how the district would be able to accomplish that and still meet state requirements.
In past years, less than half of students in Johnston's attendance zone chose to attend the East Austin school.
The district also plans to try to recruit students districtwide to attend the new schools on the Johnston campus.
On Thursday, Scott declined to say what type of plan would address the enrollment requirement but said he didn't "want to punish the district for having an open enrollment policy."
By Molly Bloom
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Saturday, June 07, 2008
A proposal to be submitted to the Austin school board Monday calls for two new high schools on the campus of the former Johnston High School, which the state closed this week for failing to meet state academic standards for five years in a row.
Under the proposal, Johnston students would see few major changes during the 2008-09 school year. The new school would operate much as Johnston High did, with the addition of various support systems and an increased focus on individualized instruction. Significant changes would come the following year, when the new schools would open at the Johnston campus.
District officials say the two models that seem to best suit Johnston students are a technology-focused high school, in which students learn by working on projects rather than through lectures, and an "early college start" high school that allows students to earn college credits.
If trustees approve the proposal, the district will submit it to state Education Commissioner Robert Scott. District officials say they will flesh out the plan's details in the coming months.
Johnston was closed for repeatedly failing to meet state standards based on the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills and dropout rates. Scott said Thursday that he hoped to rule on the plan by the end of the month. Under the law, Scott also had the option of placing the school under alternative management. If Scott turns down the district's plan for reopening, the district can either let the campus sit vacant or open a school with different grade levels, such as elementary, at the site.
"We believe we have to get this right," said Patti Everitt, the district's director of operations and community engagement. "We have to match what we do to the needs of the students."
The district plans to ask struggling Johnston students and incoming freshmen who didn't do well on the TAKS in middle school to attend summer programs to bring them up to grade level. A college and career support center would help students plan their futures beyond high school graduation, according to the plan.
The district also could hire a contractor to run the schools, similar to the "in-district" charter school arrangements in Houston and San Antonio.
At such schools, an outside entity would act as the principal while the district paid for day-to-day operations and salaries.
Under state law, at least 75 percent of Johnston teachers must be reassigned; district officials have said that they will find other positions for teachers not returning to Johnston who want to stay in the district.
State law also requires that at least 50 percent of the students at any new schools on the Johnston campus must have not been previously served by the school.
However, the Austin school district has not proposed a dramatic change to the school's student body, and district officials say students who want to attend Johnston will not be reassigned to other schools.
The proposal does not specify how the district would be able to accomplish that and still meet state requirements.
In past years, less than half of students in Johnston's attendance zone chose to attend the East Austin school.
The district also plans to try to recruit students districtwide to attend the new schools on the Johnston campus.
On Thursday, Scott declined to say what type of plan would address the enrollment requirement but said he didn't "want to punish the district for having an open enrollment policy."
Hispanics suffer highest US workplace death rates
By Will Dunham
WASHINGTON, June 5 (Reuters) - Hispanic workers in the United States are killed at work at a 25 percent higher rate than other U.S. workers with many deaths coming in construction, federal health officials said on Thursday.
Hispanics disproportionately take dangerous jobs like construction. Some may hesitate to speak up about safety hazards and may accept risky tasks for fear of being fired, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said.
The most common causes of death were falls at construction sites and roadway incidents including crashes or being hit by a car while working on a road crew, the CDC said. Deaths from workplace falls increased about 370 percent from 1992 to 2006.
The report tracked Hispanic workplace fatalities of U.S. citizens, legal immigrants or illegal immigrants.
Immigration has become a potent political issue in the United States where about 12 million illegal immigrants live, many from Mexico, Central America and South America.
In 2006, the death rate for Hispanics was 5 per 100,000 workers, compared with 4 per 100,000 for all workers, 4 per 100,000 for non-Hispanic whites and 3.7 per 100,000 for non-Hispanic blacks, the CDC said.
Hispanics are the nation's fastest-growing minority. There were 19.6 million Hispanic workers in the United States in 2006, 56 percent of them foreign born.
They have become an increasingly important source of labor in U.S. construction.
An analysis of construction deaths found that Hispanic workers had higher rates than non-Hispanics in the same occupations such as laborers or roofers, the CDC said.
Dr. Sherry Baron of the CDC's National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health said inadequate training and supervision of workers, often made worse by language barriers or literacy problems, were factors behind this trend.
From 1992 to 2006, 11,303 Hispanic workers -- 95 percent of them men -- died due to workplace injuries, accounting for about 13 percent of overall such deaths in the United States.
The CDC said 67 percent of Hispanics killed in job injuries were foreign born, almost three quarters from Mexico. It said the work-related injury death rate for foreign-born Hispanic workers is about 70 percent higher than U.S.-born Hispanics.
The highest job fatality rates for Hispanics were in South Carolina (22.8 per 100,000 Hispanic workers), Oklahoma, Georgia and Tennessee, the CDC said. (Editing by Alan Elsner and Maggie Fox)
WASHINGTON, June 5 (Reuters) - Hispanic workers in the United States are killed at work at a 25 percent higher rate than other U.S. workers with many deaths coming in construction, federal health officials said on Thursday.
Hispanics disproportionately take dangerous jobs like construction. Some may hesitate to speak up about safety hazards and may accept risky tasks for fear of being fired, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said.
The most common causes of death were falls at construction sites and roadway incidents including crashes or being hit by a car while working on a road crew, the CDC said. Deaths from workplace falls increased about 370 percent from 1992 to 2006.
The report tracked Hispanic workplace fatalities of U.S. citizens, legal immigrants or illegal immigrants.
Immigration has become a potent political issue in the United States where about 12 million illegal immigrants live, many from Mexico, Central America and South America.
In 2006, the death rate for Hispanics was 5 per 100,000 workers, compared with 4 per 100,000 for all workers, 4 per 100,000 for non-Hispanic whites and 3.7 per 100,000 for non-Hispanic blacks, the CDC said.
Hispanics are the nation's fastest-growing minority. There were 19.6 million Hispanic workers in the United States in 2006, 56 percent of them foreign born.
They have become an increasingly important source of labor in U.S. construction.
An analysis of construction deaths found that Hispanic workers had higher rates than non-Hispanics in the same occupations such as laborers or roofers, the CDC said.
Dr. Sherry Baron of the CDC's National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health said inadequate training and supervision of workers, often made worse by language barriers or literacy problems, were factors behind this trend.
From 1992 to 2006, 11,303 Hispanic workers -- 95 percent of them men -- died due to workplace injuries, accounting for about 13 percent of overall such deaths in the United States.
The CDC said 67 percent of Hispanics killed in job injuries were foreign born, almost three quarters from Mexico. It said the work-related injury death rate for foreign-born Hispanic workers is about 70 percent higher than U.S.-born Hispanics.
The highest job fatality rates for Hispanics were in South Carolina (22.8 per 100,000 Hispanic workers), Oklahoma, Georgia and Tennessee, the CDC said. (Editing by Alan Elsner and Maggie Fox)
Climate of fear? Illegal immigration bill draws debate in R.I. Senate
This is terrible, not only the language used in this article but the discrimination in these bills.
Read the full text of immigration bills before Senate committees
S2556, S2762: Bills that would restrict inquiries into immigration status and protect employers from fallout from unlawful employment practice suits
S2076: Senator Maselli&rsquos so-called Taxpayer and Citizens&rsquo Protection Act
S2689: A bill that would require appropriate interpreters
-Patricia
May 22, 2008
By KAREN LEE ZINER | Journal Staff Writer
PROVIDENCE — A sweeping bill to control illegal immigration in Rhode Island will create “a climate of fear for documented and undocumented immigrants,” an opponent of the proposed “Rhode Island Taxpayer and Citizen Protection Act of 2008” testified yesterday.
Proponents told the Senate Health and Human Services Committee that the bill will alleviate the “economic hardship” of illegal immigration.
“This legislation really fosters an environment of hostility based on language and accent,” said Daniel Bass of the Ocean State Action coalition of community and environmental groups, professional associations and labor unions. Bass said immigration reform belongs at the federal level.
“It’s time we start taking care of the legal residents and citizens of this state,” said Sen. Christopher Maselli, D-Johnston, one of the sponsors of the bill. “I’m not walking in here saying this is the answer to all our woes. But based on the outpouring of support — the e-mails and phone calls — there are a lot of people from all communities who support this bill,” he said.
