Tucson’s Sin of Scandal Failing Students
By Rodolfo F. Acuña -
Rough Draft, 01/13/2012
What is missing in the media’s coverage of the elimination of the Tucson Unified School District Mexican American Studies program is that students were learning and they wanted to go to school. I take this travesty personal. One of the reasons I have stayed in education for over fifty-five years is that I wanted to do something about the dropout problem. I always heeded John Dewey dicta that a student failure was that of the teacher. If students drop out then there is something wrong with the educational system.
Arizona education has many problems: taxpayers do not want to pay for schools and it is dead last in student per capita spending. White parents don’t want their children going to school with Latinos and blacks as well as other working class people, so charter schools have multiplied to “balance” student ethnicity by making it whiter.
Arizona has blatantly avoided federal court orders to desegregate: more than fifty years after Brown v. the Board of Education (1954), the TUSD is still under a federal court mandate to “balance” the schools. The federal government, meanwhile, has poured millions of dollars into Arizona to help pay for integration purposes.
The truth be told, there has been no improvement. The dropout problem remains over fifty percent. As part of an effort to correct imbalances, the federal court in its desegregation plan, included the MAS program, which federal government paid for.
Because I have been a highly successful educator, I have seen that building student identity ameliorates an inferiority complex ingrained by the educational process. Innumerable studies prove that an increase sense of self motivates students to better their skills and allows them to succeed in school.
The reason that I want to improve education is personal. I am not religious, but I always remember the nuns telling me when I saw a person less fortunate to say, “There for the grace of God go I.”
Although I could not do it, I appreciate the work of Fr. Greg Boyle and Homeboy Industries. It hurts me every time I see a gang kid because I realize that as a member of society I bear a responsibility for the outcome. My vocation differs Greg’s and I work with students by giving them an alternative to gangs when they are young. My feeling is every student that goes to college does not end up in a gang.
The TUSD MAS program was contributing to that end. Despite the racist lies of Arizona politicos it is a model to motivate students. And, despite the actions of the TUSD school board, other districts will emulate and study it.
My feelings about the people behind the destruction of the MAS program are that they have no redemption. They are no better than the members of the mafia who do not care about the outcome or hardships they cause as long as they make a profit.
Democracy has been dealt a blow. The actions of these racist has contributed to disillusionment among many students. They have brought about a loss of faith, which is always difficult whether it be in religion or politics. This loss leads to an emptiness and hopelessness. For instance, I know people who as a result of the pedophile scandals in the Catholic Church have not returned to mass.
In ending the MAS program, the state of Arizona has been complicit in condemning many Latino students to failure. Thomas de Aquinas defined scandal as a word or action that is intrinsically evil, and leads to the spiritual ruin of another person. You don’t necessarily have to physically cause someone’s sin, but only be the moral cause of the sin. A sin of scandal is not accidental but premeditated as in the case of Arizona elites.
From the top on down, Arizona officials know that their actions is causing many Latinos to be stigmatized. They know that they are contributing to their dropping out of school and they don’t care.
Mark Stegeman, Michael Hicks, Miguel Cuevas and the newly appointed Alexandre Sugiyama all know it. They are bought men who don’t care about the consequences as long as it fills their pockets.
For them, education is business and it doesn’t much matter if Mexican Americans get an education. As long as people hate Mexicans, it is easier to cash in on their lack of education.
It is a well-known fact that the Tea Party is not a populist movement. It is racist and driven by right wing funding that includes the Koch brothers who Mitt Romney says are the “financial engine of the Tea Party.”
Most Arizonans know the role of ALEC (the American Legislative Exchange Council). The People for the American Way Foundation and Common Cause have published a report documenting the fact that ALEC has inspired and written most anti- Latino and worker legislation in the state. It is at the forefront of anti-labor, anti-healthcare and anti-environmental. It is behind the privatization of schools and prisons.
Major corporations including Coca-Cola, Kraft, ExxonMobil and GlaxoSmithKline are key players in Arizona politics. Two dozen major corporations have sat on ALEC’s board which is insidiously called the “Private Enterprise Board.”
Well aware of the growing Latino population, it is to ALEC’s advantage to keep the state white and Mexicans disenfranchised. Thus, it has sponsored voter suppression bills that potentially disenfranchise tens of thousands of Arizonans.
The report identifies fifty Arizona state legislators who are current ALEC members. These bought politicos wrote and sponsored SB 1070, Arizona’s notorious immigration. It is no accident that privatized prisons are flush with immigrant detainees. Uneducated Mexican Americans also insure future inmate growth. Aside from money to run the prisons, prison labor is competing with free labor.
In Tucson, the Southern Arizona Leadership Council is an ALEC mini-me; an all-white country club whose members overlap with other heavy hitters locally, regionally and statewide. The TUSD superintendent of schools is a former SALC vice-president.
Recently, when Judy Burns, a supporter of the MAS program died, SALC engineered the appointment of Alexandre Sugiyama, a lecturer in Economics at the University of Arizona, to fill her seat. It accomplished its ends by stacking the selection committee.
Sugiyama was obviously selected because he is half Brazilian and half Japanese. He has no ties to the community; he is a lecturer with no publications, or knowledge or interest in education.
His student evaluations are low: “AVOID (reasons): 1. Resents his own job such that he's consistently 15 mins late to 1hr class…” Another “if you choose to take this class with this teacher you are in for a real treat. TORTURE. Sugiyama is such a horrid teacher it is unreal. Do yourself a favor and just say NO.”
As soon as Sugiyama was appointed, he voted with Stegeman and Hicks to replace Cuevas as chair and then with a 4-1 majority abolished MAS. Democracy in action.
Thus far, what is lost are the Latino students and no one gives a damn. Nobody cares if they end up in gangs, as long as they money for the elites -- that is what counts. Fear of ending up in a class with a Mexican will generate more Charter Schools and more dropouts will insure larger prison populations. Everyone makes money.
The disillusionment is not limited to Arizona politicos but includes the federal government. The federal courts have not enforced federal laws. The Obama administration is paralyzed furthering the feeling of abandonment and encouraging TUSD Tea Party Board member Hicks to go around saying that state law trumps federal law.
My mother would say about the gaggle in Tucson, no tienen madre. They are disrespectful; they don’t care about the law, or how many people are hurt by their actions.
I am not as nice as my mother was. I feel much like the people in the Boyle Heights area when the Night Stalker, Richard Ramírez, was terrorizing Los Angeles. They put out signs daring him to come East of the River, and then took care of him when he did.
Hopefully the Tea Party will come to L.A.
Saturday, January 14, 2012
Tuesday, January 10, 2012
How UT Professors Are Like Chefs
An answer to the citizens of Texas, who pay my salary and lend me their children to educate
By J.P. Olivelle in Guest Columns | The Alcalde
Jan | Feb 2012, Letters on January 9, 2012
“What do you do?” I am asked this question frequently, and often I struggle to answer adequately. Conditioned from our first day as assistant professors, we fall back on academic-speak.
“I do research and teaching.” My friend nods politely with glazed eyes. Once again, I have failed to tell the story of the academy grippingly.
Now the question is asked not by curious friends but by powerful people with agendas. They think they know already: we really don’t do much, and the little we do doesn’t amount to much. They ask questions about the very soul of the modern university.
It is easy to dismiss the questions from those pushing an agenda. But when my friend asks me, “What do you do?” it makes me wonder whether we have answered it to the satisfaction of the good and generous citizens of Texas, whose children we educate. So let me try.
We are theoretical physicists and art historians, philosophers and mathematicians, sociologists and biologists, engineers, geologists, and anthropologists. But I think we can say in five words what we do: we create and disseminate knowledge. No other social institution does that. We create knowledge through our research endeavors, sometimes in teams, but often alone in a lonely quest. We disseminate the knowledge we create through our writings, public presentations, and most importantly, our teaching.
This is the rare gift that students attending major research universities like UT enjoy. They get served by the chefs; they receive knowledge from those who create it. I like to tell my undergraduate students that going to a restaurant is a good parable for the difference between a school and a university. You can sit at the front and eat a dish that is already fully prepared (knowledge between two hard covers). Or you can go into the kitchen and discover how it is made.
This is what students get when they come to UT. The chef serves you in the kitchen; you learn from the masters. Even when we teach what others have discovered, we know how those discoveries took place, and we can get our students to question those discoveries. This is often called “critical thinking.” In other words, how can what you learn permit you to not simply repeat what you have learned, but to create new possibilities? Students learn to question, to look behind the curtain, to go into the kitchen and interrogate the chef.
In a fast-moving world where you really cannot prepare for a job because that job may not be there when you graduate, the education we impart must enable young people to be able to do and enjoy a wide variety of things. We have to prepare them for life, not for a job. And for that they must have the best knowledge we can give them about the world and the sharpest intellectual skills we can instill in them to remake it.
But what do I do? I work with ancient and early medieval texts from India written primarily in the classical language of Sanskrit. Why? Because I want to understand and reveal through my writings how societies and cultures of a different time and place may have lessons for us today. But that is not the only reason (a utilitarian one), nor the most important. Research is based on the innate curiosity of the human mind to go beyond the apparent, to explore what is distant and unfamiliar, whether it is the working of sub-atomic particles, the distant birth of the cosmos, or the way ancient people lived. It is this curiosity that generates experiments in art, music, and scholarship; it is what sets humans apart and accounts for the history of human accomplishments.
This curiosity-driven search for knowledge cannot be recorded on a bottom line of cost and benefit, although many of those bottom lines would not exist without that thirst and search for knowledge. This is what sets the university apart from the corporation.
As I have labored over ancient Indian legal texts, I have critically edited many of them, making reliable texts available to researchers. I have made annotated translations, making them available to both scholars and ordinary citizens. To prepare a critical edition, as I did of Manu’s famous second-century Code of Law, is tedious, time-consuming, and finally exhilarating. To read 50 copies of a work written many centuries ago by hand on country paper or palm leaves in nine different scripts, to note down and compare every variant reading and make a family tree of the manuscripts, and finally to arrive at a critically constituted text that I believe is the closest possible approximation to the original—this is the lonely quest I mentioned earlier. The result, however, is that we gain new insights into how an ancient people governed themselves, the laws by which they lived, and the ways they resolved disputes.
Is research that is unsupported by outside funds or that does not generate profits through practical applications worthwhile? The bottom-line arguments are good for 10-second sound-bites but disastrous for the health of a university. Sometimes when I am feeling down, I get an email from a stranger who has read a translation of mine of an ancient Indian text and wants me to know how much he appreciated it. Although these moments are rare and far between, they tell me that what I am doing is worthwhile.
The centrality of liberal arts, of scholarship in the human sciences, was underlined by perhaps the most gifted technology leader ever: Steve Jobs. “If you’re looking for CEOs of this caliber, you have to look outside the engineering and business schools,” noted a recent eulogizer.
Speaking of what makes Apple products distinctive, Jobs himself disclosed the secret: “I think our major contribution [to computing] was in bringing a liberal arts point of view to the use of computers,” he said. “If you really look at the ease of use of the Macintosh, the driving motivation behind that was to bring not only ease of use to people—so that many, many more people could use computers for nontraditional things at that time—but it was to bring beautiful fonts and typography to people, it was to bring graphics to people … so that they could see beautiful photographs, or pictures, or artwork, et cetera … to help them communicate.
“Our goal was to bring a liberal arts perspective and a liberal arts audience to what had traditionally been a very geeky technology and a very geeky audience.”
To which we all can only say, Amen!
J.P. Olivelle is the Jacob and Frances Sanger Mossiker Chair in the Humanities in UT’s College of Liberal Arts.
Photo credit: iStockphoto.
By J.P. Olivelle in Guest Columns | The Alcalde
Jan | Feb 2012, Letters on January 9, 2012
“What do you do?” I am asked this question frequently, and often I struggle to answer adequately. Conditioned from our first day as assistant professors, we fall back on academic-speak.
“I do research and teaching.” My friend nods politely with glazed eyes. Once again, I have failed to tell the story of the academy grippingly.
Now the question is asked not by curious friends but by powerful people with agendas. They think they know already: we really don’t do much, and the little we do doesn’t amount to much. They ask questions about the very soul of the modern university.
It is easy to dismiss the questions from those pushing an agenda. But when my friend asks me, “What do you do?” it makes me wonder whether we have answered it to the satisfaction of the good and generous citizens of Texas, whose children we educate. So let me try.
We are theoretical physicists and art historians, philosophers and mathematicians, sociologists and biologists, engineers, geologists, and anthropologists. But I think we can say in five words what we do: we create and disseminate knowledge. No other social institution does that. We create knowledge through our research endeavors, sometimes in teams, but often alone in a lonely quest. We disseminate the knowledge we create through our writings, public presentations, and most importantly, our teaching.
This is the rare gift that students attending major research universities like UT enjoy. They get served by the chefs; they receive knowledge from those who create it. I like to tell my undergraduate students that going to a restaurant is a good parable for the difference between a school and a university. You can sit at the front and eat a dish that is already fully prepared (knowledge between two hard covers). Or you can go into the kitchen and discover how it is made.
This is what students get when they come to UT. The chef serves you in the kitchen; you learn from the masters. Even when we teach what others have discovered, we know how those discoveries took place, and we can get our students to question those discoveries. This is often called “critical thinking.” In other words, how can what you learn permit you to not simply repeat what you have learned, but to create new possibilities? Students learn to question, to look behind the curtain, to go into the kitchen and interrogate the chef.
In a fast-moving world where you really cannot prepare for a job because that job may not be there when you graduate, the education we impart must enable young people to be able to do and enjoy a wide variety of things. We have to prepare them for life, not for a job. And for that they must have the best knowledge we can give them about the world and the sharpest intellectual skills we can instill in them to remake it.
But what do I do? I work with ancient and early medieval texts from India written primarily in the classical language of Sanskrit. Why? Because I want to understand and reveal through my writings how societies and cultures of a different time and place may have lessons for us today. But that is not the only reason (a utilitarian one), nor the most important. Research is based on the innate curiosity of the human mind to go beyond the apparent, to explore what is distant and unfamiliar, whether it is the working of sub-atomic particles, the distant birth of the cosmos, or the way ancient people lived. It is this curiosity that generates experiments in art, music, and scholarship; it is what sets humans apart and accounts for the history of human accomplishments.
This curiosity-driven search for knowledge cannot be recorded on a bottom line of cost and benefit, although many of those bottom lines would not exist without that thirst and search for knowledge. This is what sets the university apart from the corporation.
As I have labored over ancient Indian legal texts, I have critically edited many of them, making reliable texts available to researchers. I have made annotated translations, making them available to both scholars and ordinary citizens. To prepare a critical edition, as I did of Manu’s famous second-century Code of Law, is tedious, time-consuming, and finally exhilarating. To read 50 copies of a work written many centuries ago by hand on country paper or palm leaves in nine different scripts, to note down and compare every variant reading and make a family tree of the manuscripts, and finally to arrive at a critically constituted text that I believe is the closest possible approximation to the original—this is the lonely quest I mentioned earlier. The result, however, is that we gain new insights into how an ancient people governed themselves, the laws by which they lived, and the ways they resolved disputes.
Is research that is unsupported by outside funds or that does not generate profits through practical applications worthwhile? The bottom-line arguments are good for 10-second sound-bites but disastrous for the health of a university. Sometimes when I am feeling down, I get an email from a stranger who has read a translation of mine of an ancient Indian text and wants me to know how much he appreciated it. Although these moments are rare and far between, they tell me that what I am doing is worthwhile.
The centrality of liberal arts, of scholarship in the human sciences, was underlined by perhaps the most gifted technology leader ever: Steve Jobs. “If you’re looking for CEOs of this caliber, you have to look outside the engineering and business schools,” noted a recent eulogizer.
Speaking of what makes Apple products distinctive, Jobs himself disclosed the secret: “I think our major contribution [to computing] was in bringing a liberal arts point of view to the use of computers,” he said. “If you really look at the ease of use of the Macintosh, the driving motivation behind that was to bring not only ease of use to people—so that many, many more people could use computers for nontraditional things at that time—but it was to bring beautiful fonts and typography to people, it was to bring graphics to people … so that they could see beautiful photographs, or pictures, or artwork, et cetera … to help them communicate.
“Our goal was to bring a liberal arts perspective and a liberal arts audience to what had traditionally been a very geeky technology and a very geeky audience.”
To which we all can only say, Amen!
J.P. Olivelle is the Jacob and Frances Sanger Mossiker Chair in the Humanities in UT’s College of Liberal Arts.
Photo credit: iStockphoto.
The Broad Significance of Fisher v. Texas
By Richard Kahlenberg | The Chronicle of Higher Education
January 8, 2012
In the next few weeks, the U.S. Supreme Court is likely to decide whether or not it will hear a challenge to affirmative action at the University of Texas. The university, whose racial-preference program was sustained in the lower courts, has urged the Supreme Court not to take the case, while opponents of affirmative action have strongly urged that the justices do so.
The case, Fisher v. Texas, presents the question of whether an institution of higher education is allowed to use race in admissions even when the use of “race-neutral” alternatives produce a fair amount of racial diversity by themselves. For several years beginning in the mid-1990s, the University of Texas was banned by a Circuit Court decision from using race in admissions, so it employed two alternatives: a socioeconomic affirmative-action program, and a plan under which students from the top 10 percent of every high-school class in Texas were automatically admitted regardless of standardized test scores.
After the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed the ability of universities to carefully employ racial preferences in the 2003 Grutter v. Bollinger decision, Texas went back to considering race alongside the top-10-percent and class-based affirmative-action programs. White plaintiffs sued, arguing that the use of race was unnecessary and therefore violated Grutter because Texas’s race-neutral plans produced sufficient racial diversity.
In its filing with the Supreme Court last month, the University of Texas made a number of arguments, including one that suggested that the “unique circumstances of UT-Austin,” made the case unworthy of Supreme Court review. Percentage plans only exist in three states: Texas, California, and Florida. Moreover, the latter two states’ laws already prohibit consideration of race in admissions so the legality of racial considerations in those jurisdictions is moot. The “Texas-specific” nature of the controversy “does not merit this Court’s review,” the lawyers argued.
But the larger legal issue at stake – how hard should universities be pushed to explore race-neutral alternatives before resorting to race – is hardly unique to Texas. While the specific mechanism involved in Texas’s top-10-percent plan may not work everywhere (particularly at private institutions with national applicant pools), Texas’s use of socioeconomic affirmative action has widespread applicability and has been shown to produce substantial levels of racial and ethnic diversity.
In a 2004 Century Foundation study, for example, class-based affirmative action produced almost as much racial and ethnic diversity (10 percent black and Latino) as the use of race (12 percent black and Latino) at the most selective 146 institutions. And a 2010 study modeling an economic affirmative-action plan at the University of Colorado at Boulder found that a sufficiently large socioeconomic boost produced even more racial diversity than the use of race. These studies comport with research finding that today, socioeconomic obstacles are far more significant than racial ones in predicting achievement on standardized test scores.
The broad question of better defining how much pressure should be placed on universities to devise race-neutral alternatives is likely to be of particular concern to Justice Anthony Kennedy – the swing justice on today’s Supreme Court – who dissented in the 2003 Grutter case. In Grutter, Kennedy argued that the Court should “force educational institutions to seriously explore race-neutral alternatives.” Likewise, in a 2007 case involving the use of race in K-12 school-integration plans, Kennedy suggested that the individual classification of students by race should be employed only as “a last resort.”
It is little wonder that the University of Texas is making every argument it can to keep Fisher away from the Supreme Court. We will soon know whether its efforts are effective.
January 8, 2012
In the next few weeks, the U.S. Supreme Court is likely to decide whether or not it will hear a challenge to affirmative action at the University of Texas. The university, whose racial-preference program was sustained in the lower courts, has urged the Supreme Court not to take the case, while opponents of affirmative action have strongly urged that the justices do so.
The case, Fisher v. Texas, presents the question of whether an institution of higher education is allowed to use race in admissions even when the use of “race-neutral” alternatives produce a fair amount of racial diversity by themselves. For several years beginning in the mid-1990s, the University of Texas was banned by a Circuit Court decision from using race in admissions, so it employed two alternatives: a socioeconomic affirmative-action program, and a plan under which students from the top 10 percent of every high-school class in Texas were automatically admitted regardless of standardized test scores.
After the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed the ability of universities to carefully employ racial preferences in the 2003 Grutter v. Bollinger decision, Texas went back to considering race alongside the top-10-percent and class-based affirmative-action programs. White plaintiffs sued, arguing that the use of race was unnecessary and therefore violated Grutter because Texas’s race-neutral plans produced sufficient racial diversity.
In its filing with the Supreme Court last month, the University of Texas made a number of arguments, including one that suggested that the “unique circumstances of UT-Austin,” made the case unworthy of Supreme Court review. Percentage plans only exist in three states: Texas, California, and Florida. Moreover, the latter two states’ laws already prohibit consideration of race in admissions so the legality of racial considerations in those jurisdictions is moot. The “Texas-specific” nature of the controversy “does not merit this Court’s review,” the lawyers argued.
But the larger legal issue at stake – how hard should universities be pushed to explore race-neutral alternatives before resorting to race – is hardly unique to Texas. While the specific mechanism involved in Texas’s top-10-percent plan may not work everywhere (particularly at private institutions with national applicant pools), Texas’s use of socioeconomic affirmative action has widespread applicability and has been shown to produce substantial levels of racial and ethnic diversity.
In a 2004 Century Foundation study, for example, class-based affirmative action produced almost as much racial and ethnic diversity (10 percent black and Latino) as the use of race (12 percent black and Latino) at the most selective 146 institutions. And a 2010 study modeling an economic affirmative-action plan at the University of Colorado at Boulder found that a sufficiently large socioeconomic boost produced even more racial diversity than the use of race. These studies comport with research finding that today, socioeconomic obstacles are far more significant than racial ones in predicting achievement on standardized test scores.
The broad question of better defining how much pressure should be placed on universities to devise race-neutral alternatives is likely to be of particular concern to Justice Anthony Kennedy – the swing justice on today’s Supreme Court – who dissented in the 2003 Grutter case. In Grutter, Kennedy argued that the Court should “force educational institutions to seriously explore race-neutral alternatives.” Likewise, in a 2007 case involving the use of race in K-12 school-integration plans, Kennedy suggested that the individual classification of students by race should be employed only as “a last resort.”
It is little wonder that the University of Texas is making every argument it can to keep Fisher away from the Supreme Court. We will soon know whether its efforts are effective.
Monday, January 09, 2012
Arizona withholds school funding over ethnic studies class
The state's superintendent finds Tucson's Mexican American studies program again in violation of state law. The program might have to be cut, a school district board member says.
By Stephen Ceasar, Los Angeles Times
January 6, 2012, 4:50 p.m.
Tucson's Mexican American studies program remains in violation of state law, Arizona's public schools chief ruled Friday, ordering that millions in state funding be withheld from the school district until the program is dismantled or brought into compliance.
John Huppenthal, the state superintendent of public instruction, said the Tucson Unified School District program was in violation of a new state law prohibiting ethnic studies classes that are deemed to be divisive.
Among other things, the law bans classes primarily designed for a particular ethnic group or which "promote resentment toward a race or class of people."
Defenders of the program say it does no such thing. They say the classes push Latino students to excel and teach a long-neglected slice of America's cultural heritage: Chicano perspectives on literature, history and social justice.
Huppenthal ordered that beginning in February, 10% of the district's monthly apportionment of state aid be withheld until the program comes into compliance. He did not say the district should eliminate the program but did not offer any suggestions on how it could be changed to comply with state law.
It is the second instance in which Huppenthal ruled that the program violated the law. The first decision, in June, was appealed by the school district. Last week, an Arizona administrative law judge rejected that appeal, affirming Huppenthal's original decision.
The withholding of state funds will also be applied retroactively between August 2011 and January 2012. That money — about $5 million — will be taken out of the district's February allotment, said Ryan Ducharme, an Arizona Department of Education spokesman.
Should the district not bring the program into compliance, the district stands to lose about $14.4 million over the fiscal year, Ducharme said.
The district's governing board can also appeal the decision in Superior Court. The board will discuss the matter in its next meeting on Tuesday, a district spokeswoman said.
"We would find it nearly impossible for them to cure the program," Huppenthal said. "The problems are so widespread and so deep that it would be very difficult. These are decisions they would have to make."
Miguel Cuevas, a member of the district board, said that Huppenthal's decision to withhold funds retroactively took the board members by surprise. They will now review the decision and determine whether Huppenthal was within his legal rights to withhold funding while the district was appealing his first decision.
Cuevas told the Los Angeles Times that because the district would not be able to weather the loss of more than $14 million in state funding, the board would have to consider several options, including the elimination of the program.
"I cannot go down the path of losing $15 million," he said. "That is something I cannot see happen."
The law does not outlaw all ethnic studies courses in Arizona, but was framed in a way to target the Tucson program. The program's opponents — led by Huppenthal, a veteran state senator elected superintendent of public instruction in 2010 — say that by framing historical events in racial terms, the teachers promote groupthink and victimhood.
The classes, Huppenthal said in a statement, assert that "Latino minorities have been and continue to be oppressed by a Caucasian majority."
A separate case pending in federal court contends that the state law is unconstitutional. Eleven teachers and two students have requested an injunction to halt its implementation. A federal judge in Tucson heard arguments on the injunction last month but will soon rule on Huppenthal's motion to dismiss the case.
By Stephen Ceasar, Los Angeles Times
January 6, 2012, 4:50 p.m.
Tucson's Mexican American studies program remains in violation of state law, Arizona's public schools chief ruled Friday, ordering that millions in state funding be withheld from the school district until the program is dismantled or brought into compliance.
John Huppenthal, the state superintendent of public instruction, said the Tucson Unified School District program was in violation of a new state law prohibiting ethnic studies classes that are deemed to be divisive.
Among other things, the law bans classes primarily designed for a particular ethnic group or which "promote resentment toward a race or class of people."
Defenders of the program say it does no such thing. They say the classes push Latino students to excel and teach a long-neglected slice of America's cultural heritage: Chicano perspectives on literature, history and social justice.
Huppenthal ordered that beginning in February, 10% of the district's monthly apportionment of state aid be withheld until the program comes into compliance. He did not say the district should eliminate the program but did not offer any suggestions on how it could be changed to comply with state law.
It is the second instance in which Huppenthal ruled that the program violated the law. The first decision, in June, was appealed by the school district. Last week, an Arizona administrative law judge rejected that appeal, affirming Huppenthal's original decision.
The withholding of state funds will also be applied retroactively between August 2011 and January 2012. That money — about $5 million — will be taken out of the district's February allotment, said Ryan Ducharme, an Arizona Department of Education spokesman.
Should the district not bring the program into compliance, the district stands to lose about $14.4 million over the fiscal year, Ducharme said.
The district's governing board can also appeal the decision in Superior Court. The board will discuss the matter in its next meeting on Tuesday, a district spokeswoman said.
"We would find it nearly impossible for them to cure the program," Huppenthal said. "The problems are so widespread and so deep that it would be very difficult. These are decisions they would have to make."
Miguel Cuevas, a member of the district board, said that Huppenthal's decision to withhold funds retroactively took the board members by surprise. They will now review the decision and determine whether Huppenthal was within his legal rights to withhold funding while the district was appealing his first decision.
Cuevas told the Los Angeles Times that because the district would not be able to weather the loss of more than $14 million in state funding, the board would have to consider several options, including the elimination of the program.
"I cannot go down the path of losing $15 million," he said. "That is something I cannot see happen."
The law does not outlaw all ethnic studies courses in Arizona, but was framed in a way to target the Tucson program. The program's opponents — led by Huppenthal, a veteran state senator elected superintendent of public instruction in 2010 — say that by framing historical events in racial terms, the teachers promote groupthink and victimhood.
The classes, Huppenthal said in a statement, assert that "Latino minorities have been and continue to be oppressed by a Caucasian majority."
A separate case pending in federal court contends that the state law is unconstitutional. Eleven teachers and two students have requested an injunction to halt its implementation. A federal judge in Tucson heard arguments on the injunction last month but will soon rule on Huppenthal's motion to dismiss the case.
There's got to be a better way to finance education
Houston Chronicle
Friday, January 6, 2012
The state of Texas is facing multiple lawsuits over school finance as it heads into the New Year.
It's not as if the litigation was totally unexpected.
School district administrators from across the state were in Austin last legislative session begging the Legislature to address the woefully inadequate public school finance situation.
Not only did state lawmakers fail to address the problems, they cut $5.3 billion from public education and failed to provide additional funding for the 80,000 new students who are added to the school rolls each year.
There is something fundamentally wrong with the way the state conducts business if school districts are regularly forced to spend their money to take the state to court to do right by schoolchildren.
The latest flurry of lawsuits against the state over school finance is the sixth time the issue has landed in court since the 1989 Texas Supreme Court ruling in the landmark Edgewood v. Kirby lawsuit.
The first lawsuit filed this time around was brought by low- and medium-wealth districts that contend the state's funding formula is inequitable.
The second suit was filed by higher-wealth districts that claim the Legislature has failed to adequately fund public education.
The third lawsuit, filed by the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund, contends the state's public education funding system is inequitable for all students and inadequate for English-language learners and low-income students.
And the state's largest school districts filed the fourth lawsuit.
It is unfortunate taxpayers have had to resort to taking state officials to court to fix the problem.
State lawmakers have known for years that the 2006 so-called margins tax, which allowed a broad-based business tax to replace property taxes, was not working, but they did nothing about it.
They allowed the shortfall in revenue to expand until it prompted heavy cuts in public education and forced thousands of teacher layoffs, staff cuts and reductions in many programs.
In the process, many school districts have been forced to set their property tax rates at the maximum allowed by law just to be able to balance this budget.
The state keeps setting the accountability bar higher and higher for public education but cuts funding. State officials boast they were able to balance the state budget without raising taxes, but in doing so they forced school districts to finance lawsuits to take the state to court to get it to do the right thing.
It is unfair and unjust.
Friday, January 6, 2012
The state of Texas is facing multiple lawsuits over school finance as it heads into the New Year.
It's not as if the litigation was totally unexpected.
School district administrators from across the state were in Austin last legislative session begging the Legislature to address the woefully inadequate public school finance situation.
Not only did state lawmakers fail to address the problems, they cut $5.3 billion from public education and failed to provide additional funding for the 80,000 new students who are added to the school rolls each year.
There is something fundamentally wrong with the way the state conducts business if school districts are regularly forced to spend their money to take the state to court to do right by schoolchildren.
The latest flurry of lawsuits against the state over school finance is the sixth time the issue has landed in court since the 1989 Texas Supreme Court ruling in the landmark Edgewood v. Kirby lawsuit.
The first lawsuit filed this time around was brought by low- and medium-wealth districts that contend the state's funding formula is inequitable.
The second suit was filed by higher-wealth districts that claim the Legislature has failed to adequately fund public education.
The third lawsuit, filed by the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund, contends the state's public education funding system is inequitable for all students and inadequate for English-language learners and low-income students.
And the state's largest school districts filed the fourth lawsuit.
It is unfortunate taxpayers have had to resort to taking state officials to court to fix the problem.
State lawmakers have known for years that the 2006 so-called margins tax, which allowed a broad-based business tax to replace property taxes, was not working, but they did nothing about it.
They allowed the shortfall in revenue to expand until it prompted heavy cuts in public education and forced thousands of teacher layoffs, staff cuts and reductions in many programs.
In the process, many school districts have been forced to set their property tax rates at the maximum allowed by law just to be able to balance this budget.
The state keeps setting the accountability bar higher and higher for public education but cuts funding. State officials boast they were able to balance the state budget without raising taxes, but in doing so they forced school districts to finance lawsuits to take the state to court to get it to do the right thing.
It is unfair and unjust.
Thursday, January 05, 2012
UT official resigns after questions raised about ties to startups
By Kirk Ladendorf | AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Published: 9:49 p.m. Thursday, Jan. 5, 2012
Richard Miller, the University of Texas' first chief commercialization officer, resigned his position last week after being told he must no longer have a financial interest in startup companies that might want to license technology from the school.
Miller, a veteran biotechnology researcher and entrepreneur in California, went to work for UT in September 2010 to help turn more of the school's research discoveries into new jobs, companies and licensing income. As part of his job, he oversaw the work of the Office of Technology Commercialization, which assists companies that are interested in using patented UT technology and negotiates licensing deals with them.
Miller resigned effective Dec. 31 after he was told by UT officials that he could not have a personal and financial involvement in companies that might want to license technology developed at UT.
UT generated $25.6 million in licensing revenue in the most recent fiscal year and completed 29 new licensing and options agreements, according to the commercialization office's website. The school also received 58 U.S. and foreign patents last year.
Juan Sanchez, UT's vice president of research, said there was no active conflict of interest with Miller's involvement with the companies because they had not yet licensed technology from UT. However, Miller "was setting up a scenario in which he would be negotiating with himself, and that would have been a conflict of interest, which we would not allow," Sanchez said.
"We couldn't move forward with his expectation of having a dual role" with the companies, Sanchez said. "It was clear that he would have to divest his interest. The resignation was his call. I would have liked him to remain as chief commercialization officer, but he chose not to."
Sanchez said he instructed Miller in December to divest his interests in three startup companies that he had co-founded with UT faculty members and graduate students. Miller did divest his holdings in the three companies — Wibole, Graphea Inc. and Ultimor — but resigned sometime after that discussion, Sanchez said.