Key components of the legislation would require state agencies “to cooperate with federal immigration authorities in enforcing federal immigration laws,” would deny driver’s licenses to undocumented immigrants, and would criminalize renting to illegal immigrants, and hiring or harboring illegal immigrant workers. The bill reflects many of the measures in Governor Carcieri’s recent executive order to curb illegal immigration.
“This bill doesn’t hurt anyone. It only helps the citizens of Rhode Island,” said Terry Gorman, president of Rhode Islanders for Immigration Law Enforcement.
“If you’re illegal, get out,” Gorman said.
Michael Evora, executive director of the Rhode Island Commission for Human Rights, said that creating criminal penalties for renting in “knowing or in reckless disregard” of the fact that a tenant is an undocumented immigrant, will likely lead to increased racial profiling, by “creating an incentive for people to avoid risk.”
“If I don’t want to run the risk” of facing criminal penalties, said Evora, “guess what. I’m not going to rent to someone of color or with an accent.” He added, “… We’re concerned about there being more victims [of discrimination].”
Read the full text of immigration bills before Senate committees
S2556, S2762: Bills that would restrict inquiries into immigration status and protect employers from fallout from unlawful employment practice suits
S2076: Senator Maselli&rsquos so-called Taxpayer and Citizens&rsquo Protection Act
S2689: A bill that would require appropriate interpreters
-Patricia
May 22, 2008
By KAREN LEE ZINER | Journal Staff Writer
PROVIDENCE — A sweeping bill to control illegal immigration in Rhode Island will create “a climate of fear for documented and undocumented immigrants,” an opponent of the proposed “Rhode Island Taxpayer and Citizen Protection Act of 2008” testified yesterday.
Proponents told the Senate Health and Human Services Committee that the bill will alleviate the “economic hardship” of illegal immigration.
“This legislation really fosters an environment of hostility based on language and accent,” said Daniel Bass of the Ocean State Action coalition of community and environmental groups, professional associations and labor unions. Bass said immigration reform belongs at the federal level.
“It’s time we start taking care of the legal residents and citizens of this state,” said Sen. Christopher Maselli, D-Johnston, one of the sponsors of the bill. “I’m not walking in here saying this is the answer to all our woes. But based on the outpouring of support — the e-mails and phone calls — there are a lot of people from all communities who support this bill,” he said.
Key components of the legislation would require state agencies “to cooperate with federal immigration authorities in enforcing federal immigration laws,” would deny driver’s licenses to undocumented immigrants, and would criminalize renting to illegal immigrants, and hiring or harboring illegal immigrant workers. The bill reflects many of the measures in Governor Carcieri’s recent executive order to curb illegal immigration.
“This bill doesn’t hurt anyone. It only helps the citizens of Rhode Island,” said Terry Gorman, president of Rhode Islanders for Immigration Law Enforcement.
“If you’re illegal, get out,” Gorman said.
Michael Evora, executive director of the Rhode Island Commission for Human Rights, said that creating criminal penalties for renting in “knowing or in reckless disregard” of the fact that a tenant is an undocumented immigrant, will likely lead to increased racial profiling, by “creating an incentive for people to avoid risk.”
“If I don’t want to run the risk” of facing criminal penalties, said Evora, “guess what. I’m not going to rent to someone of color or with an accent.” He added, “… We’re concerned about there being more victims [of discrimination].”
Hurdles Remain High for English-LearnersHurdles Remain High for English-Learners
School sees strong progress, but says credit proves elusive under federal law.
By Mary Ann Zehr | Ed Week
June 2, 2008
Sacramento
Ong Vue’s very first day of school came when she was 15 and was enrolled in 9th grade at Luther Burbank High School after arriving here as a refugee from Thailand.
The Hmong teenager says her family couldn’t afford to send her to school in Thailand. When she started at Luther Burbank, she spoke Thai and Hmong, but no English.
Four years later, Ms. Vue is a senior at the 1,970-student school and has passed the math section of California’s high school exit exam. She plans to attend community college in the fall, and hopes to become an elementary school teacher.
Despite her clear academic progress, Ms. Vue’s showing on standardized tests has been a handicap in her school’s quest to meet the yardstick for adequate yearly progress, or AYP, under the federal No Child Left Behind Act.
Read On...
By Mary Ann Zehr | Ed Week
June 2, 2008
Sacramento
Ong Vue’s very first day of school came when she was 15 and was enrolled in 9th grade at Luther Burbank High School after arriving here as a refugee from Thailand.
The Hmong teenager says her family couldn’t afford to send her to school in Thailand. When she started at Luther Burbank, she spoke Thai and Hmong, but no English.
Four years later, Ms. Vue is a senior at the 1,970-student school and has passed the math section of California’s high school exit exam. She plans to attend community college in the fall, and hopes to become an elementary school teacher.
Despite her clear academic progress, Ms. Vue’s showing on standardized tests has been a handicap in her school’s quest to meet the yardstick for adequate yearly progress, or AYP, under the federal No Child Left Behind Act.
Read On...
Varying data leave incomplete picture of immigrants' progress
By HOLLY K. HACKER / The Dallas Morning News
June 9, 2008
Researchers have a good idea how many school-age children were born outside the U.S.
As for how these young immigrants fare in classrooms – how quickly they learn English; how often they repeat a grade; how many graduate on time – details are murky. That's because, across the country, school districts vary widely in the information they collect, making it very hard to draw useful comparisons or study the progress of students.
"The data collected by schools is simply not particularly nuanced, especially for immigrants," said Richard Fry, a researcher at the Pew Hispanic Center, a national nonprofit. "You don't know where they were born. You don't know how long they've been here. You don't know anything about their parents."
The U.S. Census gives an overview of the immigrant population by counting foreign-born residents, no matter how long they've been in the U.S. Its most recent survey, from 2006, found that 7 percent of Texas school-age children – some 325,000 kids – are foreign-born. The rate is around 9 percent in Dallas-Fort Worth. Most come from Mexico.
But if you want details, good luck. School districts aren't required to ask students what country they were born in or when they moved to the U.S.
Dallas ISD, for one, voluntarily collects that information through an intake center for new immigrants and refugees. The center also asks families how much schooling their children have had to help place them academically.
Dallas also tracks the total number of students born outside the U.S., but all districts don't keep such detailed records.
There are other problems. For example, not everyone defines "immigrant" the same way.
The Texas Education Agency uses the federal Education Department's definition: a foreign-born student who has attended U.S. schools less than three years. Once that student hits year four, the immigrant label disappears.
So what? Well, it matters if you care how many foreign-born students graduate or drop out from Texas public schools.
The state reports that of 3,165 immigrants in the Class of 2006, just half graduated in four years, and nearly a third dropped out.
But those statistics don't tell the whole story.
Take two Mexican-born students who enroll in Texas schools in ninth grade. The first graduates four years later – but doesn't count as an immigrant because she has exceeded the three-year mark. The second student drops out after ninth grade – and because he was still considered an immigrant, he shows up as an immigrant dropout.
Another problem is that some immigrants, especially teenagers, never enroll in a U.S. school. The census counts them as dropouts. Schools don't, because they never "dropped in" to begin with.
The rate of immigration has slowed in the Dallas area in recent years, because, experts speculate, of greater border enforcement and a decline in construction jobs. Schools also have seen that slowing. Dallas, for example, added 2,240 immigrants this school year, down from 4,730 new immigrants in 2001-02.
Dallas ISD Superintendent Michael Hinojosa agrees that tighter border controls have probably had an effect, along with crackdowns on illegal immigrants in Farmers Branch, Irving and other places. But he questions whether the drop is really as steep as the data show. School records – such as Census Bureau surveys – rely on self-reporting, and he suspects some families aren't identifying themselves as immigrants, regardless of their legal status. He predicts that will continue.
"I think people are going to be more scared of being deported," he said.
June 9, 2008
Researchers have a good idea how many school-age children were born outside the U.S.
As for how these young immigrants fare in classrooms – how quickly they learn English; how often they repeat a grade; how many graduate on time – details are murky. That's because, across the country, school districts vary widely in the information they collect, making it very hard to draw useful comparisons or study the progress of students.
"The data collected by schools is simply not particularly nuanced, especially for immigrants," said Richard Fry, a researcher at the Pew Hispanic Center, a national nonprofit. "You don't know where they were born. You don't know how long they've been here. You don't know anything about their parents."