Sanchez said he asked Miller to divest his interest in the Austin companies he co-founded as soon as he learned of Miller's involvement with them.
Sanchez said that, to the best of his knowledge, Miller received no financial gain when he divested his interest in the companies.
Miller could not be reached by the American-Statesman for comment Thursday.
"In his heart ... Dr. Miller is still an entrepreneur and wants to work directly with startup companies in Austin and elsewhere," Sanchez said in a letter announcing Miller's resignation within UT.
Miller arrived in Austin in 2010 with ambitious plans to accelerate the pace of turning technical discoveries into jobs, companies and licensing revenue at the school.
Miller is an experienced biotech entrepreneur in California, and also taught at Stanford University, considered one of the nation's leaders in commercializing technology advances. He was hired by UT at a salary of $310,000.
UT's Office of Technology Commercialization, which Miller oversaw, had been involved with introducing at least two of the companies that Miller co-founded at conferences in which companies seek new investors. The office reported on a Venture Labs Expo at UT in May , at which Miller spoke and where two of the companies, Wibole and Graphea, were given as examples of the kinds of young companies that the Office of Technology Commercialization was working with.
The report said Graphea "was commercializing a patented graphene-based chemistry for high-performance composites."
It also said that Wibole had developed "a technology to improve the performance of cellular networks" and added that "OTC helped Wibole patent its technology."
But Sanchez said this week that UT has no formal ties with any of the companies Miller co-founded because the school has not yet licensed any of its research discoveries to them.
Sanchez said after his conversation with Miller, he asked UT's legal affairs office to provide a detailed talk to employees at the commercialization office on which limitations apply to them in working with customers that seek to license the school's research.
"We needed to make sure that we properly educated people," Sanchez said of the meeting.
Sanchez has asked Dan Sharp, associate director of the commercialization office, to serve as the interim director until a permanent replacement for Miller is found.
On reflection, Sanchez said, UT had a positive relationship with Miller, who he said brought several innovations to the school's commercialization effort.
"I see this as a minor obstacle that we have to overcome, — to find another chief commercialization officer with the same level of experience and enthusiasm" as Miller, Sanchez said. "I am committed — and so is everyone here at UT — that OTC continue to succeed. We are enthusiastic that we will continue to be very proactive in commercializing research."
While he was at UT, Miller pushed for the creation of a so-called embedded fund that would pay for early-stage work for startup companies working to commercialize the school's research work.
He also said it would take time for his ideas of accelerating commercialization in Austin to bear fruit.
"In a year or two, we will know if we can do some big-time stuff," he told the American-Statesman in an interview published in September 2010. "You will be able to feel that you are getting some traction.
"I am expecting to work very hard. In fact, I am already working very hard. The attraction is the possibility of doing something really, really different that is fun to do and that can have a huge impact."
Over the past decade, UT has stepped up its efforts to generate more revenue from technology licensing. Part of the reason is faculty pressure and recruitment of top-level researchers. Both new recruits and existing research faculty have pressed the school's administration to take a more proactive role in tech commercialization.
Pike Powers, an Austin lawyer and veteran economic development activist, said Miller brought new ideas to UT but might not have understood the constraints of working for a public university.
"He was offering some new ideas and thoughts about ways that the University of Texas could be more competitive," Powers said. "I don't think he received as strong a reception as he wanted to receive, so it was frustrating for him. He met with numerous members of the business community, and we advised him to be very careful about what steps he took next and to make sure he had the full support of the business community and the UT administration. But I don't think he ever heard that message to the extent that he should have."
Published: 9:49 p.m. Thursday, Jan. 5, 2012
Richard Miller, the University of Texas' first chief commercialization officer, resigned his position last week after being told he must no longer have a financial interest in startup companies that might want to license technology from the school.
Miller, a veteran biotechnology researcher and entrepreneur in California, went to work for UT in September 2010 to help turn more of the school's research discoveries into new jobs, companies and licensing income. As part of his job, he oversaw the work of the Office of Technology Commercialization, which assists companies that are interested in using patented UT technology and negotiates licensing deals with them.
Miller resigned effective Dec. 31 after he was told by UT officials that he could not have a personal and financial involvement in companies that might want to license technology developed at UT.
UT generated $25.6 million in licensing revenue in the most recent fiscal year and completed 29 new licensing and options agreements, according to the commercialization office's website. The school also received 58 U.S. and foreign patents last year.
Juan Sanchez, UT's vice president of research, said there was no active conflict of interest with Miller's involvement with the companies because they had not yet licensed technology from UT. However, Miller "was setting up a scenario in which he would be negotiating with himself, and that would have been a conflict of interest, which we would not allow," Sanchez said.
"We couldn't move forward with his expectation of having a dual role" with the companies, Sanchez said. "It was clear that he would have to divest his interest. The resignation was his call. I would have liked him to remain as chief commercialization officer, but he chose not to."
Sanchez said he instructed Miller in December to divest his interests in three startup companies that he had co-founded with UT faculty members and graduate students. Miller did divest his holdings in the three companies — Wibole, Graphea Inc. and Ultimor — but resigned sometime after that discussion, Sanchez said.
Sanchez said he asked Miller to divest his interest in the Austin companies he co-founded as soon as he learned of Miller's involvement with them.
Sanchez said that, to the best of his knowledge, Miller received no financial gain when he divested his interest in the companies.
Miller could not be reached by the American-Statesman for comment Thursday.
"In his heart ... Dr. Miller is still an entrepreneur and wants to work directly with startup companies in Austin and elsewhere," Sanchez said in a letter announcing Miller's resignation within UT.
Miller arrived in Austin in 2010 with ambitious plans to accelerate the pace of turning technical discoveries into jobs, companies and licensing revenue at the school.
Miller is an experienced biotech entrepreneur in California, and also taught at Stanford University, considered one of the nation's leaders in commercializing technology advances. He was hired by UT at a salary of $310,000.
UT's Office of Technology Commercialization, which Miller oversaw, had been involved with introducing at least two of the companies that Miller co-founded at conferences in which companies seek new investors. The office reported on a Venture Labs Expo at UT in May , at which Miller spoke and where two of the companies, Wibole and Graphea, were given as examples of the kinds of young companies that the Office of Technology Commercialization was working with.
The report said Graphea "was commercializing a patented graphene-based chemistry for high-performance composites."
It also said that Wibole had developed "a technology to improve the performance of cellular networks" and added that "OTC helped Wibole patent its technology."
But Sanchez said this week that UT has no formal ties with any of the companies Miller co-founded because the school has not yet licensed any of its research discoveries to them.
Sanchez said after his conversation with Miller, he asked UT's legal affairs office to provide a detailed talk to employees at the commercialization office on which limitations apply to them in working with customers that seek to license the school's research.
"We needed to make sure that we properly educated people," Sanchez said of the meeting.
Sanchez has asked Dan Sharp, associate director of the commercialization office, to serve as the interim director until a permanent replacement for Miller is found.
On reflection, Sanchez said, UT had a positive relationship with Miller, who he said brought several innovations to the school's commercialization effort.
"I see this as a minor obstacle that we have to overcome, — to find another chief commercialization officer with the same level of experience and enthusiasm" as Miller, Sanchez said. "I am committed — and so is everyone here at UT — that OTC continue to succeed. We are enthusiastic that we will continue to be very proactive in commercializing research."
While he was at UT, Miller pushed for the creation of a so-called embedded fund that would pay for early-stage work for startup companies working to commercialize the school's research work.
He also said it would take time for his ideas of accelerating commercialization in Austin to bear fruit.
"In a year or two, we will know if we can do some big-time stuff," he told the American-Statesman in an interview published in September 2010. "You will be able to feel that you are getting some traction.
"I am expecting to work very hard. In fact, I am already working very hard. The attraction is the possibility of doing something really, really different that is fun to do and that can have a huge impact."
Over the past decade, UT has stepped up its efforts to generate more revenue from technology licensing. Part of the reason is faculty pressure and recruitment of top-level researchers. Both new recruits and existing research faculty have pressed the school's administration to take a more proactive role in tech commercialization.
Pike Powers, an Austin lawyer and veteran economic development activist, said Miller brought new ideas to UT but might not have understood the constraints of working for a public university.
"He was offering some new ideas and thoughts about ways that the University of Texas could be more competitive," Powers said. "I don't think he received as strong a reception as he wanted to receive, so it was frustrating for him. He met with numerous members of the business community, and we advised him to be very careful about what steps he took next and to make sure he had the full support of the business community and the UT administration. But I don't think he ever heard that message to the extent that he should have."
UT-Austin Prepares for Fight Over Tuition Increases
by Reeve Hamilton | Texas Tribune
January 5, 2011
A group of students taking their cues from the Occupy movement wants the University of Texas System regents to know they won’t take tuition increases without a fight.
At a meeting in front of UT’s iconic tower tonight, the students will settle on a final version of a protest document they hope sparks a larger pushback against the growing cost of higher education.
If 2011 was a rough year for higher education, and UT in particular, the burgeoning Occupy UT group — which takes its name and inspiration from the worldwide phenomenon that began last year — might be an indication that 2012 may not be any easier. One assured flashpoint: how and how high tuition is set.
Forces on both the left and right of the political spectrum are already preparing for battle.
Toward the end of 2011, UT President Bill Powers concurred with recommendations from the university’s Tuition Policy Advisory Committee, made up of students, faculty and administrators, to ask the University of Texas System Board of Regents to increase tuition by 2.6 percent each of the next two years. That’s the maximum the regents, who will make the final tuition decision later this year, said they’d allow.
Adopting the recommendations will mean an extra $127 for in-state students in the coming academic year and $131 in the next. Leaders at UT argue that increases are necessary to avoid immediate cuts to crucial programs.
Not every university in Texas intends to increase tuition next year — the University of Texas at Arlington is a notable example — but it certainly is the trend. And the opposition UT faces from students and others who oppose the price hikes is illustrative of tuition struggles statewide.
Natalie Butler, the UT student body president and a member of the tuition advisory committee, said she hoped the increases would buy the university time to reconsider its approach to funding. “The fact that this current model is not sustainable is not lost on anyone, myself included,” she said.
When the committee’s recommendations were released following a closed-door meeting, many in right-leaning circles that spent much of last year questioning UT’s efficiency and transparency began crying foul. On the conservative Empower Texans blog, writer Will Lutz questioned if the process had violated recent legislative efforts to increase the transparency of the decision-making process regarding student fees. He concluded that while no open-records laws may have been broken, the committee was “ignoring both the intent and spirit” of recent legislation.
UT officials argue that as an advisory body that does not make final decisions on tuition, the committee can meet behind closed doors, allowing members to speak more freely.
Meanwhile, the ostensibly nonpartisan but generally left-leaning members of the nascent Occupy UT movement attended the advisory committee meeting following the announcement of the recommendations to chant their complaints about the proposed increases and the process that led to them.
“We know that this forum is a mere formality,” dozens of students stood up and shouted. “We know that this forum was never a chance to democratically participate in this decision-making process.”
UT President Powers later told the student newspaper The Daily Texan, “I thought the comments were very constructive. It was an interesting theatrical way to make a point. … It doesn’t surprise me that there’s not unanimous agreement on this across the University.”
Trevor Hoag, an assistant instructor at UT and an Occupy UT participant, said — speaking for himself, not the group — that he believes administrators are in “a tight spot” due to state budget cuts. And he said he wants to believe that they are more like-minded than it might seem at first blush. But, Hoag said, “If you’re really standing with us, then what would be the perfect rebuke to the Legislature than to say, ‘You’re going to cut us, but we’re not going to raise tuition. We’re going to buck the trend.’”
The Occupy students’ draft statement catalogs a list of grievances with the university: tuition increases “such that lower- and middle-class students can no longer afford to attend”; students accruing massive student loan debt, “which has led to wide-spread bankruptcy and default”; and an administration that “has leveled no serious rebuke against the legislature of the State of Texas” by demanding the re-regulation of tuition and a return to previous funding levels.
The students also complain that UT has made those decisions, among others, “with practically no democratic input from students, and it will continue to do so until students unite in order to turn the tide.”
Kevin Hegarty, UT’s vice president and chief financial officer, disagreed. He said the opportunities for student involvement in tuition recommendations had increased — the tuition advisory committee held open forums prior to its decision, and several new student budget advisory committees have been established in the last year — but overall student participation had not. “The vast majority of the student body does not seem to want to engage in that particular discussion, but that said, we’ll continue to make the effort,” he said.
Butler, the student body president, agreed, saying she had expected to hear calls to prevent tuition increases at two open advisory committee meetings before the recommendations were finalized. “I was expecting it and didn’t hear it, and that colored my thinking of things,” she said.
Now, the tuition decision rests with the regents, and it’s likely that they will hear opposition from voices on the right and from Occupiers like Hoag, who said, “We just want, if nothing else, manageable student debt.”
Hoag and his compatriots in Occupy UT have big plans. Thus far their strategy has been more event-based, but a physical occupation could be in the works for later in the semester. And they are reaching out to sympathetic groups at other schools, like Texas State University in San Marcos, which has had a small band of occupiers for months.
“Our target is, in some way, to attract others to swell the movement rather than to plead to the masters for more scraps,” Hoag said.
Wednesday, January 04, 2012
Lost Decade for Educational Progress -- NCLB 10th Anniversary Report
Here's the link to the Full Report
-Patricia
FairTest NationalCenterfor Fair & Open Testing
For further information:
Dr. Monty Neill (617)
477-9792
Bob Schaeffer (239) 395-6773
For use on or after Tuesday afternoon, January 3, 2012
The federal No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law “failed badly both
in terms of its own goals and more broadly,” leading to a decade
of educational stagnation. That is the central conclusion of a major
new report marking NCLB’s tenth anniversary. President George W. Bush
signed the program into law on January 8, 2002.
The report, “NCLB’s Lost Decade for Educational Progress,”
summarizes data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress
(NAEP) and dozens of independent studies. It was written by staff of
the National Center for Fair & Open Testing (FairTest).
Among the report’s major findings:
- NCLB failed to significantly increase average academic
performance or to significantly narrow achievement gaps, as measured
by NAEP. U.S. students made greater gains before NCLB became law
than after it was implemented.
- NCLB severely damaged educational quality and equity by
narrowing the curriculum in many schools and focusing attention on the
limited skills standardized tests measure. These negative effects fell
most heavily on classrooms serving low-income and minority
children.
- So-called "reforms" to NCLB fail to address many of the
law’s fundamental problems and, in some cases, may intensify them.
Flawed proposals include Obama Administration waivers and the Senate
Education Committee’s Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA)
reauthorization bill
“NCLB undermined many promising reform efforts because of its
reliance on one-size-fits-all testing, labeling and sanctioning
schools,” explained FairTest’s Lisa Guisbond, the new report’s lead
author. “A decade’s worth of solid evidence documents the failure of
NCLB and similar high-stakes testing schemes. Successful programs in
the U.S. and other nations demonstrate better ways to improve
schools. Yet, policymakers still cling to the discredited NCLB model.”
“It’snot too late to learn the lessons of the past ten years.
Now is the time to craft a federal law that supports equity and
progress in all public schools,” added FairTest Executive Director,
Dr. Monty Neill. The Forum on Educational Accountability (FEA), which
FairTest leads, is promoting a comprehensive plan to overhaul NCLB.
The proposal calls for using multiple measures to assess student and
school performance. It also targets resources to improve teaching and
learning. More than 150 national education, civil rights, disability,
religious, labor and civic groups signed theJoint Organizational
Statement on NCLB, which FEA seeks to implement.
- - 30 - -
- the NCLB 10th Anniversary report is posted at
http://fairtest.org/NCLB-lost-decade-report-home
-Patricia
FairTest NationalCenterfor Fair & Open Testing
For further information:
Dr. Monty Neill (617)
477-9792
Bob Schaeffer (239) 395-6773
For use on or after Tuesday afternoon, January 3, 2012
The federal No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law “failed badly both
in terms of its own goals and more broadly,” leading to a decade
of educational stagnation. That is the central conclusion of a major
new report marking NCLB’s tenth anniversary. President George W. Bush
signed the program into law on January 8, 2002.
The report, “NCLB’s Lost Decade for Educational Progress,”
summarizes data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress
(NAEP) and dozens of independent studies. It was written by staff of
the National Center for Fair & Open Testing (FairTest).
Among the report’s major findings:
- NCLB failed to significantly increase average academic
performance or to significantly narrow achievement gaps, as measured
by NAEP. U.S. students made greater gains before NCLB became law
than after it was implemented.
- NCLB severely damaged educational quality and equity by
narrowing the curriculum in many schools and focusing attention on the
limited skills standardized tests measure. These negative effects fell
most heavily on classrooms serving low-income and minority
children.
- So-called "reforms" to NCLB fail to address many of the
law’s fundamental problems and, in some cases, may intensify them.