The U.S. Census gives an overview of the immigrant population by counting foreign-born residents, no matter how long they've been in the U.S. Its most recent survey, from 2006, found that 7 percent of Texas school-age children – some 325,000 kids – are foreign-born. The rate is around 9 percent in Dallas-Fort Worth. Most come from Mexico.
But if you want details, good luck. School districts aren't required to ask students what country they were born in or when they moved to the U.S.
Dallas ISD, for one, voluntarily collects that information through an intake center for new immigrants and refugees. The center also asks families how much schooling their children have had to help place them academically.
Dallas also tracks the total number of students born outside the U.S., but all districts don't keep such detailed records.
There are other problems. For example, not everyone defines "immigrant" the same way.
The Texas Education Agency uses the federal Education Department's definition: a foreign-born student who has attended U.S. schools less than three years. Once that student hits year four, the immigrant label disappears.
So what? Well, it matters if you care how many foreign-born students graduate or drop out from Texas public schools.
The state reports that of 3,165 immigrants in the Class of 2006, just half graduated in four years, and nearly a third dropped out.
But those statistics don't tell the whole story.
Take two Mexican-born students who enroll in Texas schools in ninth grade. The first graduates four years later – but doesn't count as an immigrant because she has exceeded the three-year mark. The second student drops out after ninth grade – and because he was still considered an immigrant, he shows up as an immigrant dropout.
Another problem is that some immigrants, especially teenagers, never enroll in a U.S. school. The census counts them as dropouts. Schools don't, because they never "dropped in" to begin with.
The rate of immigration has slowed in the Dallas area in recent years, because, experts speculate, of greater border enforcement and a decline in construction jobs. Schools also have seen that slowing. Dallas, for example, added 2,240 immigrants this school year, down from 4,730 new immigrants in 2001-02.
Dallas ISD Superintendent Michael Hinojosa agrees that tighter border controls have probably had an effect, along with crackdowns on illegal immigrants in Farmers Branch, Irving and other places. But he questions whether the drop is really as steep as the data show. School records – such as Census Bureau surveys – rely on self-reporting, and he suspects some families aren't identifying themselves as immigrants, regardless of their legal status. He predicts that will continue.
"I think people are going to be more scared of being deported," he said.
Education a challenge in small Mexican community with strong ties to Dallas
Monday, June 9, 2008
by MACARENA HERNÁNDEZ and GARY JACOBSON | The Dallas Morning News
LOMA ALTA, Mexico – Just down the dirt road from several small adobe houses, past a cat keeping silent watch under a street lamp, past two lounging dogs, 16 students line up outside their one-room concrete school.
The tiniest kid holds the Mexican flag. It's early March, and during a weekly patriotic ceremony the teacher tells her students about Mexico's beloved former president, Benito Juarez, whose birthday is later in the month.
"He was an Indian from Oaxaca and a sheepherder just like you," Maria Gloria Martínez says. "Imagine that, one of you could be president."
As she speaks, nine kids watch from the yard of a nearby house. Mexico requires that children attend school through junior high, but there is often little enforcement. Many of those watching are old enough to be in Ms. Martínez's elementary school, but their parents don't send them.
Ms. Martínez, 69, wears glasses, has short gray hair and does needlework to earn extra money. She also has the voice of a drill sergeant. Earning the equivalent of $170 a month, she lives at the school during the week, sleeping on a cot by the door. Village families bring her food.
In this arid region of Mexico's central highlands, nearly 1,000 miles from Dallas and 7,000 feet above sea level, the elementary and middle schools are, in effect, feeder schools for Adamson High School in Oak Cliff.
Adamson principal Rawly Sanchez has never met Ms. Martínez. But the success of his job is partly linked to her. Many of his students come from rural areas in Mexico such as this, pushed north by powerful economic forces that sometimes hinder schooling.
One of the Loma Alta students who now attends Adamson is Juan, a teen who saved enough money after coming to America to buy a house a short walk from the rural school. He moved to Dallas with his family in 2006 to work construction after dropping out of junior high in Mexico.
"If my children get an education, maybe they won't have to leave because they'll be able to find work," says Juan's aunt, Carmela, who lives in Loma Alta with her 10 kids. "But without an education what can you do? Maybe herd animals, but even those jobs are almost gone."
Loma Alta is one of the smallest of a dozen rural settlements surrounding the town of Ocampo in the state of Guanajuato. Ocampo is the largest community in the municipality (similar to a county in the U.S.) of the same name. The town has 6,000 residents, the municipality 21,000.
Stop anyone in Ocampo and chances are they have a relative in Dallas. If not, that's usually because the relative lives in Chicago, the second most popular destination.
Casa Guanajuato, an organization that helps new immigrants in Dallas, estimates that more people from Ocampo live in Dallas than in the municipality. Personal connections provide a built-in support network, adding to the job allure of Dallas. For a century, Guanajuato has supplied a steady flow of immigrants to the U.S., working on railroads, farms and in well-paying construction jobs.
The connections go both ways. During a 10-day period in Ocampo, two reporters and a photographer from The Dallas Morning News saw many signs of North Texas: a minivan with a Southlake Dragons bumper sticker in front of an elementary school, a first-grader wearing a Trinity Christian Academy jacket, a junior high student wearing a Boswell High School shirt, a woman in a Molina Jaguars T-shirt, and a young boy wearing a "Kahn Elementary Field Day 2002" shirt. Kahn, in Oak Cliff, feeds into Sunset High School. Molina is a Dallas high school.
On Friday and Saturday nights on Ocampo's main square, dreams of El Norte loom large. At the Ciber Cafe, teenage boys pay 10 pesos, about $1, an hour to cruise the Internet. Wearing Dallas Cowboys jerseys and Nikes, they slouch in their chairs as they click through MySpace and watch rap videos on YouTube. It takes only a few minutes of questioning to find someone who has either worked in Dallas, or wants to. For many, earning money is more important than school.
The culture shock of moving north is great. The education shock can be greater.
There was no elementary school in Loma Alta when Juan's mother grew up there. "I was 12 years old when they opened the school," says Maria, 38. "My mother says that before that a lady, on her own, would teach kids at her home."
The average schooling level for municipality residents is fourth grade, according to government statistics. Fifteen percent don't read or write; only 12 percent have finished high school. The municipality didn't have a high school until 1993.
"When we built the high school, the thinking was that people would stop leaving for the U.S.," says Francisco "Pancho" Pedroza, president of the municipality. They didn't.
José Juan Salazar, an Ocampo education official who works with Mr. Pedroza, believes the U.S. educational system is better at encouraging entrepreneurial spirit in kids. "In Mexico," he says, "they educate you as if you are always going to work for someone else."
Before moving to Dallas, Mr. Pedroza's niece, Gabby, and nephew, Luis Adrian, both attended Ocampo's only private school, Instituto Mexico, long the choice of better-off residents. Now, they attend Adamson with Juan.
In the United States, Mr. Pedroza would be called "mayor." Born in 1945, he completed the sixth grade at Instituto Mexico and started working. There were no junior highs in Ocampo then.
He moved to Dallas in 1966, unloading produce for a year at the Farmers Market. Immigration officials caught up with him, he says, so he moved to Chicago and worked at a meatpacking plant. He returned to Ocampo in 1985.
Mr. Pedroza, who has a full head of gray hair and a ready smile, says he is trying to expand the area's agribusiness opportunities and attract a shoe factory. Eventually, he hopes a branch of a university will open in town. Mainly, he wants to give residents an economic reason to stay home and kids a better chance at an education.
"We know we can't stop them from leaving," he says. "But if they're going to leave at least they'll have more education."
Next to agriculture, brick making is Ocampo's top industry, employing about 100 workers, Mr. Pedroza says. One of those workers is a sweat-and-dirt streaked 14-year-old named Luis Cortés. He wears a red "Tommy" cap and a Chevrolet T-shirt that says "The Heartbeat of America." He explains how he quit going to school in the fourth grade to help shovel and mix the mud that becomes bricks and tiles.
"Why should he sit in school bored, not learning anything, when he can be making $10 a day?" says his uncle, José Zuñiga, also a brick maker. The uncle, in his mid-20s, says he did not finish primary school, either. The average worker in Ocampo earns about $70 a week, municipality officials say.
Classroom challenges
The quality of education in Mexico ranges widely, from big urban centers to remote rural areas, like Loma Alta. Those from urban areas tend to be better prepared academically.
Educators in Guanajuato say there has been progress in the last 15 years. Even rural schools are now equipped with computers. There is a standard interactive curriculum for fifth- and sixth-graders that former President Vicente Fox supported.
Perhaps the greatest challenge for Mexico is improving opportunities for students in rural areas, where economic pressures often force families to choose work over school. For decades, Mexico has experimented with ways to reach these students. Some Adamson students attended telesecundarias, junior highs that offer the same televised lesson at the same time nationwide. Between broadcasts, classroom teachers supplement the on-screen instruction with discussions and workbook assignments.
"I see so many kids with so much potential here, but we need to change the culture, and we need more government support," says Carlos Rosales, a regional high school director.
As families move back and forth across the border, more kids from Dallas schools are showing up in Ocampo schools. There is some evidence, municipality officials say, that students from the U.S. are helping improve achievement scores in primary grades.
That's not true for older students coming from America. Complaints of Mexican educators sound much the same as complaints of Dallas teachers talking about students from Mexico. The kids don't know the language well enough, and their math skills are weak.
Students from the United States bring with them some American attitude.
That was evident in an advanced English class at Instituto Mexico. Located behind double metal doors at the rear of a Catholic church a few blocks from the town square, the Instituto offers classes from preschool through ninth grade, charging the equivalent of $35 a month in tuition. Its resources are limited, but its community tradition strong.
That tradition doesn't mean much to Jorge Rangel, who was born and raised in Dallas and moved to Ocampo with his family just before the start of school last summer.
"Oh, man, I want to go back," he says. "This school is a waste."
The big 16-year-old bulges out of his small one-piece desk and chair. The laces on his white athletic shoes are untied. He pronounces his name George. His mom calls him Jorge.
In a class of 13, he is one of three students who attended Dallas schools. Jorge and one friend decided they didn't need to buy the class textbook. They act as if they already know more English than the teacher.
María Guadalupe López, the teacher, was born in Mexico and has lived in Chicago and Dallas. She says the kids who have been in American schools don't like being told what to do and are behind in math. She wonders if those who go back and forth between the countries will ever master one language to an academic level. That echoes concerns Adamson teachers have about Mexican immigrant students mastering enough English to pass the state TAKS exams.
"That's not what I wanted," Ms. Lopez tells Jorge about a class assignment, handing it back. "I said write what you saw, what you learned." The class had taken a field trip to the pyramids of Teotihuacan near Mexico City.
"It was cool but boring at the same time," Jorge had written in English.
Before moving to Ocampo, Jorge attended St. Cecilia Catholic School in Oak Cliff and then Greiner Middle School, where he played football. His father and uncle run a bus company that transports people and cargo to and from the U.S. His mother, Norma Rangel, a U.S. citizen and graduate of Sunset High School, admits some of Jorge's teachers think he is "sassy." Mrs. Rangel thinks he is having trouble adjusting to his new life. "As time goes by, I think he'll like it here," she says.
The next school stop for Jorge, his mother says, is Ocampo's high school, a modern two-story campus near two junior highs and the agricultural experiment station. Municipality officials say that of the nearly 600 students who graduate from Ocampo's junior highs every year, about 150 go on to high school. That includes students at two small high schools in other towns.
The decision to attend high school often depends upon economics. Does a kid have to work to help support the family?
Looking at enrollment figures for the 2006-07 school year, high school principal César Rangel (no relation to Jorge), says 332 students started the year in the school's three grades, and 272 were enrolled at the end of the year. Most who left went to the U.S., Dr. Rangel says.
Is it a brain drain for Mexico?
"Absolutely," Dr. Rangel says. "It's a shame for us that we're not able to retain our people. But it's because at the national level, we're not giving them employment opportunities."
The high school offers specialties in three technical careers: industrial maintenance (repairing machines, electrical, plumbing), information systems (software) and administration (office work). At the same time, some students take college prep classes.
Dr. Rangel says the school has 20 teachers, counting part-timers. They earn the equivalent of about $8 an hour and average about 32 hours a week. Each student pays an enrollment fee equal to about $45 a semester. Many have scholarships.
Dr. Rangel has some advice for the American teachers of Mexican immigrants.
"Really understand that these kids don't know English and they are going into a new culture," he says. "It's going to be little by little that they learn the language." The primary predictor of academic success is the same on both sides of the border, he says: the educational level of the parents.
In an industrial arts class at the high school where the students are wiring lights, instructor Sergio González says he worked construction in Atlanta but returned to Mexico about three years ago, just before he turned 30.
"I love being a teacher," he says. "You become a father to these kids. ...When they fail, I fail, too." Based upon his experience, he gives his students three rules for attaining success in the United States: 1. Learn English. 2. Work every day. 3. Don't get in trouble with the law.
Dreams of America
Back at Loma Alta, Ms. Martínez says this is the most difficult assignment she has had. Two teachers had already come and gone from the school this year before she arrived. The kids were not used to doing schoolwork and were out of control.
The preschool didn't open this term because enrollment was just two students short of qualifying for a teacher through CONAFE, the federal agency that places teachers such as Ms. Martínez in hard-to-fill jobs in poor rural areas. If all the families in town had enrolled their kids, there would have been enough students to unlock the preschool.
Some CONAFE teachers have completed only ninth grade, but they get government assistance to continue their studies. Ms. Martínez says her schooling would be equivalent in the U.S. to two years of college.
Her small classroom building has modern touches: a satellite dish, an IBM computer, an interactive "smart board" and a Lexmark printer. Yet, outside, the common restroom is an adobe wall around a hole in the ground. Students wash their hands from a spigot at the water tank. Ms. Martínez bathes near the front door of the classroom and throws the used water outside.
One day during class, the conversation turns to what her students expect to do in the future. Ms. Martínez listens to their dreams of making money in America. One girl says she's going to work in a restaurant. Another boy says he's going to slaughter pigs. The oldest of the class says he's going to work construction.
"Ay, what crazy dreams we sometimes have," Ms. Martínez says. "You know what? I am so happy here in my homeland."
by MACARENA HERNÁNDEZ and GARY JACOBSON | The Dallas Morning News
LOMA ALTA, Mexico – Just down the dirt road from several small adobe houses, past a cat keeping silent watch under a street lamp, past two lounging dogs, 16 students line up outside their one-room concrete school.
The tiniest kid holds the Mexican flag. It's early March, and during a weekly patriotic ceremony the teacher tells her students about Mexico's beloved former president, Benito Juarez, whose birthday is later in the month.
"He was an Indian from Oaxaca and a sheepherder just like you," Maria Gloria Martínez says. "Imagine that, one of you could be president."
As she speaks, nine kids watch from the yard of a nearby house. Mexico requires that children attend school through junior high, but there is often little enforcement. Many of those watching are old enough to be in Ms. Martínez's elementary school, but their parents don't send them.
Ms. Martínez, 69, wears glasses, has short gray hair and does needlework to earn extra money. She also has the voice of a drill sergeant. Earning the equivalent of $170 a month, she lives at the school during the week, sleeping on a cot by the door. Village families bring her food.
In this arid region of Mexico's central highlands, nearly 1,000 miles from Dallas and 7,000 feet above sea level, the elementary and middle schools are, in effect, feeder schools for Adamson High School in Oak Cliff.
Adamson principal Rawly Sanchez has never met Ms. Martínez. But the success of his job is partly linked to her. Many of his students come from rural areas in Mexico such as this, pushed north by powerful economic forces that sometimes hinder schooling.
One of the Loma Alta students who now attends Adamson is Juan, a teen who saved enough money after coming to America to buy a house a short walk from the rural school. He moved to Dallas with his family in 2006 to work construction after dropping out of junior high in Mexico.
"If my children get an education, maybe they won't have to leave because they'll be able to find work," says Juan's aunt, Carmela, who lives in Loma Alta with her 10 kids. "But without an education what can you do? Maybe herd animals, but even those jobs are almost gone."
Loma Alta is one of the smallest of a dozen rural settlements surrounding the town of Ocampo in the state of Guanajuato. Ocampo is the largest community in the municipality (similar to a county in the U.S.) of the same name. The town has 6,000 residents, the municipality 21,000.
Stop anyone in Ocampo and chances are they have a relative in Dallas. If not, that's usually because the relative lives in Chicago, the second most popular destination.