Flawed proposals include Obama Administration waivers and the Senate
Education Committee’s Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA)
reauthorization bill
“NCLB undermined many promising reform efforts because of its
reliance on one-size-fits-all testing, labeling and sanctioning
schools,” explained FairTest’s Lisa Guisbond, the new report’s lead
author. “A decade’s worth of solid evidence documents the failure of
NCLB and similar high-stakes testing schemes. Successful programs in
the U.S. and other nations demonstrate better ways to improve
schools. Yet, policymakers still cling to the discredited NCLB model.”
“It’snot too late to learn the lessons of the past ten years.
Now is the time to craft a federal law that supports equity and
progress in all public schools,” added FairTest Executive Director,
Dr. Monty Neill. The Forum on Educational Accountability (FEA), which
FairTest leads, is promoting a comprehensive plan to overhaul NCLB.
The proposal calls for using multiple measures to assess student and
school performance. It also targets resources to improve teaching and
learning. More than 150 national education, civil rights, disability,
religious, labor and civic groups signed theJoint Organizational
Statement on NCLB, which FEA seeks to implement.
- - 30 - -
- the NCLB 10th Anniversary report is posted at
http://fairtest.org/NCLB-lost-decade-report-home
Tuesday, January 03, 2012
Budget Analysis Documenting the Harm Done in 2011 Legislative Session
CPPP's Budget Analysis Documenting the Harm Done in 2011 Legislative Session:
A new report from the Austin-based Center for Public Policy Priorities updates the damage inventory resulting from state budget cuts forced through the legislature by the governor and legislative leaders last spring and summer. The December 2011 report by analyst Eva DeLuna Castro notes that “the state budget directly eliminates 5,727 public jobs by 2013, while school districts will lose state aid that would have supported 49,000 jobs.” The report further concludes: “After adjusting for inflation, Texas per-student spending will fall to its lowest point in over a decade. The 2012-13 budget assumes that local property taxes will not rise to offset the decrease in state aid.”
Download the full report.
A new report from the Austin-based Center for Public Policy Priorities updates the damage inventory resulting from state budget cuts forced through the legislature by the governor and legislative leaders last spring and summer. The December 2011 report by analyst Eva DeLuna Castro notes that “the state budget directly eliminates 5,727 public jobs by 2013, while school districts will lose state aid that would have supported 49,000 jobs.” The report further concludes: “After adjusting for inflation, Texas per-student spending will fall to its lowest point in over a decade. The 2012-13 budget assumes that local property taxes will not rise to offset the decrease in state aid.”
Download the full report.
MALDEF sues Texas over school finance
This is the case to keep a close watch on, friends.
-Patricia
By Kate Alexander | AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Tuesday, Dec. 13, 2011
Disparities in education funding in Texas have reached levels not seen in two decades and low-income students who are learning English are particularly affected, according to a school finance lawsuit filed Tuesday.
The lawsuit, brought by the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund , is the third in recent months to challenge the constitutionality of Texas' school finance system.
No Central Texas school districts have signed on to the lawsuit, but local parents are slated to join, lawyer David Hinojosa said.
All the pending school finance litigation turns, in part, on whether the state is providing an adequate public education without violating a constitutional prohibition of a statewide property tax.
The lawsuit filed on Tuesday also takes aim at how funding inequities hamstring school districts that are considered property-poor and serve large contingents of English-language learners.
Those inequities have been exacerbated by state budget cuts enacted this spring, many of which hit programs specifically aimed at helping students at risk of failure, according to the lawsuit.
"The state has left many Texas children behind by blatantly defying its constitutional duty to fully support their education. Every Texas child should have the opportunity to go to college, and this lawsuit will ensure that opportunity," Hinojosa said.
For example, the Edgewood school district in San Antonio taxes its property owners at the maximum rate, $1.17 per $100 of assessed property value, which yields $5,472 per student. But the nearby Alamo Heights district levies a tax rate of $1.04 and gets $6,242 per student.
Past court rulings have found a $600 funding gap to be "minimally acceptable," according to the lawsuit, but the funding disparities have increased by two and three times that amount since that time.
Meanwhile, Edgewood has a more challenging student population to educate because 93 percent are low-income, compared with 22 percent in Alamo Heights, Texas Education Agency figures show.
The percentage of English-language learners in Edgewood is almost four times greater than in Alamo Heights' .
Students who face these challenges can achieve on par with their peers if the school districts have the resources to help them, said Julian Vasquez Heilig , a University of Texas education professor. More money — spent the right way — does help English-language learners catch up, he said.
"We do have clear evidence that certain things do increase test scores," said Vasquez Heilig , whose research has found that bilingual teachers and smaller classes to be particularly important for improving test scores for English-language learners.
But others argue that additional spending does not produce better results.
"I don't think that more funding is really the answer," said James Golsan , an education policy analyst for the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a limited-government think tank. "Given our previous track record, I'm really not convinced of that fact."
The fourth and final school finance lawsuit, which is expected this week, will involve the broadest array of school districts.
More than 1.5 million students are served by the school districts that are party to the suit, among them Austin, Dallas and Houston. On Monday , the Hays school board voted to join the case as well.
All four of the challenges will be consolidated for trial next fall in Travis County.
-Patricia
By Kate Alexander | AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Tuesday, Dec. 13, 2011
Disparities in education funding in Texas have reached levels not seen in two decades and low-income students who are learning English are particularly affected, according to a school finance lawsuit filed Tuesday.
The lawsuit, brought by the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund , is the third in recent months to challenge the constitutionality of Texas' school finance system.
No Central Texas school districts have signed on to the lawsuit, but local parents are slated to join, lawyer David Hinojosa said.
All the pending school finance litigation turns, in part, on whether the state is providing an adequate public education without violating a constitutional prohibition of a statewide property tax.
The lawsuit filed on Tuesday also takes aim at how funding inequities hamstring school districts that are considered property-poor and serve large contingents of English-language learners.
Those inequities have been exacerbated by state budget cuts enacted this spring, many of which hit programs specifically aimed at helping students at risk of failure, according to the lawsuit.
"The state has left many Texas children behind by blatantly defying its constitutional duty to fully support their education. Every Texas child should have the opportunity to go to college, and this lawsuit will ensure that opportunity," Hinojosa said.
For example, the Edgewood school district in San Antonio taxes its property owners at the maximum rate, $1.17 per $100 of assessed property value, which yields $5,472 per student. But the nearby Alamo Heights district levies a tax rate of $1.04 and gets $6,242 per student.
Past court rulings have found a $600 funding gap to be "minimally acceptable," according to the lawsuit, but the funding disparities have increased by two and three times that amount since that time.
Meanwhile, Edgewood has a more challenging student population to educate because 93 percent are low-income, compared with 22 percent in Alamo Heights, Texas Education Agency figures show.
The percentage of English-language learners in Edgewood is almost four times greater than in Alamo Heights' .
Students who face these challenges can achieve on par with their peers if the school districts have the resources to help them, said Julian Vasquez Heilig , a University of Texas education professor. More money — spent the right way — does help English-language learners catch up, he said.
"We do have clear evidence that certain things do increase test scores," said Vasquez Heilig , whose research has found that bilingual teachers and smaller classes to be particularly important for improving test scores for English-language learners.
But others argue that additional spending does not produce better results.
"I don't think that more funding is really the answer," said James Golsan , an education policy analyst for the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a limited-government think tank. "Given our previous track record, I'm really not convinced of that fact."
The fourth and final school finance lawsuit, which is expected this week, will involve the broadest array of school districts.
More than 1.5 million students are served by the school districts that are party to the suit, among them Austin, Dallas and Houston. On Monday , the Hays school board voted to join the case as well.
All four of the challenges will be consolidated for trial next fall in Travis County.
Senator grills UT chancellor, an old friend
By Ralph K.M. Haurwitz | AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Friday, Nov. 18, 2011
State Sen. Judith Zaffirini, D-Laredo, has known Francisco Cigarroa since he was born. His mother is one of her best friends. His father is her physician.
But Cigarroa, the chancellor of the University of Texas System, didn't alert Zaffirini, who leads the Senate Higher Education Committee, when a controversy erupted early this year over the direction of the system and its governing board.
"And when UT was criticized in particular, you didn't defend UT," Zaffirini told Cigarroa at a hearing held Friday by a special House-Senate panel. "Why not?"
Cigarroa replied that he initially was "trying to put my hands around how quickly this was moving and where it was going."
Indeed, he was navigating a political minefield. The chairman of the Board of Regents had hired an adviser — who was later dismissed — with a job description overlapping some of the chancellor's duties. And some UT regents, along with counterparts at the Texas A&M University System, seemed sympathetic to Gov. Rick Perry's desire to shake up public higher education.
Cigarroa testified that he found other venues to speak his mind, including a gathering of prominent donors, newspaper editorial boards and meetings of the regents where he defended the system's faculty members and scolded board members for micromanagement.
"So in my voice," Cigarroa said, "I spoke out to the best of my abilities."
The exchange wasn't the only moment when the senator put her old friend on the spot during Friday's hearing of the Joint Oversight Committee on Higher Education Governance, Excellence and Transparency, which Zaffirini leads along with Rep. Dan Branch , R-Dallas. Up to now, she has largely defended the chancellor's handling of the higher education debate, which broke out in March after Gene Powell, chairman of the UT regents, hired Rick O'Donnell as special adviser and suggested that college costs could be reduced by offering a $10,000 bachelor's degree akin to the quality of a midlevel vehicle .
Zaffirini noted that when her office requested emails and other records about several higher education proposals promoted by Perry, including bonus pay for faculty members based solely on student evaluations, the A&M System "turned in the documents we requested almost immediately. Nothing was marked confidential. Working with UT, on the other hand, whether with the system or with a particular individual, was incredibly challenging.
"I think I called you, chancellor, what, perhaps five times, saying, 'Where is the information and why aren't we getting it?' And so many of the emails were marked confidential," Zaffirini said.
"We haven't found anything that we consider confidential. Embarrassing? Yes. Controversial? Absolutely. Stupid? Sometimes. But not confidential. And even today we have not resolved which are no longer considered confidential. Why is it so difficult and why is this information still being considered confidential?" she said.
Cigarroa replied that he didn't understand why it was so difficult. "I certainly conveyed your strong concerns to the Office of General Counsel," he said. "I think a complicating factor was that we were under threat of ... a lawsuit by the previous special adviser to the board. I wasn't really an expert to determine what was confidential or not from a legal perspective."
The chancellor said he would convey her concerns again to the system's general counsel, Barry Burgdorf .
"The sooner the better," Zaffirini said, "because we have so much information that I can't ask you questions about because they're marked confidential, and that really ties our hands."
Friday, Nov. 18, 2011
State Sen. Judith Zaffirini, D-Laredo, has known Francisco Cigarroa since he was born. His mother is one of her best friends. His father is her physician.
But Cigarroa, the chancellor of the University of Texas System, didn't alert Zaffirini, who leads the Senate Higher Education Committee, when a controversy erupted early this year over the direction of the system and its governing board.
"And when UT was criticized in particular, you didn't defend UT," Zaffirini told Cigarroa at a hearing held Friday by a special House-Senate panel. "Why not?"
Cigarroa replied that he initially was "trying to put my hands around how quickly this was moving and where it was going."
Indeed, he was navigating a political minefield. The chairman of the Board of Regents had hired an adviser — who was later dismissed — with a job description overlapping some of the chancellor's duties. And some UT regents, along with counterparts at the Texas A&M University System, seemed sympathetic to Gov. Rick Perry's desire to shake up public higher education.
Cigarroa testified that he found other venues to speak his mind, including a gathering of prominent donors, newspaper editorial boards and meetings of the regents where he defended the system's faculty members and scolded board members for micromanagement.
"So in my voice," Cigarroa said, "I spoke out to the best of my abilities."
The exchange wasn't the only moment when the senator put her old friend on the spot during Friday's hearing of the Joint Oversight Committee on Higher Education Governance, Excellence and Transparency, which Zaffirini leads along with Rep. Dan Branch , R-Dallas. Up to now, she has largely defended the chancellor's handling of the higher education debate, which broke out in March after Gene Powell, chairman of the UT regents, hired Rick O'Donnell as special adviser and suggested that college costs could be reduced by offering a $10,000 bachelor's degree akin to the quality of a midlevel vehicle .
Zaffirini noted that when her office requested emails and other records about several higher education proposals promoted by Perry, including bonus pay for faculty members based solely on student evaluations, the A&M System "turned in the documents we requested almost immediately. Nothing was marked confidential. Working with UT, on the other hand, whether with the system or with a particular individual, was incredibly challenging.
"I think I called you, chancellor, what, perhaps five times, saying, 'Where is the information and why aren't we getting it?' And so many of the emails were marked confidential," Zaffirini said.
"We haven't found anything that we consider confidential. Embarrassing? Yes. Controversial? Absolutely. Stupid? Sometimes. But not confidential. And even today we have not resolved which are no longer considered confidential. Why is it so difficult and why is this information still being considered confidential?" she said.
Cigarroa replied that he didn't understand why it was so difficult. "I certainly conveyed your strong concerns to the Office of General Counsel," he said. "I think a complicating factor was that we were under threat of ... a lawsuit by the previous special adviser to the board. I wasn't really an expert to determine what was confidential or not from a legal perspective."
The chancellor said he would convey her concerns again to the system's general counsel, Barry Burgdorf .
"The sooner the better," Zaffirini said, "because we have so much information that I can't ask you questions about because they're marked confidential, and that really ties our hands."
Largest school finance lawsuit in Texas takes shape
By Kate Alexander | AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Thursday, Dec. 22, 2011
The legal fight over Texas' school finance system is shaping up to become the largest of its kind in state history.
Texas' largest school districts — including Austin, Houston and Dallas — joined the fight Thursday when they and 60 other districts, including Round Rock, filed a lawsuit that claims the method for funding Texas public schools is unconstitutional. It is the fourth such legal challenge filed against the state in recent months.
In all, more than 3 million students go to school in districts that have signed on to one of the four lawsuits. That total exceeds 60 percent of the state's public school population and dwarfs any of the past legal challenges.
"It demonstrates the pervasiveness of the issue," said lawyer David Thompson , who is representing the school districts that filed the latest lawsuit. "It is a problem of statewide magnitude."
The issue, according to the lawsuit, is that the state has run afoul of the Texas Constitution by failing to provide adequate resources to meet the higher academic standards established by the Legislature. At the same time, districts lack "meaningful discretion" to set their own tax rates, as the courts have said is required.
Finally, the system for divvying up the limited state dollars among the districts is inequitable and arbitrary.
More than $5 billion worth of state budget cuts to education enacted by lawmakers earlier this year has exacerbated the problem. Effectively, each Texas student on average is now valued at about $500 less than last year.
"From our perspective, the finance system is broken, and we've been saying that for the last two or three years," Round Rock Superintendent Jesús Chávez said.
The superintendent and the attorneys said the lack of state funding makes it more difficult for schools to perform at high levels, particularly with the increased rigor of new state-mandated achievement tests rolling out this school year.
"We are looking at steadily rising standards and funding that seems to be completely unrelated to what it is we're trying to accomplish," Thompson said.
Thursday's lawsuit involves the widest array of school districts, encompassing as many as 1.6 million students, including about 86,700 in Austin.
"The school board and administration believe that the current school finance system prevents the district from providing an appropriate and adequate education to all students. It is in the best interest of Austin students to seek a remedy within the court system that will ensure the level of funding to which they are entitled by the Texas Constitution," district spokesman Alex Sanchez said.
The other challenges have come from more focused groups of districts, including those that are considered property-wealthy and those on the opposite end with large populations of English-language learners.
About half the school districts in the state are now party to the lawsuits, which are expected to be consolidated and heard in a single trial next fall in Travis County.
Those big numbers might not figure into the court's legal calculus. But they matter to members of the Legislature, who would be tasked with fixing the school finance system if it is ruled unconstitutional, said Ray Freeman , deputy director of the Equity Center, which has spearheaded one of the other lawsuits. That challenge, which focuses on districts that are at the lower end in terms of per-student funding, includes 1.3 million students.
"You have elected officials in every one of these school districts saying that things are bad enough that we need to sue the state," Freeman said.
The current round of school finance litigation is the eighth filed against Texas since 1968.
The issues at the center of today's litigation stem from the Legislature's response to a 2005 Texas Supreme Court ruling that lawmakers had enacted an unconstitutional statewide property tax.
Legislators reduced local school property tax rates by one-third and dedicated more state money to the schools to replace the local money. The state has not maintained that level of school funding in recent years.
They also froze the level of per-student revenue at what each school district was getting in 2005-06 with the intention of coming back in 2007 to make a long-term fix. But lawmakers still haven't fashioned a lasting solution.
In a joint statement announcing Thursday's suit, the lawyers argue that the temporary finance system from 2006 has become "a permanent funding system that assigns different levels of money to students in different school districts without regard for the actual costs of educating a growing and increasingly diverse and poor student population."
For example, neighboring Pflugerville, which joined the Equity Center lawsuit, and Round Rock school districts tax their property owners at the same rate. But Round Rock has almost $700 more per student to spend this school year.
"There's the issue of adequacy, as well as equity," Chávez said. "For Round Rock, certainly the adequacy is very important, having the necessary funds to provide a good education to our students. With the shortage of funds from the state level, that's been put into jeopardy."
Thursday, Dec. 22, 2011
The legal fight over Texas' school finance system is shaping up to become the largest of its kind in state history.
Texas' largest school districts — including Austin, Houston and Dallas — joined the fight Thursday when they and 60 other districts, including Round Rock, filed a lawsuit that claims the method for funding Texas public schools is unconstitutional. It is the fourth such legal challenge filed against the state in recent months.
In all, more than 3 million students go to school in districts that have signed on to one of the four lawsuits. That total exceeds 60 percent of the state's public school population and dwarfs any of the past legal challenges.
"It demonstrates the pervasiveness of the issue," said lawyer David Thompson , who is representing the school districts that filed the latest lawsuit. "It is a problem of statewide magnitude."
The issue, according to the lawsuit, is that the state has run afoul of the Texas Constitution by failing to provide adequate resources to meet the higher academic standards established by the Legislature. At the same time, districts lack "meaningful discretion" to set their own tax rates, as the courts have said is required.
Finally, the system for divvying up the limited state dollars among the districts is inequitable and arbitrary.
More than $5 billion worth of state budget cuts to education enacted by lawmakers earlier this year has exacerbated the problem. Effectively, each Texas student on average is now valued at about $500 less than last year.
"From our perspective, the finance system is broken, and we've been saying that for the last two or three years," Round Rock Superintendent Jesús Chávez said.
The superintendent and the attorneys said the lack of state funding makes it more difficult for schools to perform at high levels, particularly with the increased rigor of new state-mandated achievement tests rolling out this school year.
"We are looking at steadily rising standards and funding that seems to be completely unrelated to what it is we're trying to accomplish," Thompson said.
Thursday's lawsuit involves the widest array of school districts, encompassing as many as 1.6 million students, including about 86,700 in Austin.
"The school board and administration believe that the current school finance system prevents the district from providing an appropriate and adequate education to all students. It is in the best interest of Austin students to seek a remedy within the court system that will ensure the level of funding to which they are entitled by the Texas Constitution," district spokesman Alex Sanchez said.
The other challenges have come from more focused groups of districts, including those that are considered property-wealthy and those on the opposite end with large populations of English-language learners.
About half the school districts in the state are now party to the lawsuits, which are expected to be consolidated and heard in a single trial next fall in Travis County.
Those big numbers might not figure into the court's legal calculus. But they matter to members of the Legislature, who would be tasked with fixing the school finance system if it is ruled unconstitutional, said Ray Freeman , deputy director of the Equity Center, which has spearheaded one of the other lawsuits. That challenge, which focuses on districts that are at the lower end in terms of per-student funding, includes 1.3 million students.
"You have elected officials in every one of these school districts saying that things are bad enough that we need to sue the state," Freeman said.
The current round of school finance litigation is the eighth filed against Texas since 1968.
The issues at the center of today's litigation stem from the Legislature's response to a 2005 Texas Supreme Court ruling that lawmakers had enacted an unconstitutional statewide property tax.
Legislators reduced local school property tax rates by one-third and dedicated more state money to the schools to replace the local money. The state has not maintained that level of school funding in recent years.
They also froze the level of per-student revenue at what each school district was getting in 2005-06 with the intention of coming back in 2007 to make a long-term fix. But lawmakers still haven't fashioned a lasting solution.
In a joint statement announcing Thursday's suit, the lawyers argue that the temporary finance system from 2006 has become "a permanent funding system that assigns different levels of money to students in different school districts without regard for the actual costs of educating a growing and increasingly diverse and poor student population."
For example, neighboring Pflugerville, which joined the Equity Center lawsuit, and Round Rock school districts tax their property owners at the same rate. But Round Rock has almost $700 more per student to spend this school year.
"There's the issue of adequacy, as well as equity," Chávez said. "For Round Rock, certainly the adequacy is very important, having the necessary funds to provide a good education to our students. With the shortage of funds from the state level, that's been put into jeopardy."
2011 marred by test cheating scandals across U.S.
By Dorie Turner | ASSOCIATED PRESS
Saturday, Dec. 31, 2011
ATLANTA — It was the year of the test cheating scandal.
From Atlanta to Philadelphia and Washington to Los Angeles, officials have accused hundreds of educators of changing answers on tests or giving answers to students. Just last month, state investigators revealed that dozens of educators in 11 schools in Georgia's Dougherty County either cheated or failed to prevent cheating on 2009 standardized tests.
In July, those investigators accused nearly 180 educators in almost half of Atlanta's 100 schools of cheating dating back to 2001 — which experts have called the largest cheating scandal in U.S. history. And at least 20 students have been charged on Long Island with cheating on SAT and ACT college entrance exams by paying someone to take the test for them.
"It's a year in which cheating became a national scandal, a scandal of national proportions," said Bob Schaeffer, a spokesman for the National Center for Fair & Open Testing, which advocates against high-stakes testing. "The Atlanta case forced policymakers and journalists in other jurisdictions to look to see if there's anything similar going on in their backyards."
Schaeffer, who has long followed cheating scandals, said he's seen as many cheating stories in 2011 as in the previous half-dozen years combined. He said there have been confirmed cases of cheating in 30 states and the District of Columbia in the past three years.
Experts say some educators have bowed to the mounting pressure under the federal No Child Left Behind law as schools' benchmarks increase each year toward the ultimate goal of having all children reading and doing math at their grade level by 2014. Teachers in Atlanta reported that administrators created a culture of "fear, intimidation and retaliation" where testing goals had to be met no matter what, according to investigators.
"This problem existed before No Child Left Behind, but NCLB has exacerbated the problem, clearly," said Walter Haney, a retired Boston College education professor and expert on cheating. "I think testing is really important, but the problem has been the misuse of test results without looking behind the test scores to see who and who is not tested."
Federal officials have been saying for more than a year that the law doesn't accurately depict what's happening in schools. Although lawmakers agree the law needs to be fixed, an overhaul has become mired in the partisan atmosphere in Congress.
At President Barack Obama's invitation, states have begun filing waivers to get relief from the law. Under the 11 waivers already filed, states are asking to use a variety of factors to determine whether they pass muster and to choose how schools will be punished if they don't improve. Among the factors that could be used are college entrance exam scores or the performance of students on Advanced Placement tests.
At least 39 states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico have said they will file waivers, though it is unclear how many will be approved.
In Pennsylvania, an investigation continues into irregularities found in 2009 state standardized tests in reading and math. The probe began last summer after a routine forensics report flagged "highly improbable" results in 90 schools across the state. The state education secretary ordered the 50 districts representing the named schools to conduct internal investigations and submit reports to him by Aug. 15. Four months later, the reports are still being analyzed and have not been made public.
Twenty-eight of the flagged schools were in Philadelphia, the state's largest district. District spokesman Fernando Gallard said the system is talking with the state Department of Education over how to move forward with the investigation.
In Washington, federal and city officials are investigating possible cheating in more than 100 schools from 2008 to 2010. The unusually high rate of erasures in those schools came to light after a USA Today investigation of improbable test gains in more than 300 schools in six states and the District of Columbia.
Saturday, Dec. 31, 2011
ATLANTA — It was the year of the test cheating scandal.
From Atlanta to Philadelphia and Washington to Los Angeles, officials have accused hundreds of educators of changing answers on tests or giving answers to students. Just last month, state investigators revealed that dozens of educators in 11 schools in Georgia's Dougherty County either cheated or failed to prevent cheating on 2009 standardized tests.
In July, those investigators accused nearly 180 educators in almost half of Atlanta's 100 schools of cheating dating back to 2001 — which experts have called the largest cheating scandal in U.S. history. And at least 20 students have been charged on Long Island with cheating on SAT and ACT college entrance exams by paying someone to take the test for them.
"It's a year in which cheating became a national scandal, a scandal of national proportions," said Bob Schaeffer, a spokesman for the National Center for Fair & Open Testing, which advocates against high-stakes testing. "The Atlanta case forced policymakers and journalists in other jurisdictions to look to see if there's anything similar going on in their backyards."
Schaeffer, who has long followed cheating scandals, said he's seen as many cheating stories in 2011 as in the previous half-dozen years combined. He said there have been confirmed cases of cheating in 30 states and the District of Columbia in the past three years.
Experts say some educators have bowed to the mounting pressure under the federal No Child Left Behind law as schools' benchmarks increase each year toward the ultimate goal of having all children reading and doing math at their grade level by 2014. Teachers in Atlanta reported that administrators created a culture of "fear, intimidation and retaliation" where testing goals had to be met no matter what, according to investigators.
"This problem existed before No Child Left Behind, but NCLB has exacerbated the problem, clearly," said Walter Haney, a retired Boston College education professor and expert on cheating. "I think testing is really important, but the problem has been the misuse of test results without looking behind the test scores to see who and who is not tested."
Federal officials have been saying for more than a year that the law doesn't accurately depict what's happening in schools. Although lawmakers agree the law needs to be fixed, an overhaul has become mired in the partisan atmosphere in Congress.
At President Barack Obama's invitation, states have begun filing waivers to get relief from the law. Under the 11 waivers already filed, states are asking to use a variety of factors to determine whether they pass muster and to choose how schools will be punished if they don't improve. Among the factors that could be used are college entrance exam scores or the performance of students on Advanced Placement tests.
At least 39 states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico have said they will file waivers, though it is unclear how many will be approved.
In Pennsylvania, an investigation continues into irregularities found in 2009 state standardized tests in reading and math. The probe began last summer after a routine forensics report flagged "highly improbable" results in 90 schools across the state. The state education secretary ordered the 50 districts representing the named schools to conduct internal investigations and submit reports to him by Aug. 15. Four months later, the reports are still being analyzed and have not been made public.
Twenty-eight of the flagged schools were in Philadelphia, the state's largest district. District spokesman Fernando Gallard said the system is talking with the state Department of Education over how to move forward with the investigation.
In Washington, federal and city officials are investigating possible cheating in more than 100 schools from 2008 to 2010. The unusually high rate of erasures in those schools came to light after a USA Today investigation of improbable test gains in more than 300 schools in six states and the District of Columbia.
Teach for America: Liberal mission helps conservative agenda
From Valerie Strauss' blog of the WASHINGTON POST.
-ANGELA
Teach for America: Liberal mission helps conservative agenda
By Valerie Strauss
This was written by Andrew Hartman, who teaches history at Illinois State University. He is the author of Education and the Cold War: The Battle for the American School. This was originally published at jacobinmag.com. It is long but well worth your time.
By Andrew Hartman
The job of the American public school teacher has never been so thankless. In states across America, cutting teacher salaries and pensions has become the most popular method for fixing budget deficits. New Jersey Republican Governor Chris Christie’s deep cuts, for instance, force teachers to contribute a much higher percentage of their salaries to their pensions, while doubling or even tripling their health care contributions and eliminating cost-of-living adjustments. Republican governors Scott Walker of Wisconsin and John Kasich of Ohio took their austerity measures a step further by seeking to abolish collective bargaining rights for teachers. Such legislation is possible because the image of teachers has never been so degraded, especially of unionized teachers, whom Christie routinely refers to as “thugs” and “bullies.”
The liberals of the education reform movement, often more surreptitiously than Michelle Rhee, the overstated former Washington D.C. chancellor of schools during Democratic Mayor Adrian Fenty’s term in office, have for decades advanced negative assumptions about public school teachers that now power the attacks by Christie, Walker, Kasich and their ilk.
This is particularly true of Teach for America (TFA), the prototypical liberal education reform organization, where Rhee first made her mark. The history of TFA reveals the ironies of contemporary education reform. In its mission to deliver justice to underprivileged children, TFA and the liberal education reform movement have advanced an agenda that advances conservative attempts to undercut teacher’s unions. More broadly, TFA has been in the vanguard in forming a neoliberal consensus about the role of public education — and the role of public school teachers — in a deeply unequal society.
In 1988, Princeton student Wendy Kopp wrote a thesis arguing for a national teacher corps, modeled on the Peace Corps — the archetype of liberal volunteerism — that “would mobilize some of the most passionate, dedicated members of my generation to change the fact that where a child is born in the United States largely determines his or her chances in life.”
Kopp launched TFA in 1990 as a not-for-profit charged with selecting the brightest, most idealistic recent college graduates as corps members who would commit to teach for two years in some of the nation’s toughest schools. From its inception, the media anointed TFA the savior of American education. Prior to a single corps member stepping foot in a classroom, The New York Times and Newsweek lavished Kopp’s new organization with cover stories full of insipid praise. Adulation has remained the norm.
Its recent twenty-year anniversary summit, held in Washington, D.C., featured fawning video remarks by President Obama and a glitzy “who’s who” roster of liberal cheerleaders, including John Lewis, Malcolm Gladwell, Gloria Steinem, and TFA board member John Legend. The organs of middlebrow centrist opinion — Time magazine, Atlantic Monthly , The New Republic — glorify TFA at every opportunity. [Education columnist Jay Mathews of ] The Washington Post has heralded the nation’s education reform movement as the “TFA insurgency”— a perplexing linguistic choice given so-called “insurgency” methods have informed national education policies from Reagan to Obama.
TFA is, at best, another chimerical attempt in a long history of chimerical attempts to sell educational reform as a solution to class inequality. At worst, it’s a Trojan horse for all that is unseemly about the contemporary education reform movement.
The original TFA mission was based on a set of four somewhat noble if paternalistic rationales. First, by bringing the elite into the teaching profession, even if temporarily, TFA would burnish it with a much-needed “aura of status and selectivity.” Second, by supplying its recruits to impoverished school districts, both urban and rural, TFA would compensate for the lack of quality teachers willing to work in such challenging settings. And third, although Kopp recognized that most corps members would not remain classroom teachers beyond their two-year commitments, she believed that TFA alums would form the nucleus of a new movement of educational leaders — that their transformative experiences teaching poor children would mold their ambitious career trajectories. Above these three foundational principles loomed a fourth: the mission to relegate educational inequality to the ash heap of history.
TFA goals derive, in theory, from laudable — if misguided — impulses. But each, in practice, has demonstrated to be deeply problematic.
TFA, suitably representative of the liberal education reform more generally, underwrites, intentionally or not, the conservative assumptions of the education reform movement: that teacher’s unions serve as barriers to quality education; that testing is the best way to assess quality education; that educating poor children is best done by institutionalizing them; that meritocracy is an end-in-itself; that social class is an unimportant variable in education reform; that education policy is best made by evading politics proper; and that faith in public school teachers is misplaced.
Take the first rationale: that TFA would enhance the image of the teaching profession. On the contrary, the only brand TFA endows with an “aura of status and selectivity” is its own. As reported in The New York Times , 18 percent of Harvard seniors applied to TFA in 2010, a rate only surpassed by the 22 percent of Yale seniors who sought to join the national teacher corps that year. All told, TFA selected 4,500 lucky recruits from a pool of 46,359 applicants in 2010. [In 2011 the acceptance rate was 11 percent.]
Although many applicants are no doubt motivated to join out of altruism, the two-year TFA experience has become a highly desirable notch on the resumes of the nation’s most diligent strivers. The more exclusive TFA becomes, the more ordinary regular teachers seem. TFA corps members typically come from prestigious institutions of higher education, while most regular teachers are trained at the second- and third-tier state universities that house the nation’s largest colleges of education.
Whereas TFA corps members leverage the elite TFA brand to launch careers in law or finance — or, if they remain in education, to bypass the typical career path on their way to principalships and other positions of leadership — most regular teachers must plod along, negotiating their way through traditional career ladders. These distinctions are lost on nobody. They are what make regular teachers and their unions such low-hanging political fruit for the likes of Christie, Walker, and Kasich.
The second justification for TFA — that it exists to supply good teachers to schools where few venture to work — has also proven questionable. Though the assertion made some sense in 1990, when many impoverished school districts did in fact suffer from a dearth of teachers, the same is not so easily argued now.
Following the economic collapse of 2008, which contributed to school revenue problems nationwide, massive teacher layoffs became the new norm, including in districts where teacher shortages had provided an entry to TFA in the past. Thousands of Chicago teachers, for instance, have felt the sting of layoffs and furloughs in the past two years, even as the massive Chicago Public School system, bound by contract, continues to annually hire a specified number of TFA corps members. In the face of these altered conditions, the TFA public relations machine now deemphasizes teacher shortages and instead accentuates one crucial adjective: “quality.” In other words, schools in poor urban and rural areas of the country might not suffer from a shortage of teachers in general, but they lack for the quality teachers that Kopp’s organization provides.