Casa Guanajuato, an organization that helps new immigrants in Dallas, estimates that more people from Ocampo live in Dallas than in the municipality. Personal connections provide a built-in support network, adding to the job allure of Dallas. For a century, Guanajuato has supplied a steady flow of immigrants to the U.S., working on railroads, farms and in well-paying construction jobs.
The connections go both ways. During a 10-day period in Ocampo, two reporters and a photographer from The Dallas Morning News saw many signs of North Texas: a minivan with a Southlake Dragons bumper sticker in front of an elementary school, a first-grader wearing a Trinity Christian Academy jacket, a junior high student wearing a Boswell High School shirt, a woman in a Molina Jaguars T-shirt, and a young boy wearing a "Kahn Elementary Field Day 2002" shirt. Kahn, in Oak Cliff, feeds into Sunset High School. Molina is a Dallas high school.
On Friday and Saturday nights on Ocampo's main square, dreams of El Norte loom large. At the Ciber Cafe, teenage boys pay 10 pesos, about $1, an hour to cruise the Internet. Wearing Dallas Cowboys jerseys and Nikes, they slouch in their chairs as they click through MySpace and watch rap videos on YouTube. It takes only a few minutes of questioning to find someone who has either worked in Dallas, or wants to. For many, earning money is more important than school.
The culture shock of moving north is great. The education shock can be greater.
There was no elementary school in Loma Alta when Juan's mother grew up there. "I was 12 years old when they opened the school," says Maria, 38. "My mother says that before that a lady, on her own, would teach kids at her home."
The average schooling level for municipality residents is fourth grade, according to government statistics. Fifteen percent don't read or write; only 12 percent have finished high school. The municipality didn't have a high school until 1993.
"When we built the high school, the thinking was that people would stop leaving for the U.S.," says Francisco "Pancho" Pedroza, president of the municipality. They didn't.
José Juan Salazar, an Ocampo education official who works with Mr. Pedroza, believes the U.S. educational system is better at encouraging entrepreneurial spirit in kids. "In Mexico," he says, "they educate you as if you are always going to work for someone else."
Before moving to Dallas, Mr. Pedroza's niece, Gabby, and nephew, Luis Adrian, both attended Ocampo's only private school, Instituto Mexico, long the choice of better-off residents. Now, they attend Adamson with Juan.
In the United States, Mr. Pedroza would be called "mayor." Born in 1945, he completed the sixth grade at Instituto Mexico and started working. There were no junior highs in Ocampo then.
He moved to Dallas in 1966, unloading produce for a year at the Farmers Market. Immigration officials caught up with him, he says, so he moved to Chicago and worked at a meatpacking plant. He returned to Ocampo in 1985.
Mr. Pedroza, who has a full head of gray hair and a ready smile, says he is trying to expand the area's agribusiness opportunities and attract a shoe factory. Eventually, he hopes a branch of a university will open in town. Mainly, he wants to give residents an economic reason to stay home and kids a better chance at an education.
"We know we can't stop them from leaving," he says. "But if they're going to leave at least they'll have more education."
Next to agriculture, brick making is Ocampo's top industry, employing about 100 workers, Mr. Pedroza says. One of those workers is a sweat-and-dirt streaked 14-year-old named Luis Cortés. He wears a red "Tommy" cap and a Chevrolet T-shirt that says "The Heartbeat of America." He explains how he quit going to school in the fourth grade to help shovel and mix the mud that becomes bricks and tiles.
"Why should he sit in school bored, not learning anything, when he can be making $10 a day?" says his uncle, José Zuñiga, also a brick maker. The uncle, in his mid-20s, says he did not finish primary school, either. The average worker in Ocampo earns about $70 a week, municipality officials say.
Classroom challenges
The quality of education in Mexico ranges widely, from big urban centers to remote rural areas, like Loma Alta. Those from urban areas tend to be better prepared academically.
Educators in Guanajuato say there has been progress in the last 15 years. Even rural schools are now equipped with computers. There is a standard interactive curriculum for fifth- and sixth-graders that former President Vicente Fox supported.
Perhaps the greatest challenge for Mexico is improving opportunities for students in rural areas, where economic pressures often force families to choose work over school. For decades, Mexico has experimented with ways to reach these students. Some Adamson students attended telesecundarias, junior highs that offer the same televised lesson at the same time nationwide. Between broadcasts, classroom teachers supplement the on-screen instruction with discussions and workbook assignments.
"I see so many kids with so much potential here, but we need to change the culture, and we need more government support," says Carlos Rosales, a regional high school director.
As families move back and forth across the border, more kids from Dallas schools are showing up in Ocampo schools. There is some evidence, municipality officials say, that students from the U.S. are helping improve achievement scores in primary grades.
That's not true for older students coming from America. Complaints of Mexican educators sound much the same as complaints of Dallas teachers talking about students from Mexico. The kids don't know the language well enough, and their math skills are weak.
Students from the United States bring with them some American attitude.
That was evident in an advanced English class at Instituto Mexico. Located behind double metal doors at the rear of a Catholic church a few blocks from the town square, the Instituto offers classes from preschool through ninth grade, charging the equivalent of $35 a month in tuition. Its resources are limited, but its community tradition strong.
That tradition doesn't mean much to Jorge Rangel, who was born and raised in Dallas and moved to Ocampo with his family just before the start of school last summer.
"Oh, man, I want to go back," he says. "This school is a waste."
The big 16-year-old bulges out of his small one-piece desk and chair. The laces on his white athletic shoes are untied. He pronounces his name George. His mom calls him Jorge.
In a class of 13, he is one of three students who attended Dallas schools. Jorge and one friend decided they didn't need to buy the class textbook. They act as if they already know more English than the teacher.
María Guadalupe López, the teacher, was born in Mexico and has lived in Chicago and Dallas. She says the kids who have been in American schools don't like being told what to do and are behind in math. She wonders if those who go back and forth between the countries will ever master one language to an academic level. That echoes concerns Adamson teachers have about Mexican immigrant students mastering enough English to pass the state TAKS exams.
"That's not what I wanted," Ms. Lopez tells Jorge about a class assignment, handing it back. "I said write what you saw, what you learned." The class had taken a field trip to the pyramids of Teotihuacan near Mexico City.
"It was cool but boring at the same time," Jorge had written in English.
Before moving to Ocampo, Jorge attended St. Cecilia Catholic School in Oak Cliff and then Greiner Middle School, where he played football. His father and uncle run a bus company that transports people and cargo to and from the U.S. His mother, Norma Rangel, a U.S. citizen and graduate of Sunset High School, admits some of Jorge's teachers think he is "sassy." Mrs. Rangel thinks he is having trouble adjusting to his new life. "As time goes by, I think he'll like it here," she says.
The next school stop for Jorge, his mother says, is Ocampo's high school, a modern two-story campus near two junior highs and the agricultural experiment station. Municipality officials say that of the nearly 600 students who graduate from Ocampo's junior highs every year, about 150 go on to high school. That includes students at two small high schools in other towns.
The decision to attend high school often depends upon economics. Does a kid have to work to help support the family?
Looking at enrollment figures for the 2006-07 school year, high school principal César Rangel (no relation to Jorge), says 332 students started the year in the school's three grades, and 272 were enrolled at the end of the year. Most who left went to the U.S., Dr. Rangel says.
Is it a brain drain for Mexico?
"Absolutely," Dr. Rangel says. "It's a shame for us that we're not able to retain our people. But it's because at the national level, we're not giving them employment opportunities."
The high school offers specialties in three technical careers: industrial maintenance (repairing machines, electrical, plumbing), information systems (software) and administration (office work). At the same time, some students take college prep classes.
Dr. Rangel says the school has 20 teachers, counting part-timers. They earn the equivalent of about $8 an hour and average about 32 hours a week. Each student pays an enrollment fee equal to about $45 a semester. Many have scholarships.
Dr. Rangel has some advice for the American teachers of Mexican immigrants.
"Really understand that these kids don't know English and they are going into a new culture," he says. "It's going to be little by little that they learn the language." The primary predictor of academic success is the same on both sides of the border, he says: the educational level of the parents.
In an industrial arts class at the high school where the students are wiring lights, instructor Sergio González says he worked construction in Atlanta but returned to Mexico about three years ago, just before he turned 30.
"I love being a teacher," he says. "You become a father to these kids. ...When they fail, I fail, too." Based upon his experience, he gives his students three rules for attaining success in the United States: 1. Learn English. 2. Work every day. 3. Don't get in trouble with the law.