After twenty years of sending academically gifted but untrained college graduates into the nation’s toughest schools, the evidence regarding TFA corps member effectiveness is in, and it is decidedly mixed. Professors of education Julian Vasquez Heilig and Su Jin Jez, in the most thorough survey of such research yet, found that TFA corps members tend to perform equal to teachers in similar situations —that is, they do as well as new teachers lacking formal training assigned to impoverished schools. Sometimes they do better, particularly in math instruction.
Yet “the students of novice TFA teachers perform significantly less well,” Vasquez Heilig and Jin Jez discovered, “than those of credentialed beginning teachers.” It seems clear that TFA’s vaunted thirty-day summer institute—TFA “boot camp”—is no replacement for the preparation given future teachers at traditional colleges of education.
Putting TFA forward to solve the problems of the teaching profession has turned out poorly. But the third premise for Kopp’s national teacher corps — that it would “create a leadership force for long-term change” in how the nation’s least privileged students are schooled — has been the most destructive. Such destructiveness is directly related to Kopp’s success in attaching TFA to the education reform movement.
In this, Kopp’s timing could not have been more fortuitous. When TFA was founded, the education reform movement was beginning to make serious headway in policy-making circles. This movement had been in the works since as far back as the notorious Coleman Report, a massive 1966 government study written by sociologist James Coleman, officially titled “Equality of Educational Opportunity.”
Coleman contended that school funding had little bearing on educational achievement and, thus, efforts to achieve resource “equity” were wasteful. The Coleman Report became a touchstone for those who argued that pushing for educational “excellence,” measurable by standardized tests, was the best method to improve schools and hold teachers accountable. Chester Finn, an influential conservative policy analyst who worked in the Reagan Department of Education, put his finger on the educational pulse of our age when he wrote that “holding schools” — and teachers — “to account for their students’ academic achievement” was the only educational policy [along with the choice movement] that made sense in a “post-Coleman” world.
With unwavering support from powerful economic and political actors, who almost uniformly understood the state of American public education through the lens of “A Nation at Risk,” a widely publicized 1983 study that argued the failure of American schools was undermining the nation’s ability to compete in an increasingly global economy, education reformers set out to ensure that schools and teachers were held accountable for the achievement of their students, privileged or not. George H. W. Bush, dubbed the “education president,” filled his department of education with advocates of “outcome-based education,” which emphasized “excellence” in contrast to “equity.” Educational progress was to be measured by what students produced (outputs) rather than by what resources were invested in schools (inputs). The TFA mantra — “we don’t need to wait to fix poverty in order to ensure that all children receive an excellent education” — meshed perfectly with this “post-Coleman” zeitgeist.
One of the more salient aspects of the so-called “TFA insurgency” was that it operated from the assumption that more resources were not a prerequisite for improving schools. “Schools that transform their students’ trajectories aspire not to equality of inputs,” Kopp declared, “but rather to equality of outputs.” Instead of more resources, underprivileged students needed better teachers. Reformers thus set out to devise a system that hired and retained effective teachers while also driving ineffective ones from the classroom.
The TFA network has been crucial in shaping efforts to improve the nation’s teacher force. Kopp’s second book, “A Chance to Make History ” (2011), reads like a primer for such reform measures. Kopp is particularly enamored by high-performing charter schools, which succeed because they do whatever it takes to hire and retain good teachers, a zero-sum game that most schools cannot win without more resources — those dreaded “inputs.”
But successful charter schools, Kopp maintains, also stop at nothing to remove bad teachers from the classroom. This is why charter schools are the preferred mechanism for delivery of education reform: as defined by Kopp, charter schools are “public schools empowered with flexibility over decision making in exchange for accountability for results.” And yet, “results,” or rather, academic improvement, act more like a fig leaf, especially in light of numerous recent studies that show charter schools, taken on the whole, actually do a worse job of educating students than regular public schools.
Rather, crushing teacher’s unions — the real meaning behind Kopp’s “flexibility” euphemism — has become the ultimate end of the education reform movement. This cannot be emphasized enough: the precipitous growth of charter schools and the TFA insurgency are part and parcel precisely because both cohere with the larger push to marginalize teacher’s unions.
The TFA insurgency has, from its inception, sold education reform as above politics. The idea is to support ideas that work, plain and simple, no matter their source. But the biography of Michelle Rhee, the prototypical TFA corps member-turned-reformer and the most divisive person in the education reform movement, defies such anti-political posturing.
After serving a two-year stint in the Baltimore Public Schools as one of the earliest TFA corps members, she earned a Master’s Degree from the Harvard University Kennedy School of Government. From there Kopp tapped Rhee to be the founding CEO of The New Teacher Project, a TFA spin-off that sought to revolutionize the teacher accreditation process by helping school districts evade colleges of education. The notoriety she gained in her work with The New Teacher Project enabled her appointment as chancellor of schools in Washington, D.C.
Rhee is adored in elite circles. Regularly feted by Oprah, Kopp touts her as a “transformational leader.” During her short tenure leading the infamously bad D.C. schools, Rhee gained national acclaim for applying, in Kopp’s admiring words, the corporate “principles of management and accountability.”
In contrast to such devotion, teacher’s unions loathe Rhee. Rhee’s heavy-handedness in dealing with the Washington Teacher’s Union conveyed her attitude that a non-unionized teacher force would better serve justice for children, as if children would benefit from their teachers lacking the few remaining benefits accrued by collective bargaining, such as nominal job security and shrinking pensions. Rhee is also disliked by a large percentage of black D.C. citizens, who voted out former Mayor Adrian Fenty in part because of his unqualified support for Rhee’s actions. This included firing four percent of district teachers, mostly black, and replacing them largely with TFA-style teachers, mostly white, whom one astute black Washingtonian labeled “cultural tourists.”
TFA’s complicity in education reform insanity does not stop there. From its origins, the TFA-led movement to improve the teacher force has aligned itself with efforts to expand the role of high-stakes standardized testing in education. TFA insurgents, including Kopp and Rhee, maintain that, even if imperfect, standardized tests are the best means by which to quantify accountability.
Prior to the enactment of Bush’s bipartisan No Child Left Behind in 2001, high-stakes standardized testing was mostly limited to college-entrance exams such as the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT). But since then, the high-stakes testing movement has blown up: with increasing frequency, student scores on standardized exams are tied to teacher, school, and district evaluations, upon which rewards and punishments are meted out. Obama’s “Race to the Top” policy — the brainchild of Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, the former “CEO” of Chicago Public Schools — further codifies high-stakes testing by allocating scarce federal resources to those states most aggressively implementing these so-called accountability measures.
The multi-billion dollar testing industry — dominated by a few large corporations that specialize in the making and scoring of standardized tests — has become an entrenched interest, a powerful component of a growing education-industrial complex.
TFA insurgents support standardized testing not only because they believe it ensures accountability. They also herald testing because it provides evidence that their efforts are working. The schools and districts that achieved celebrity as the reform movement’s success stories did so by vastly improving standardized test scores. In emphasizing testing, though, reformers tend to overlook the obvious incentives that ambitious educators have to manipulate statistics. President Bush appointed Houston Superintendent of Schools Rod Paige as Secretary of Education in 2001 because Paige’s reform measures seemingly led to skyrocketing graduation rates. Not surprisingly, this so-called “Texas miracle,” predicated on falsified numbers, was too good to be true.
More recently, cheating scandals have likewise discredited several celebrated reform projects. In Atlanta, a TFA hotbed, former superintendent and education reform darling Beverly Hall is implicated in a cheating scandal of unparalleled proportions, involving dozens of Atlanta principals and hundreds of teachers, including TFA corps members. Cheating was so brazen in Atlanta that principals hosted pizza parties where teachers and administrators systematically corrected student exams. Following a series of investigative reports in USA Today , a new cheating scandal seems to break every week. Cheating has now been confirmed not only in Atlanta, but also in New York City, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Orlando, Dallas, Houston, Dayton, and Memphis, education reform cities all.
Rhee’s D.C. “miracle” has also been clouded by suspicion: impossibly high wrong-to-right erasure rates indicate that several of Rhee’s “blue ribbon” schools might have cheated their way to higher test scores. Such accusations are nothing new to Rhee. The legend of how she transformed her Baltimore students — a fable resembling the Hollywood drama Stand and Deliver, based on East Los Angeles math teacher Jaime Escalante’s work in helping several of his underprivileged students pass the Advanced Placement Calculus exam — has been called into question by investigative reports that suggest fraud.
That education reformers have long argued that “incentives” are necessary to improve the teaching profession underscores another in a series of ironies that mark the movement. Reformers believe that if teachers are subjected to “market forces,” such as merit pay and job insecurity, they will work harder to improve the education they provide for their students. The need to incentivize the teaching profession is the most popular argument against teacher’s unions, since unions supposedly protect bad teachers.
But, in a predictable paradox, by attaching their incentives agenda to standardized testing, the reform movement has induced cheating on a never-before-seen scale, proving the maxim known as Campbell’s Law: “The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.” In sum, the TFA insurgency’s singular success has been to empower those best at gaming the system.
In contrast to such “success,” the TFA insurgency has failed to dent educational inequality. This comes as no surprise to anyone with the faintest grasp of the tight correlation between economic and educational inequality: TFA does nothing to address the former while spinning its wheels on the latter.
In her writings, nowhere does Kopp reflect upon the patent ridiculousness of her expectation that loads of cash donated by corporations that exploit inequalities across the world — such as Union Carbide and Mobil, two of TFA’s earliest contributors — will help her solve some of the gravest injustices endemic to American society.
Kopp shows some awareness of the absurdities of her own experiences — including a “fundraising schedule [that] shuttled me between two strikingly different economic spheres: our undersourced classrooms and the plush world of American philanthropy” — but she fails to grasp that this very gap is what makes her stated goal of equality unachievable. In short, Kopp, like education reformers more generally, is an innocent when it comes to political economy. She spouts platitudes about justice for American children, but rarely pauses to ask whether rapidly growing inequality might be a barrier to such justice. She celebrates 20 years of reform movement success, but never tempers such self-congratulatory narcissism with unpleasant questions about why those who have no interest in disrupting the American class structure — such as Bill Gates and the heirs to Sam Walton’s fortunes, by far the most generous education reform philanthropists — are so keen to support the TFA insurgency. Kopp is a parody of the liberal do-gooder.
Of course, liberal notions about the potential of education to serve the ends of justice are nothing new to American social thought. Progressive educators since John Dewey have sold their wares as instruments of justice. And yet, education reform has almost always propped up the social order: just as current reform success is calculated by how well students score on standardized tests, the progressive education movement’s most longstanding success story was its pedagogical program for “Americanization.” Educational progress as measured by how well students stack up against conventional standards will always and inevitably reinforce the status quo. Most of the time, schools are little more than engines of social reproduction.
TFA exists for nothing if not for adjusting poor children to the regime otherwise known as the American meritocracy. Kopp’s model for how teachers should help poor students acclimate to the American meritocracy is the Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP), a nationwide network of charter schools. Founded by TFA alums Mike Feinberg and Dave Levin, and currently lead by CEO Richard Barth, a former TFA staff member who also happens to be Kopp’s husband, KIPP now runs over 100 schools, typically in cities that staff a multitude of TFA corps members, such as Houston, New Orleans, and New York City. Many KIPP teachers began their careers in education as TFA corps members, and an even higher percentage of KIPP administrators are TFA alums. KIPP schools are in such high demand that students must win lotteries for the opportunity to attend. The pièce de résistance of Waiting for Superman chronicles one such dramatic lottery drawing.
Slots in KIPP schools are in short supply because, unlike most charter schools, they have a track record of actually improving student performance and of helping poor children gain acceptance into college. Their methodology consists of nothing novel: teachers and students work very hard. But more than that, KIPP students and their families must sign contracts committing to a rigorous program of surveillance — the only way to ensure that underprivileged students overcome lives that otherwise drag them down. As one KIPP administrator described the philosophy: “At every moment, we asked ourselves, what about this moment of the day is or is not fostering college readiness in our students?”
While visiting a KIPP school in New York City early one morning, where fifth graders were busy with drills at 7:00 a.m., Kopp quietly lamented, without a touch of irony, that her own child of the same age was still in bed. Thus, in the KIPP model, we are presented with the solution to the nation’s educational inequalities: for poor children to succeed, they must willingly submit to Taylorist institutionalization. This is made starkly evident in the concluding scene of “Waiting for Superman ,” when young “Anthony,” one of the lucky few, arrives at his charter school with suitcase in hand, since his particular school boards its students. Anthony is rightly ambivalent about giving up his life with his grandparents and friends in order to attend a SEED Foundation school — the prototype in education reform — where 24-hour supervision is the only way to ensure that poor children have a chance at success.
In working to perfect their approach to education, TFA insurgents miss the forest for the trees. They fail to ask big-picture questions. Will their pedagogy of surveillance make for a more humane society? Having spent their formative years in a classroom learning test-taking skills, will their students become good people? Will they know more history? Will they be more empathetic? Will they be better citizens? Will they be more inclined to challenge the meritocracy? Or, as its newest converts, will they be its most fervent disciples? What does it mean that for children born in the Bronx to go to college they must give up their childhoods, however bleak?
I teach at a second-tier state university in the Midwest that houses a large college of education, not exactly TFA’s prime recruiting territory. And yet, every year a TFA representative briefly stops by our campus to sell our students on TFA and encourage them to apply. Three of my best former students have, to my surprise, been chosen TFA corps members. Although I would never begrudge such hard-won personal victories for my students — well-meaning individuals who hail from decidedly non-privileged backgrounds—in the future I am determined to strongly encourage those students interested in becoming TFA corps members to read Paul Goodman’s “Compulsory Mis-Education” (1964), in my opinion the single-best critique of the kind of education that the TFA insurgency seeks to perfect.
Goodman’s disdain for what the corporate-organized society did to young people was first made apparent in his 1959 bestseller, “Growing Up Absurd ,” a response to the “curious” fact that two of the most analyzed phenomena of the 1950s — the “disgrace of the Organized System” and the problem of disaffected youth — were given mutually exclusive treatment. Goodman combined these two popular strands of social commentary — a critique of the bureaucratic society with an analysis of juvenile delinquency — and argued that the former caused the latter.
In Compulsory Mis-Education , Goodman extended this general critique of the “organized society” to a more specific attack on its socialization method: compulsory schooling. Schooling as socialization, which he described as “‘vocational guidance’ to fit people wherever they are needed in the productive system,” troubled Goodman in means and ends. He both loathed the practice of adjusting children to society and despised the social regime in which children were being adjusted to—“our highly organized system of machine production and its corresponding social relations.” For Goodman, compulsory schooling thus prepared “kids to take some part in a democratic society that does not need them.”
Goodman was not against education in the strict sense of the word. For him, the question of education was always of kind. In Goodman’s world, which I imagine as a sort of utopia, those who seek to institutionalize the poor are the enemies of the good. And teachers — real teachers, those who commit their lives (not two years) to expanding their students’ imaginative universes — they are the heroes. I can hardly imagine a better inoculation against the hidden curriculum of liberal do-gooders.
-ANGELA
Teach for America: Liberal mission helps conservative agenda
By Valerie Strauss
This was written by Andrew Hartman, who teaches history at Illinois State University. He is the author of Education and the Cold War: The Battle for the American School. This was originally published at jacobinmag.com. It is long but well worth your time.
By Andrew Hartman
The job of the American public school teacher has never been so thankless. In states across America, cutting teacher salaries and pensions has become the most popular method for fixing budget deficits. New Jersey Republican Governor Chris Christie’s deep cuts, for instance, force teachers to contribute a much higher percentage of their salaries to their pensions, while doubling or even tripling their health care contributions and eliminating cost-of-living adjustments. Republican governors Scott Walker of Wisconsin and John Kasich of Ohio took their austerity measures a step further by seeking to abolish collective bargaining rights for teachers. Such legislation is possible because the image of teachers has never been so degraded, especially of unionized teachers, whom Christie routinely refers to as “thugs” and “bullies.”
The liberals of the education reform movement, often more surreptitiously than Michelle Rhee, the overstated former Washington D.C. chancellor of schools during Democratic Mayor Adrian Fenty’s term in office, have for decades advanced negative assumptions about public school teachers that now power the attacks by Christie, Walker, Kasich and their ilk.
This is particularly true of Teach for America (TFA), the prototypical liberal education reform organization, where Rhee first made her mark. The history of TFA reveals the ironies of contemporary education reform. In its mission to deliver justice to underprivileged children, TFA and the liberal education reform movement have advanced an agenda that advances conservative attempts to undercut teacher’s unions. More broadly, TFA has been in the vanguard in forming a neoliberal consensus about the role of public education — and the role of public school teachers — in a deeply unequal society.
In 1988, Princeton student Wendy Kopp wrote a thesis arguing for a national teacher corps, modeled on the Peace Corps — the archetype of liberal volunteerism — that “would mobilize some of the most passionate, dedicated members of my generation to change the fact that where a child is born in the United States largely determines his or her chances in life.”
Kopp launched TFA in 1990 as a not-for-profit charged with selecting the brightest, most idealistic recent college graduates as corps members who would commit to teach for two years in some of the nation’s toughest schools. From its inception, the media anointed TFA the savior of American education. Prior to a single corps member stepping foot in a classroom, The New York Times and Newsweek lavished Kopp’s new organization with cover stories full of insipid praise. Adulation has remained the norm.
Its recent twenty-year anniversary summit, held in Washington, D.C., featured fawning video remarks by President Obama and a glitzy “who’s who” roster of liberal cheerleaders, including John Lewis, Malcolm Gladwell, Gloria Steinem, and TFA board member John Legend. The organs of middlebrow centrist opinion — Time magazine, Atlantic Monthly , The New Republic — glorify TFA at every opportunity. [Education columnist Jay Mathews of ] The Washington Post has heralded the nation’s education reform movement as the “TFA insurgency”— a perplexing linguistic choice given so-called “insurgency” methods have informed national education policies from Reagan to Obama.
TFA is, at best, another chimerical attempt in a long history of chimerical attempts to sell educational reform as a solution to class inequality. At worst, it’s a Trojan horse for all that is unseemly about the contemporary education reform movement.
The original TFA mission was based on a set of four somewhat noble if paternalistic rationales. First, by bringing the elite into the teaching profession, even if temporarily, TFA would burnish it with a much-needed “aura of status and selectivity.” Second, by supplying its recruits to impoverished school districts, both urban and rural, TFA would compensate for the lack of quality teachers willing to work in such challenging settings. And third, although Kopp recognized that most corps members would not remain classroom teachers beyond their two-year commitments, she believed that TFA alums would form the nucleus of a new movement of educational leaders — that their transformative experiences teaching poor children would mold their ambitious career trajectories. Above these three foundational principles loomed a fourth: the mission to relegate educational inequality to the ash heap of history.
TFA goals derive, in theory, from laudable — if misguided — impulses. But each, in practice, has demonstrated to be deeply problematic.
TFA, suitably representative of the liberal education reform more generally, underwrites, intentionally or not, the conservative assumptions of the education reform movement: that teacher’s unions serve as barriers to quality education; that testing is the best way to assess quality education; that educating poor children is best done by institutionalizing them; that meritocracy is an end-in-itself; that social class is an unimportant variable in education reform; that education policy is best made by evading politics proper; and that faith in public school teachers is misplaced.
Take the first rationale: that TFA would enhance the image of the teaching profession. On the contrary, the only brand TFA endows with an “aura of status and selectivity” is its own. As reported in The New York Times , 18 percent of Harvard seniors applied to TFA in 2010, a rate only surpassed by the 22 percent of Yale seniors who sought to join the national teacher corps that year. All told, TFA selected 4,500 lucky recruits from a pool of 46,359 applicants in 2010. [In 2011 the acceptance rate was 11 percent.]
Although many applicants are no doubt motivated to join out of altruism, the two-year TFA experience has become a highly desirable notch on the resumes of the nation’s most diligent strivers. The more exclusive TFA becomes, the more ordinary regular teachers seem. TFA corps members typically come from prestigious institutions of higher education, while most regular teachers are trained at the second- and third-tier state universities that house the nation’s largest colleges of education.
Whereas TFA corps members leverage the elite TFA brand to launch careers in law or finance — or, if they remain in education, to bypass the typical career path on their way to principalships and other positions of leadership — most regular teachers must plod along, negotiating their way through traditional career ladders. These distinctions are lost on nobody. They are what make regular teachers and their unions such low-hanging political fruit for the likes of Christie, Walker, and Kasich.
The second justification for TFA — that it exists to supply good teachers to schools where few venture to work — has also proven questionable. Though the assertion made some sense in 1990, when many impoverished school districts did in fact suffer from a dearth of teachers, the same is not so easily argued now.
Following the economic collapse of 2008, which contributed to school revenue problems nationwide, massive teacher layoffs became the new norm, including in districts where teacher shortages had provided an entry to TFA in the past. Thousands of Chicago teachers, for instance, have felt the sting of layoffs and furloughs in the past two years, even as the massive Chicago Public School system, bound by contract, continues to annually hire a specified number of TFA corps members. In the face of these altered conditions, the TFA public relations machine now deemphasizes teacher shortages and instead accentuates one crucial adjective: “quality.” In other words, schools in poor urban and rural areas of the country might not suffer from a shortage of teachers in general, but they lack for the quality teachers that Kopp’s organization provides.
After twenty years of sending academically gifted but untrained college graduates into the nation’s toughest schools, the evidence regarding TFA corps member effectiveness is in, and it is decidedly mixed. Professors of education Julian Vasquez Heilig and Su Jin Jez, in the most thorough survey of such research yet, found that TFA corps members tend to perform equal to teachers in similar situations —that is, they do as well as new teachers lacking formal training assigned to impoverished schools. Sometimes they do better, particularly in math instruction.
Yet “the students of novice TFA teachers perform significantly less well,” Vasquez Heilig and Jin Jez discovered, “than those of credentialed beginning teachers.” It seems clear that TFA’s vaunted thirty-day summer institute—TFA “boot camp”—is no replacement for the preparation given future teachers at traditional colleges of education.
Putting TFA forward to solve the problems of the teaching profession has turned out poorly. But the third premise for Kopp’s national teacher corps — that it would “create a leadership force for long-term change” in how the nation’s least privileged students are schooled — has been the most destructive. Such destructiveness is directly related to Kopp’s success in attaching TFA to the education reform movement.
In this, Kopp’s timing could not have been more fortuitous. When TFA was founded, the education reform movement was beginning to make serious headway in policy-making circles. This movement had been in the works since as far back as the notorious Coleman Report, a massive 1966 government study written by sociologist James Coleman, officially titled “Equality of Educational Opportunity.”
Coleman contended that school funding had little bearing on educational achievement and, thus, efforts to achieve resource “equity” were wasteful. The Coleman Report became a touchstone for those who argued that pushing for educational “excellence,” measurable by standardized tests, was the best method to improve schools and hold teachers accountable. Chester Finn, an influential conservative policy analyst who worked in the Reagan Department of Education, put his finger on the educational pulse of our age when he wrote that “holding schools” — and teachers — “to account for their students’ academic achievement” was the only educational policy [along with the choice movement] that made sense in a “post-Coleman” world.
With unwavering support from powerful economic and political actors, who almost uniformly understood the state of American public education through the lens of “A Nation at Risk,” a widely publicized 1983 study that argued the failure of American schools was undermining the nation’s ability to compete in an increasingly global economy, education reformers set out to ensure that schools and teachers were held accountable for the achievement of their students, privileged or not. George H. W. Bush, dubbed the “education president,” filled his department of education with advocates of “outcome-based education,” which emphasized “excellence” in contrast to “equity.” Educational progress was to be measured by what students produced (outputs) rather than by what resources were invested in schools (inputs). The TFA mantra — “we don’t need to wait to fix poverty in order to ensure that all children receive an excellent education” — meshed perfectly with this “post-Coleman” zeitgeist.
One of the more salient aspects of the so-called “TFA insurgency” was that it operated from the assumption that more resources were not a prerequisite for improving schools. “Schools that transform their students’ trajectories aspire not to equality of inputs,” Kopp declared, “but rather to equality of outputs.” Instead of more resources, underprivileged students needed better teachers. Reformers thus set out to devise a system that hired and retained effective teachers while also driving ineffective ones from the classroom.
The TFA network has been crucial in shaping efforts to improve the nation’s teacher force. Kopp’s second book, “A Chance to Make History ” (2011), reads like a primer for such reform measures. Kopp is particularly enamored by high-performing charter schools, which succeed because they do whatever it takes to hire and retain good teachers, a zero-sum game that most schools cannot win without more resources — those dreaded “inputs.”
But successful charter schools, Kopp maintains, also stop at nothing to remove bad teachers from the classroom. This is why charter schools are the preferred mechanism for delivery of education reform: as defined by Kopp, charter schools are “public schools empowered with flexibility over decision making in exchange for accountability for results.” And yet, “results,” or rather, academic improvement, act more like a fig leaf, especially in light of numerous recent studies that show charter schools, taken on the whole, actually do a worse job of educating students than regular public schools.
Rather, crushing teacher’s unions — the real meaning behind Kopp’s “flexibility” euphemism — has become the ultimate end of the education reform movement. This cannot be emphasized enough: the precipitous growth of charter schools and the TFA insurgency are part and parcel precisely because both cohere with the larger push to marginalize teacher’s unions.
The TFA insurgency has, from its inception, sold education reform as above politics. The idea is to support ideas that work, plain and simple, no matter their source. But the biography of Michelle Rhee, the prototypical TFA corps member-turned-reformer and the most divisive person in the education reform movement, defies such anti-political posturing.
After serving a two-year stint in the Baltimore Public Schools as one of the earliest TFA corps members, she earned a Master’s Degree from the Harvard University Kennedy School of Government. From there Kopp tapped Rhee to be the founding CEO of The New Teacher Project, a TFA spin-off that sought to revolutionize the teacher accreditation process by helping school districts evade colleges of education. The notoriety she gained in her work with The New Teacher Project enabled her appointment as chancellor of schools in Washington, D.C.
Rhee is adored in elite circles. Regularly feted by Oprah, Kopp touts her as a “transformational leader.” During her short tenure leading the infamously bad D.C. schools, Rhee gained national acclaim for applying, in Kopp’s admiring words, the corporate “principles of management and accountability.”
In contrast to such devotion, teacher’s unions loathe Rhee. Rhee’s heavy-handedness in dealing with the Washington Teacher’s Union conveyed her attitude that a non-unionized teacher force would better serve justice for children, as if children would benefit from their teachers lacking the few remaining benefits accrued by collective bargaining, such as nominal job security and shrinking pensions. Rhee is also disliked by a large percentage of black D.C. citizens, who voted out former Mayor Adrian Fenty in part because of his unqualified support for Rhee’s actions. This included firing four percent of district teachers, mostly black, and replacing them largely with TFA-style teachers, mostly white, whom one astute black Washingtonian labeled “cultural tourists.”
TFA’s complicity in education reform insanity does not stop there. From its origins, the TFA-led movement to improve the teacher force has aligned itself with efforts to expand the role of high-stakes standardized testing in education. TFA insurgents, including Kopp and Rhee, maintain that, even if imperfect, standardized tests are the best means by which to quantify accountability.
Prior to the enactment of Bush’s bipartisan No Child Left Behind in 2001, high-stakes standardized testing was mostly limited to college-entrance exams such as the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT). But since then, the high-stakes testing movement has blown up: with increasing frequency, student scores on standardized exams are tied to teacher, school, and district evaluations, upon which rewards and punishments are meted out. Obama’s “Race to the Top” policy — the brainchild of Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, the former “CEO” of Chicago Public Schools — further codifies high-stakes testing by allocating scarce federal resources to those states most aggressively implementing these so-called accountability measures.
The multi-billion dollar testing industry — dominated by a few large corporations that specialize in the making and scoring of standardized tests — has become an entrenched interest, a powerful component of a growing education-industrial complex.
TFA insurgents support standardized testing not only because they believe it ensures accountability. They also herald testing because it provides evidence that their efforts are working. The schools and districts that achieved celebrity as the reform movement’s success stories did so by vastly improving standardized test scores. In emphasizing testing, though, reformers tend to overlook the obvious incentives that ambitious educators have to manipulate statistics. President Bush appointed Houston Superintendent of Schools Rod Paige as Secretary of Education in 2001 because Paige’s reform measures seemingly led to skyrocketing graduation rates. Not surprisingly, this so-called “Texas miracle,” predicated on falsified numbers, was too good to be true.
More recently, cheating scandals have likewise discredited several celebrated reform projects. In Atlanta, a TFA hotbed, former superintendent and education reform darling Beverly Hall is implicated in a cheating scandal of unparalleled proportions, involving dozens of Atlanta principals and hundreds of teachers, including TFA corps members. Cheating was so brazen in Atlanta that principals hosted pizza parties where teachers and administrators systematically corrected student exams. Following a series of investigative reports in USA Today , a new cheating scandal seems to break every week. Cheating has now been confirmed not only in Atlanta, but also in New York City, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Orlando, Dallas, Houston, Dayton, and Memphis, education reform cities all.
Rhee’s D.C. “miracle” has also been clouded by suspicion: impossibly high wrong-to-right erasure rates indicate that several of Rhee’s “blue ribbon” schools might have cheated their way to higher test scores. Such accusations are nothing new to Rhee. The legend of how she transformed her Baltimore students — a fable resembling the Hollywood drama Stand and Deliver, based on East Los Angeles math teacher Jaime Escalante’s work in helping several of his underprivileged students pass the Advanced Placement Calculus exam — has been called into question by investigative reports that suggest fraud.
That education reformers have long argued that “incentives” are necessary to improve the teaching profession underscores another in a series of ironies that mark the movement. Reformers believe that if teachers are subjected to “market forces,” such as merit pay and job insecurity, they will work harder to improve the education they provide for their students. The need to incentivize the teaching profession is the most popular argument against teacher’s unions, since unions supposedly protect bad teachers.
But, in a predictable paradox, by attaching their incentives agenda to standardized testing, the reform movement has induced cheating on a never-before-seen scale, proving the maxim known as Campbell’s Law: “The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.” In sum, the TFA insurgency’s singular success has been to empower those best at gaming the system.
In contrast to such “success,” the TFA insurgency has failed to dent educational inequality. This comes as no surprise to anyone with the faintest grasp of the tight correlation between economic and educational inequality: TFA does nothing to address the former while spinning its wheels on the latter.
In her writings, nowhere does Kopp reflect upon the patent ridiculousness of her expectation that loads of cash donated by corporations that exploit inequalities across the world — such as Union Carbide and Mobil, two of TFA’s earliest contributors — will help her solve some of the gravest injustices endemic to American society.
Kopp shows some awareness of the absurdities of her own experiences — including a “fundraising schedule [that] shuttled me between two strikingly different economic spheres: our undersourced classrooms and the plush world of American philanthropy” — but she fails to grasp that this very gap is what makes her stated goal of equality unachievable. In short, Kopp, like education reformers more generally, is an innocent when it comes to political economy. She spouts platitudes about justice for American children, but rarely pauses to ask whether rapidly growing inequality might be a barrier to such justice. She celebrates 20 years of reform movement success, but never tempers such self-congratulatory narcissism with unpleasant questions about why those who have no interest in disrupting the American class structure — such as Bill Gates and the heirs to Sam Walton’s fortunes, by far the most generous education reform philanthropists — are so keen to support the TFA insurgency. Kopp is a parody of the liberal do-gooder.
Of course, liberal notions about the potential of education to serve the ends of justice are nothing new to American social thought. Progressive educators since John Dewey have sold their wares as instruments of justice. And yet, education reform has almost always propped up the social order: just as current reform success is calculated by how well students score on standardized tests, the progressive education movement’s most longstanding success story was its pedagogical program for “Americanization.” Educational progress as measured by how well students stack up against conventional standards will always and inevitably reinforce the status quo. Most of the time, schools are little more than engines of social reproduction.
TFA exists for nothing if not for adjusting poor children to the regime otherwise known as the American meritocracy. Kopp’s model for how teachers should help poor students acclimate to the American meritocracy is the Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP), a nationwide network of charter schools. Founded by TFA alums Mike Feinberg and Dave Levin, and currently lead by CEO Richard Barth, a former TFA staff member who also happens to be Kopp’s husband, KIPP now runs over 100 schools, typically in cities that staff a multitude of TFA corps members, such as Houston, New Orleans, and New York City. Many KIPP teachers began their careers in education as TFA corps members, and an even higher percentage of KIPP administrators are TFA alums. KIPP schools are in such high demand that students must win lotteries for the opportunity to attend. The pièce de résistance of Waiting for Superman chronicles one such dramatic lottery drawing.
Slots in KIPP schools are in short supply because, unlike most charter schools, they have a track record of actually improving student performance and of helping poor children gain acceptance into college. Their methodology consists of nothing novel: teachers and students work very hard. But more than that, KIPP students and their families must sign contracts committing to a rigorous program of surveillance — the only way to ensure that underprivileged students overcome lives that otherwise drag them down. As one KIPP administrator described the philosophy: “At every moment, we asked ourselves, what about this moment of the day is or is not fostering college readiness in our students?”
While visiting a KIPP school in New York City early one morning, where fifth graders were busy with drills at 7:00 a.m., Kopp quietly lamented, without a touch of irony, that her own child of the same age was still in bed. Thus, in the KIPP model, we are presented with the solution to the nation’s educational inequalities: for poor children to succeed, they must willingly submit to Taylorist institutionalization. This is made starkly evident in the concluding scene of “Waiting for Superman ,” when young “Anthony,” one of the lucky few, arrives at his charter school with suitcase in hand, since his particular school boards its students. Anthony is rightly ambivalent about giving up his life with his grandparents and friends in order to attend a SEED Foundation school — the prototype in education reform — where 24-hour supervision is the only way to ensure that poor children have a chance at success.