Dreams of America
Back at Loma Alta, Ms. Martínez says this is the most difficult assignment she has had. Two teachers had already come and gone from the school this year before she arrived. The kids were not used to doing schoolwork and were out of control.
The preschool didn't open this term because enrollment was just two students short of qualifying for a teacher through CONAFE, the federal agency that places teachers such as Ms. Martínez in hard-to-fill jobs in poor rural areas. If all the families in town had enrolled their kids, there would have been enough students to unlock the preschool.
Some CONAFE teachers have completed only ninth grade, but they get government assistance to continue their studies. Ms. Martínez says her schooling would be equivalent in the U.S. to two years of college.
Her small classroom building has modern touches: a satellite dish, an IBM computer, an interactive "smart board" and a Lexmark printer. Yet, outside, the common restroom is an adobe wall around a hole in the ground. Students wash their hands from a spigot at the water tank. Ms. Martínez bathes near the front door of the classroom and throws the used water outside.
One day during class, the conversation turns to what her students expect to do in the future. Ms. Martínez listens to their dreams of making money in America. One girl says she's going to work in a restaurant. Another boy says he's going to slaughter pigs. The oldest of the class says he's going to work construction.
"Ay, what crazy dreams we sometimes have," Ms. Martínez says. "You know what? I am so happy here in my homeland."
Report Takes Aim at ‘Model Minority’ Stereotype of Asian-American Students
Here's a link to check out the full report: "‘Model Minority’ Stereotype Obscures Reality of Asian American and Pacific Islander Educational Experience".
Also, check out a report from an earlier post entitled: "Asian American Students Struggling under NCLB" it further adds to the discussion of homogenizing Asian American students.
-Patricia
By TAMAR LEWIN
Published: June 10, 2008
The image of Asian-Americans as a homogeneous group of high achievers taking over the campuses of the nation’s most selective colleges came under assault in a report issued Monday.
The report, by New York University, the College Board and a commission of mostly Asian-American educators and community leaders, largely avoids the debates over both affirmative action and the heavy representation of Asian-Americans at the most selective colleges.
But it pokes holes in stereotypes about Asian-Americans and Pacific Islanders, including the perception that they cluster in science, technology, engineering and math. And it points out that the term “Asian-American” is extraordinarily broad, embracing members of many ethnic groups.
“Certainly there’s a lot of Asians doing well, at the top of the curve, and that’s a point of pride, but there are just as many struggling at the bottom of the curve, and we wanted to draw attention to that,” said Robert T. Teranishi, the N.Y.U. education professor who wrote the report, “Facts, Not Fiction: Setting the Record Straight.”
“Our goal,” Professor Teranishi added, “is to have people understand that the population is very diverse.”
The report, based on federal education, immigration and census data, as well as statistics from the College Board, noted that the federally defined categories of Asian-American and Pacific Islander included dozens of groups, each with its own language and culture, as varied as the Hmong, Samoans, Bengalis and Sri Lankans.
Their educational backgrounds, the report said, vary widely: while most of the nation’s Hmong and Cambodian adults have never finished high school, most Pakistanis and Indians have at least a bachelor’s degree.
The SAT scores of Asian-Americans, it said, like those of other Americans, tend to correlate with the income and educational level of their parents.
“The notion of lumping all people into a single category and assuming they have no needs is wrong,” said Alma R. Clayton-Pederson, vice president of the Association of American Colleges and Universities, who was a member of the commission the College Board financed to produce the report.
“Our backgrounds are very different,” added Dr. Clayton-Pederson, who is black, “but it’s almost like the reverse of what happened to African-Americans.”
The report found that contrary to stereotype, most of the bachelor’s degrees that Asian-Americans and Pacific Islanders received in 2003 were in business, management, social sciences or humanities, not in the STEM fields: science, technology, engineering or math. And while Asians earned 32 percent of the nation’s STEM doctorates that year, within that 32 percent more than four of five degree recipients were international students from Asia, not Asian-Americans.
The report also said that more Asian-Americans and Pacific Islanders were enrolled in community colleges than in either public or private four-year colleges. But the idea that Asian-American “model minority” students are edging out all others is so ubiquitous that quips like “U.C.L.A. really stands for United Caucasians Lost Among Asians” or “M.I.T. means Made in Taiwan” have become common, the report said.
Asian-Americans make up about 5 percent of the nation’s population but 10 percent or more — considerably more in California — of the undergraduates at many of the most selective colleges, according to data reported by colleges. But the new report suggested that some such statistics combined campus populations of Asian-Americans with those of international students from Asian countries.
The report quotes the opening to W. E. B. Du Bois’s 1903 classic “The Souls of Black Folk” — “How does it feel to be a problem?” — and says that for Asian-Americans, seen as the “good minority that seeks advancement through quiet diligence in study and work and by not making waves,” the question is, “How does it feel to be a solution?”
That question, too, is problematic, the report said, because it diverts attention from systemic failings of K-to-12 schools, shifting responsibility for educational success to individual students. In addition, it said, lumping together all Asian groups masks the poverty and academic difficulties of some subgroups.
The report said the model-minority perception pitted Asian-Americans against African-Americans. With the drop in black and Latino enrollment at selective public universities that are not allowed to consider race in admissions, Asian-Americans have been turned into buffers, the report said, “middlemen in the cost-benefit analysis of wins and losses.”
Some have suggested that Asian-Americans are held to higher admissions standards at the most selective colleges. In 2006, Jian Li, the New Jersey-born son of Chinese immigrants, filed a complaint with the Office for Civil Rights at the Education Department, saying he had been rejected by Princeton because he is Asian. Princeton’s admission policies are under review, the department says.
The report also notes the underrepresentation of Asian-Americans in administrative jobs at colleges. Only 33 of the nation’s college presidents, fewer than 1 percent, are Asian-Americans or Pacific Islanders.
Also, check out a report from an earlier post entitled: "Asian American Students Struggling under NCLB" it further adds to the discussion of homogenizing Asian American students.
-Patricia
By TAMAR LEWIN
Published: June 10, 2008
The image of Asian-Americans as a homogeneous group of high achievers taking over the campuses of the nation’s most selective colleges came under assault in a report issued Monday.
The report, by New York University, the College Board and a commission of mostly Asian-American educators and community leaders, largely avoids the debates over both affirmative action and the heavy representation of Asian-Americans at the most selective colleges.
But it pokes holes in stereotypes about Asian-Americans and Pacific Islanders, including the perception that they cluster in science, technology, engineering and math. And it points out that the term “Asian-American” is extraordinarily broad, embracing members of many ethnic groups.
“Certainly there’s a lot of Asians doing well, at the top of the curve, and that’s a point of pride, but there are just as many struggling at the bottom of the curve, and we wanted to draw attention to that,” said Robert T. Teranishi, the N.Y.U. education professor who wrote the report, “Facts, Not Fiction: Setting the Record Straight.”
“Our goal,” Professor Teranishi added, “is to have people understand that the population is very diverse.”
The report, based on federal education, immigration and census data, as well as statistics from the College Board, noted that the federally defined categories of Asian-American and Pacific Islander included dozens of groups, each with its own language and culture, as varied as the Hmong, Samoans, Bengalis and Sri Lankans.
Their educational backgrounds, the report said, vary widely: while most of the nation’s Hmong and Cambodian adults have never finished high school, most Pakistanis and Indians have at least a bachelor’s degree.
The SAT scores of Asian-Americans, it said, like those of other Americans, tend to correlate with the income and educational level of their parents.
“The notion of lumping all people into a single category and assuming they have no needs is wrong,” said Alma R. Clayton-Pederson, vice president of the Association of American Colleges and Universities, who was a member of the commission the College Board financed to produce the report.
“Our backgrounds are very different,” added Dr. Clayton-Pederson, who is black, “but it’s almost like the reverse of what happened to African-Americans.”
The report found that contrary to stereotype, most of the bachelor’s degrees that Asian-Americans and Pacific Islanders received in 2003 were in business, management, social sciences or humanities, not in the STEM fields: science, technology, engineering or math. And while Asians earned 32 percent of the nation’s STEM doctorates that year, within that 32 percent more than four of five degree recipients were international students from Asia, not Asian-Americans.
The report also said that more Asian-Americans and Pacific Islanders were enrolled in community colleges than in either public or private four-year colleges. But the idea that Asian-American “model minority” students are edging out all others is so ubiquitous that quips like “U.C.L.A. really stands for United Caucasians Lost Among Asians” or “M.I.T. means Made in Taiwan” have become common, the report said.
Asian-Americans make up about 5 percent of the nation’s population but 10 percent or more — considerably more in California — of the undergraduates at many of the most selective colleges, according to data reported by colleges. But the new report suggested that some such statistics combined campus populations of Asian-Americans with those of international students from Asian countries.
The report quotes the opening to W. E. B. Du Bois’s 1903 classic “The Souls of Black Folk” — “How does it feel to be a problem?” — and says that for Asian-Americans, seen as the “good minority that seeks advancement through quiet diligence in study and work and by not making waves,” the question is, “How does it feel to be a solution?”
That question, too, is problematic, the report said, because it diverts attention from systemic failings of K-to-12 schools, shifting responsibility for educational success to individual students. In addition, it said, lumping together all Asian groups masks the poverty and academic difficulties of some subgroups.
The report said the model-minority perception pitted Asian-Americans against African-Americans. With the drop in black and Latino enrollment at selective public universities that are not allowed to consider race in admissions, Asian-Americans have been turned into buffers, the report said, “middlemen in the cost-benefit analysis of wins and losses.”
Some have suggested that Asian-Americans are held to higher admissions standards at the most selective colleges. In 2006, Jian Li, the New Jersey-born son of Chinese immigrants, filed a complaint with the Office for Civil Rights at the Education Department, saying he had been rejected by Princeton because he is Asian. Princeton’s admission policies are under review, the department says.
The report also notes the underrepresentation of Asian-Americans in administrative jobs at colleges. Only 33 of the nation’s college presidents, fewer than 1 percent, are Asian-Americans or Pacific Islanders.
Tuesday, June 10, 2008
Expert Task Force Charges School Reform Alone Will Fail in Closing Achievement Gap
For Immediate Release
Contact: Katie Reardon
Katie.Reardon@widmeyer.com
202.667.0901
Expert Task Force Charges School Reform Alone Will Fail in Closing Achievement Gap
Diverse Bipartisan Group Launches Campaign for ‘Broader, Bolder’ Policies
to Improve Education, Bridge Achievement Gaps
Washington, DC, June 10, 2008 – A new task force of national policy experts with diverse religious and political affiliations, in public policy fields including education, social welfare, health, housing, and civil rights today launched a campaign calling for a “Broader, Bolder Approach to Education” to break a decades-long cycle of reform efforts that promised much and have achieved far too little.
Co-chaired by Helen Ladd, a Duke University professor of public policy studies, Pedro Noguera, a sociologist at New York University and an expert on educational policy, and Tom Payzant, a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, a former Boston schools superintendent and U.S. assistant secretary of education, the Task Force’s framework points to the many flaws in the approach of the current No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law and charges that the nation's education and youth development policy has erred by relying on school improvement alone to raise achievement levels of disadvantaged children.
According to the Task Force, multitudes of children are growing up in circumstances that hinder their educational achievement. Statistics suggest the rhetoric of leaving no child behind has trumped reality. As the Task Force’s ads in today’s New York Times and Washington Post note, “Some schools have demonstrated unusual effectiveness. But even they cannot, by themselves, close the entire gap between students from different backgrounds in a substantial, consistent and sustainable manner on the full range of academic and non-academic measures by which we judge student success.”
The timing of the release of a “Broader, Bolder Approach” comes after months and months of gridlock in Washington tied to the reauthorization of NCLB. The statement signed by more than 60 leaders provides a fresh way of thinking about education and youth development policy for governors, state legislators, and a President and Congress who are now running for election in November.
The signatories to “Bolder Approach” reads like a Who’s Who of diverse national leaders from all political and policy spectrums, who have come to agree that the policy embodied in NCLB has failed. The list includes former officials of the current administration, including Susan B. Neuman, who served as Assistant Secretary for Elementary and Secondary Education when NCLB was first enacted; John DiIulio, who was President Bush's first director of faith-based programs; and Dr. Richard Carmona, U.S. Surgeon General until last year. It also includes education, health, and human services officials from the Clinton Administration, such as Marshall Smith, who was Undersecretary of Education; Peter Edelman, who was Assistant Secretary of Health and Human Services, and Dr. Joycelyn Elders, U.S. Surgeon General.
Although some supporters of NCLB call it a "civil rights law," the signatories include civil rights advocates such as Julian Bond, Chairman of the NAACP; Hugh Price, former President of the National Urban
1
League; John Jackson, President of the Schott Foundation and former Chief Policy Officer at the NAACP; Julianne Malveaux, President of the Bennett College for Women; the noted sociologist William Julius Wilson; Ernie Cortes, director of the Southwest Industrial Areas Foundation; and Karen Lashman, Vice-President for Policy of the Children's Defense Fund.
The list includes well-known conservatives, such as Nobel economist James Heckman; Diane Ravitch, who served as Assistant Secretary of Education in the administration of President George H.W. Bush; and Glenn Loury, a Brown University economist. Also included are progressives such as Linda Darling-Hammond, an education advisor to Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama; Debbie Meier, founder of the Central Park East schools, and authors John Goodlad and Ted Sizer.
Other notable signatories include Robert Schwartz, the founding president of Achieve, the education reform organization of the nation's governors and leading corporate executives; Milton Goldberg, the executive director of the commission that produced the report, A Nation At Risk in 1983; Richard Kazis, Vice-President of Jobs for the Future, the high school reform organization; and Bella Rosenberg, formerly the assistant to the late Albert Shanker of the AFT. Although many of the signers are known for their concern about the education of urban youth, the Task Force also includes Rachel Tompkins, one of the nation’s leading experts in the problems of rural education.
The statement's diverse group of religious leaders include the Rev. Dr. Michael Kinnamon, General Secretary of the National Council of Churches; Richard Mouw, president of the Fuller Theological Seminary, the nation's leading evangelical seminary in Pasadena, California; and Joseph O'Keefe, S.J., Dean of the School of Education at Boston College.
Prominent academic scholars of child development and the economics of education, including James Comer, David Grissmer, Christopher Jencks, Sharon Lynn Kagan, and Jane Waldfogel, are also members of the group, as are urban schools superintendents Rudy Crew (Miami-Dade), Arne Duncan (Chicago), and Beverly Hall (Atlanta).
“After six years, it has become clear that No Child Left Behind has not succeeded in improving the quality of education available to America's neediest children. This Task Force is united around the need for a more comprehensive approach to federal policy that specifically responds to the needs of children and schools in low-income areas,” said Co-Chair Pedro Noguera. "Our 'Bold Approach' identifies critical community support systems that can effectively work to narrow the disheartening achievement gap that exists in America."
“Schools can’t do it alone,” said Co-Chair Helen Ladd. “Accountability is a pillar of our education system, but schools need the support of the community – both before children arrive at school and during their school years – for all children to achieve high standards.”
“‘A Bold Approach’ calls for a broader partnership and a sturdier bridge across schools, public health, and social services,” said Co-Chair Tom Payzant. “When we ensure our children are provided their most basic needs, then we can work toward the highest of standards applied to all of our students.”
“A Broader, Bolder Approach” applies equally to federal, state and local policy and acknowledges the centrality of formal schooling, but also focuses on the importance of high quality early childhood and preschool programs, after-school and summer programs, and programs that develop parents’ capacity to support their children’s education. Specifically, “A Broader, Bolder Approach to Education” calls for:
1.
Continued school improvement efforts. To close achievement gaps, we need to reduce class sizes in early grades for disadvantaged children; attract high-quality teachers in hard-to-staff schools; improve teacher and school leadership training; make college preparatory curriculum accessible to all; and pay special attention to recent immigrants.
2.
Developmentally appropriate and high-quality early childhood, pre-school and kindergarten care and education. These programs must not only help low-income children
2
3
academically, but provide support in developing appropriate social, economic and behavioral skills.
3.
Routine pediatric, dental, hearing and vision care for all infants, toddlers and schoolchildren. In particular, full-service school clinics can fill the health gaps created by the absence of primary care physicians in low-income areas, and by poor parents’ inability to miss work for children’s routine health services.
4.
Improving the quality of students’ out-of-school time. Low-income students learn rapidly in school, but often lose ground after school and during summers. Policymakers should increase investments in areas such as longer school days, after-school and summer programs, and school-to-work programs with demonstrated track records.
“We are pleased to support the ‘Broader, Bolder Approach to Education’ campaign,” said Nicholas C. Donohue, President and CEO of the Nellie Mae Education Foundation, New England’s largest philanthropy that focuses exclusively on education. “The Task Force reminds us that proper health care and a safe and nurturing environment are keys to learning. We are hopeful their initiative will promote a new conversation about the next stage of education reform."
The release of “A Broader, Bolder Approach for Education” marks the beginning of a long-term effort to persuade federal, state and local policymakers to consider a more enriching framework as they work to support every child’s education.
The Task Force
Lawrence Mishel, president of the Economic Policy Institute, convened the Task Force to consider the broader context of the NCLB law in the nation's approach to education and youth development policy. The Task Force drafted a statement adopted unanimously to articulate the theme that the nation has erred by attempting to rely on school improvement alone to raise the achievement of disadvantaged children. To read the full statement and view the list of signers with their biographical information, please visit www.boldapproach.org.
###
Contact: Katie Reardon
Katie.Reardon@widmeyer.com
202.667.0901
Expert Task Force Charges School Reform Alone Will Fail in Closing Achievement Gap
Diverse Bipartisan Group Launches Campaign for ‘Broader, Bolder’ Policies
to Improve Education, Bridge Achievement Gaps
Washington, DC, June 10, 2008 – A new task force of national policy experts with diverse religious and political affiliations, in public policy fields including education, social welfare, health, housing, and civil rights today launched a campaign calling for a “Broader, Bolder Approach to Education” to break a decades-long cycle of reform efforts that promised much and have achieved far too little.
Co-chaired by Helen Ladd, a Duke University professor of public policy studies, Pedro Noguera, a sociologist at New York University and an expert on educational policy, and Tom Payzant, a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, a former Boston schools superintendent and U.S. assistant secretary of education, the Task Force’s framework points to the many flaws in the approach of the current No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law and charges that the nation's education and youth development policy has erred by relying on school improvement alone to raise achievement levels of disadvantaged children.
According to the Task Force, multitudes of children are growing up in circumstances that hinder their educational achievement. Statistics suggest the rhetoric of leaving no child behind has trumped reality. As the Task Force’s ads in today’s New York Times and Washington Post note, “Some schools have demonstrated unusual effectiveness. But even they cannot, by themselves, close the entire gap between students from different backgrounds in a substantial, consistent and sustainable manner on the full range of academic and non-academic measures by which we judge student success.”
The timing of the release of a “Broader, Bolder Approach” comes after months and months of gridlock in Washington tied to the reauthorization of NCLB. The statement signed by more than 60 leaders provides a fresh way of thinking about education and youth development policy for governors, state legislators, and a President and Congress who are now running for election in November.
The signatories to “Bolder Approach” reads like a Who’s Who of diverse national leaders from all political and policy spectrums, who have come to agree that the policy embodied in NCLB has failed. The list includes former officials of the current administration, including Susan B. Neuman, who served as Assistant Secretary for Elementary and Secondary Education when NCLB was first enacted; John DiIulio, who was President Bush's first director of faith-based programs; and Dr. Richard Carmona, U.S. Surgeon General until last year. It also includes education, health, and human services officials from the Clinton Administration, such as Marshall Smith, who was Undersecretary of Education; Peter Edelman, who was Assistant Secretary of Health and Human Services, and Dr. Joycelyn Elders, U.S. Surgeon General.
Although some supporters of NCLB call it a "civil rights law," the signatories include civil rights advocates such as Julian Bond, Chairman of the NAACP; Hugh Price, former President of the National Urban
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League; John Jackson, President of the Schott Foundation and former Chief Policy Officer at the NAACP; Julianne Malveaux, President of the Bennett College for Women; the noted sociologist William Julius Wilson; Ernie Cortes, director of the Southwest Industrial Areas Foundation; and Karen Lashman, Vice-President for Policy of the Children's Defense Fund.
The list includes well-known conservatives, such as Nobel economist James Heckman; Diane Ravitch, who served as Assistant Secretary of Education in the administration of President George H.W. Bush; and Glenn Loury, a Brown University economist. Also included are progressives such as Linda Darling-Hammond, an education advisor to Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama; Debbie Meier, founder of the Central Park East schools, and authors John Goodlad and Ted Sizer.
Other notable signatories include Robert Schwartz, the founding president of Achieve, the education reform organization of the nation's governors and leading corporate executives; Milton Goldberg, the executive director of the commission that produced the report, A Nation At Risk in 1983; Richard Kazis, Vice-President of Jobs for the Future, the high school reform organization; and Bella Rosenberg, formerly the assistant to the late Albert Shanker of the AFT. Although many of the signers are known for their concern about the education of urban youth, the Task Force also includes Rachel Tompkins, one of the nation’s leading experts in the problems of rural education.
The statement's diverse group of religious leaders include the Rev. Dr. Michael Kinnamon, General Secretary of the National Council of Churches; Richard Mouw, president of the Fuller Theological Seminary, the nation's leading evangelical seminary in Pasadena, California; and Joseph O'Keefe, S.J., Dean of the School of Education at Boston College.
Prominent academic scholars of child development and the economics of education, including James Comer, David Grissmer, Christopher Jencks, Sharon Lynn Kagan, and Jane Waldfogel, are also members of the group, as are urban schools superintendents Rudy Crew (Miami-Dade), Arne Duncan (Chicago), and Beverly Hall (Atlanta).
“After six years, it has become clear that No Child Left Behind has not succeeded in improving the quality of education available to America's neediest children. This Task Force is united around the need for a more comprehensive approach to federal policy that specifically responds to the needs of children and schools in low-income areas,” said Co-Chair Pedro Noguera. "Our 'Bold Approach' identifies critical community support systems that can effectively work to narrow the disheartening achievement gap that exists in America."
“Schools can’t do it alone,” said Co-Chair Helen Ladd. “Accountability is a pillar of our education system, but schools need the support of the community – both before children arrive at school and during their school years – for all children to achieve high standards.”
“‘A Bold Approach’ calls for a broader partnership and a sturdier bridge across schools, public health, and social services,” said Co-Chair Tom Payzant. “When we ensure our children are provided their most basic needs, then we can work toward the highest of standards applied to all of our students.”
“A Broader, Bolder Approach” applies equally to federal, state and local policy and acknowledges the centrality of formal schooling, but also focuses on the importance of high quality early childhood and preschool programs, after-school and summer programs, and programs that develop parents’ capacity to support their children’s education. Specifically, “A Broader, Bolder Approach to Education” calls for:
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Continued school improvement efforts. To close achievement gaps, we need to reduce class sizes in early grades for disadvantaged children; attract high-quality teachers in hard-to-staff schools; improve teacher and school leadership training; make college preparatory curriculum accessible to all; and pay special attention to recent immigrants.
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Developmentally appropriate and high-quality early childhood, pre-school and kindergarten care and education. These programs must not only help low-income children
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academically, but provide support in developing appropriate social, economic and behavioral skills.
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Routine pediatric, dental, hearing and vision care for all infants, toddlers and schoolchildren. In particular, full-service school clinics can fill the health gaps created by the absence of primary care physicians in low-income areas, and by poor parents’ inability to miss work for children’s routine health services.
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Improving the quality of students’ out-of-school time. Low-income students learn rapidly in school, but often lose ground after school and during summers. Policymakers should increase investments in areas such as longer school days, after-school and summer programs, and school-to-work programs with demonstrated track records.
“We are pleased to support the ‘Broader, Bolder Approach to Education’ campaign,” said Nicholas C. Donohue, President and CEO of the Nellie Mae Education Foundation, New England’s largest philanthropy that focuses exclusively on education. “The Task Force reminds us that proper health care and a safe and nurturing environment are keys to learning. We are hopeful their initiative will promote a new conversation about the next stage of education reform."
The release of “A Broader, Bolder Approach for Education” marks the beginning of a long-term effort to persuade federal, state and local policymakers to consider a more enriching framework as they work to support every child’s education.
The Task Force
Lawrence Mishel, president of the Economic Policy Institute, convened the Task Force to consider the broader context of the NCLB law in the nation's approach to education and youth development policy. The Task Force drafted a statement adopted unanimously to articulate the theme that the nation has erred by attempting to rely on school improvement alone to raise the achievement of disadvantaged children. To read the full statement and view the list of signers with their biographical information, please visit www.boldapproach.org.
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