In working to perfect their approach to education, TFA insurgents miss the forest for the trees. They fail to ask big-picture questions. Will their pedagogy of surveillance make for a more humane society? Having spent their formative years in a classroom learning test-taking skills, will their students become good people? Will they know more history? Will they be more empathetic? Will they be better citizens? Will they be more inclined to challenge the meritocracy? Or, as its newest converts, will they be its most fervent disciples? What does it mean that for children born in the Bronx to go to college they must give up their childhoods, however bleak?
I teach at a second-tier state university in the Midwest that houses a large college of education, not exactly TFA’s prime recruiting territory. And yet, every year a TFA representative briefly stops by our campus to sell our students on TFA and encourage them to apply. Three of my best former students have, to my surprise, been chosen TFA corps members. Although I would never begrudge such hard-won personal victories for my students — well-meaning individuals who hail from decidedly non-privileged backgrounds—in the future I am determined to strongly encourage those students interested in becoming TFA corps members to read Paul Goodman’s “Compulsory Mis-Education” (1964), in my opinion the single-best critique of the kind of education that the TFA insurgency seeks to perfect.
Goodman’s disdain for what the corporate-organized society did to young people was first made apparent in his 1959 bestseller, “Growing Up Absurd ,” a response to the “curious” fact that two of the most analyzed phenomena of the 1950s — the “disgrace of the Organized System” and the problem of disaffected youth — were given mutually exclusive treatment. Goodman combined these two popular strands of social commentary — a critique of the bureaucratic society with an analysis of juvenile delinquency — and argued that the former caused the latter.
In Compulsory Mis-Education , Goodman extended this general critique of the “organized society” to a more specific attack on its socialization method: compulsory schooling. Schooling as socialization, which he described as “‘vocational guidance’ to fit people wherever they are needed in the productive system,” troubled Goodman in means and ends. He both loathed the practice of adjusting children to society and despised the social regime in which children were being adjusted to—“our highly organized system of machine production and its corresponding social relations.” For Goodman, compulsory schooling thus prepared “kids to take some part in a democratic society that does not need them.”
Goodman was not against education in the strict sense of the word. For him, the question of education was always of kind. In Goodman’s world, which I imagine as a sort of utopia, those who seek to institutionalize the poor are the enemies of the good. And teachers — real teachers, those who commit their lives (not two years) to expanding their students’ imaginative universes — they are the heroes. I can hardly imagine a better inoculation against the hidden curriculum of liberal do-gooders.
Tuesday, December 27, 2011
Friday, December 23, 2011
Christmas Day, 1914
I had heard of this story previously but this is the first time that I've seen it in print. Brought tears to my eyes this morning.
Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah,and Happy Kwanzaa everybody. We are all God's children.
May we continue to fight for peace, justice, and transformation in our troubled world and may we cultivate in our families and communities an earth consciousness so that we may reshape our economic system into one that is sustainable and provides equitably for all.
-Angela Valenzuela
Christmas Day, 1914
My dear sister Janet,
It is 2:00 in the morning and most of our men are asleep in their
dugouts -- yet I could not sleep myself before writing to you of the
wonderful events of Christmas Eve. In truth, what happened seems
almost like a fairy tale, and if I hadn't been through it myself, I
would scarce believe it. Just imagine: While you and the family sang
carols before the fire there in London, I did the same with enemy
soldiers here on the battlefields of France!
As I wrote before, there has been little serious fighting of late. The
first battles of the war left so many dead that both sides have held
back until replacements could come from home. So we have mostly stayed
in our trenches and waited.
But what a terrible waiting it has been! Knowing that any moment an
artillery shell might land and explode beside us in the trench,
killing or maiming several men. And in daylight not daring to lift our
heads above ground, for fear of a sniper's bullet.
And the rain -- it has fallen almost daily. Of course, it collects
right in our trenches, where we must bail it out with pots and pans.
And with the rain has come mud -- a good foot or more deep. It
splatters and cakes everything, and constantly sucks at our boots. One
new recruit got his feet stuck in it, and then his hands too when he
tried to get out -- just like in that American story of the tar baby!
Through all this, we couldn't help feeling curious about the German
soldiers across the way. After all, they faced the same dangers we
did, and slogged about in the same muck. What's more, their first
trench was only 50 yards from ours. Between us lay No Man's Land,
bordered on both sides by barbed wire -- yet they were close enough we
sometimes heard their voices.
Of course, we hated them when they killed our friends. But other
times, we joked about them and almost felt we had something in common.
And now it seems they felt the same.
Just yesterday morning -- Christmas Eve Day -- we had our first good
freeze. Cold as we were, we welcomed it, because at least the mud
froze solid. Everything was tinged white with frost, while a bright
sun shone over all. Perfect Christmas weather.
During the day, there was little shelling or rifle fire from either
side. And as darkness fell on our Christmas Eve, the shooting stopped
entirely. Our first complete silence in months! We hoped it might
promise a peaceful holiday, but we didn't count on it. We'd been told
the Germans might attack and try to catch us off guard.
I went to the dugout to rest, and lying on my cot, I must have drifted
asleep. All at once my friend John was shaking me awake, saying, "Come
and see! See what the Germans are doing!" I grabbed my rifle, stumbled
out into the trench, and stuck my head cautiously above the sandbags.
I never hope to see a stranger and more lovely sight. Clusters of tiny
lights were shining all along the German line, left and right as far
as the eye could see.
"What is it?" I asked in bewilderment, and John answered, "Christmas
trees!"
And so it was. The Germans had placed Christmas trees in front of
their trenches, lit by candle or lantern like beacons of good will.
And then we heard their voices raised in song.
"Stille nacht, heilige nacht...."
This carol may not yet be familiar to us in Britain, but John knew it
and translated: "Silent night, holy night." I've never heard one
lovelier -- or more meaningful, in that quiet, clear night, its dark
softened by a first-quarter moon.
When the song finished, the men in our trenches applauded. Yes,
British soldiers applauding Germans! Then one of our own men started
singing, and we all joined in.
"The first Nowell, the angel did say...."
In truth, we sounded not nearly as good as the Germans, with their
fine harmonies. But they responded with enthusiastic applause of their
own and then began another.
"O Tannenbaum, o Tannenbaum...."
Then we replied.
"O come all ye faithful...."
But this time they joined in, singing the same words in Latin.
"Adeste fideles...."
British and German harmonizing across No Man's Land! I would have
thought nothing could be more amazing -- but what came next was more
so.
"English, come over!" we heard one of them shout. "You no shoot, we no
shoot."
There in the trenches, we looked at each other in bewilderment. Then
one of us shouted jokingly, "You come over here."
To our astonishment, we saw two figures rise from the trench, climb
over their barbed wire, and advance unprotected across No Man's Land.
One of them called, "Send officer to talk."
I saw one of our men lift his rifle to the ready, and no doubt others
did the same -- but our captain called out, "Hold your fire." Then he
climbed out and went to meet the Germans halfway. We heard them
talking, and a few minutes later, the captain came back with a German
cigar in his mouth!
"We've agreed there will be no shooting before midnight tomorrow," he
announced. "But sentries are to remain on duty, and the rest of you,
stay alert."
Across the way, we could make out groups of two or three men starting
out of trenches and coming toward us. Then some of us were climbing
out too, and in minutes more, there we were in No Man's Land, over a
hundred soldiers and officers of each side, shaking hands with men
we'd been trying to kill just hours earlier!
Before long a bonfire was built, and around it we mingled -- British
khaki and German grey. I must say, the Germans were the better
dressed, with fresh uniforms for the holiday.
Only a couple of our men knew German, but more of the Germans knew
English. I asked one of them why that was.
"Because many have worked in England!" he said. "Before all this, I
was a waiter at the Hotel Cecil. Perhaps I waited on your table!"
"Perhaps you did!" I said, laughing.
He told me he had a girlfriend in London and that the war had
interrupted their plans for marriage. I told him, "Don't worry. We'll
have you beat by Easter, then you can come back and marry the girl."
He laughed at that. Then he asked if I'd send her a postcard he'd give
me later, and I promised I would.
Another German had been a porter at Victoria Station. He showed me a
picture of his family back in Munich. His eldest sister was so lovely,
I said I should like to meet her someday. He beamed and said he would
like that very much and gave me his family's address.
Even those who could not converse could still exchange gifts -- our
cigarettes for their cigars, our tea for their coffee, our corned beef
for their sausage. Badges and buttons from uniforms changed owners,
and one of our lads walked off with the infamous spiked helmet! I
myself traded a jackknife for a leather equipment belt -- a fine
souvenir to show when I get home.
Newspapers too changed hands, and the Germans howled with laughter at
ours. They assured us that France was finished and Russia nearly
beaten too. We told them that was nonsense, and one of them said,
"Well, you believe your newspapers and we'll believe ours."
Clearly they are lied to -- yet after meeting these men, I wonder how
truthful our own newspapers have been. These are not the "savage
barbarians" we've read so much about. They are men with homes and
families, hopes and fears, principles and, yes, love of country. In
other words, men like ourselves. Why are we led to believe otherwise?
As it grew late, a few more songs were traded around the fire, and
then all joined in for -- I am not lying to you -- "Auld Lang Syne."
Then we parted with promises to meet again tomorrow, and even some
talk of a football match.
I was just starting back to the trenches when an older German clutched
my arm. "My God," he said, "why cannot we have peace and all go home?"
I told him gently, "That you must ask your emperor."
He looked at me then, searchingly. "Perhaps, my friend. But also we
must ask our hearts."
And so, dear sister, tell me, has there ever been such a Christmas Eve
in all history? And what does it all mean, this impossible befriending
of enemies?
For the fighting here, of course, it means regrettably little. Decent
fellows those soldiers may be, but they follow orders and we do the
same. Besides, we are here to stop their army and send it home, and
never could we shirk that duty.
Still, one cannot help imagine what would happen if the spirit shown
here were caught by the nations of the world. Of course, disputes must
always arise. But what if our leaders were to offer well wishes in
place of warnings? Songs in place of slurs? Presents in place of
reprisals? Would not all war end at once?
All nations say they want peace. Yet on this Christmas morning, I
wonder if we want it quite enough.
Your loving brother,
Tom
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The two songs below are about what is described above. The
first song is written by Joe Henry and Garth Brooks, the second by John
McCutcheon.
BELLEAU WOOD
Oh, the snowflakes fell in silence
Over Belleau Wood that night
For a Christmas truce had been declared
By both sides of the fight
As we lay there in our trenches
The silence broke in two
By a German soldier singing
A song that we all knew.
Though I did not know the language
The song was "Silent Night"
Then I heard by buddy whisper,
"All is calm and all is bright"
Then the fear and doubt surrounded me
'Cause I'd die if I was wrong
But I stood up in my trench
And I began to sing along
Then across the frozen battlefield
Another's voice joined in
Until one by one each man became
A singer of the hymn
Then I thought that I was dreaming
For right there in my sight
Stood the German soldier
'Neath the falling flakes of white
And he raised his hand and smiled at me
As if he hoped to say
Here's hoping we both live
To see us find a better way
Then the devil's clock struck midnight
And the skies lit up again
And the battlefield where heaven stood
Was blown to hell again
But for just one fleeting moment
The answer seemed so clear
Heaven's not beyond the clouds
It's just beyond the fear
No, heaven's not beyond the clouds
It's for us to find it here.
CHRISTMAS IN THE TRENCHES
My name is Francis Tolliver, I come from Liverpool.
Two years ago the war was waiting for me after school.
To Belgium and to Flanders, to Germany to here
I fought for King and country I love dear.
'Twas Christmas in the trenches, where the frost so bitter hung,
The frozen fields of France were still, no Christmas song was sung
Our families back in England were toasting us that day
Their brave and glorious lads so far away.
I was lying with my messmate on the cold and rocky ground
When across the lines of battle came a most peculiar sound
Says I, ``Now listen up, me boys!'' each soldier strained to hear
As one young German voice sang out so clear.
``He's singing bloody well, you know!'' my partner says to me
Soon, one by one, each German voice joined in harmony
The cannons rested silent, the gas clouds rolled no more
As Christmas brought us respite from the war
As soon as they were finished and a reverent pause was spent
``God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen'' struck up some lads from Kent
The next they sang was ``Stille Nacht.'' ``Tis `Silent Night','' says I
And in two tongues one song filled up that sky
``There's someone coming toward us!'' the front line sentry cried
All sights were fixed on one long figure trudging from their side
His truce flag, like a Christmas star, shown on that plain so bright
As he, bravely, strode unarmed into the night
Soon one by one on either side walked into No Man's Land
With neither gun nor bayonet we met there hand to hand
We shared some secret brandy and we wished each other well
And in a flare-lit soccer game we gave 'em hell
We traded chocolates, cigarettes, and photographs from home
These sons and fathers far away from families of their own
Young Sanders played his squeezebox and they had a violin
This curious and unlikely band of men
Soon daylight stole upon us and France was France once more
With sad farewells we each prepared to settle back to war
But the question haunted every heart that lived that wonderous night
``Whose family have I fixed within my sights?''
'Twas Christmas in the trenches where the frost, so bitter hung
The frozen fields of France were warmed as songs of peace were sung
For the walls they'd kept between us to exact the work of war
Had been crumbled and were gone forevermore
My name is Francis Tolliver, in Liverpool I dwell
Each Christmas come since World War I, I've learned its lessons well
That the ones who call the shots won't be among the dead and lame
And on each end of the rifle we're the same.
Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah,and Happy Kwanzaa everybody. We are all God's children.
May we continue to fight for peace, justice, and transformation in our troubled world and may we cultivate in our families and communities an earth consciousness so that we may reshape our economic system into one that is sustainable and provides equitably for all.
-Angela Valenzuela
Christmas Day, 1914
My dear sister Janet,
It is 2:00 in the morning and most of our men are asleep in their
dugouts -- yet I could not sleep myself before writing to you of the
wonderful events of Christmas Eve. In truth, what happened seems
almost like a fairy tale, and if I hadn't been through it myself, I
would scarce believe it. Just imagine: While you and the family sang
carols before the fire there in London, I did the same with enemy
soldiers here on the battlefields of France!
As I wrote before, there has been little serious fighting of late. The
first battles of the war left so many dead that both sides have held
back until replacements could come from home. So we have mostly stayed
in our trenches and waited.
But what a terrible waiting it has been! Knowing that any moment an
artillery shell might land and explode beside us in the trench,
killing or maiming several men. And in daylight not daring to lift our
heads above ground, for fear of a sniper's bullet.
And the rain -- it has fallen almost daily. Of course, it collects
right in our trenches, where we must bail it out with pots and pans.
And with the rain has come mud -- a good foot or more deep. It
splatters and cakes everything, and constantly sucks at our boots. One
new recruit got his feet stuck in it, and then his hands too when he
tried to get out -- just like in that American story of the tar baby!
Through all this, we couldn't help feeling curious about the German
soldiers across the way. After all, they faced the same dangers we
did, and slogged about in the same muck. What's more, their first
trench was only 50 yards from ours. Between us lay No Man's Land,
bordered on both sides by barbed wire -- yet they were close enough we
sometimes heard their voices.
Of course, we hated them when they killed our friends. But other
times, we joked about them and almost felt we had something in common.
And now it seems they felt the same.
Just yesterday morning -- Christmas Eve Day -- we had our first good
freeze. Cold as we were, we welcomed it, because at least the mud
froze solid. Everything was tinged white with frost, while a bright
sun shone over all. Perfect Christmas weather.
During the day, there was little shelling or rifle fire from either
side. And as darkness fell on our Christmas Eve, the shooting stopped
entirely. Our first complete silence in months! We hoped it might
promise a peaceful holiday, but we didn't count on it. We'd been told
the Germans might attack and try to catch us off guard.
I went to the dugout to rest, and lying on my cot, I must have drifted
asleep. All at once my friend John was shaking me awake, saying, "Come
and see! See what the Germans are doing!" I grabbed my rifle, stumbled
out into the trench, and stuck my head cautiously above the sandbags.
I never hope to see a stranger and more lovely sight. Clusters of tiny
lights were shining all along the German line, left and right as far
as the eye could see.
"What is it?" I asked in bewilderment, and John answered, "Christmas
trees!"
And so it was. The Germans had placed Christmas trees in front of
their trenches, lit by candle or lantern like beacons of good will.
And then we heard their voices raised in song.
"Stille nacht, heilige nacht...."
This carol may not yet be familiar to us in Britain, but John knew it
and translated: "Silent night, holy night." I've never heard one
lovelier -- or more meaningful, in that quiet, clear night, its dark
softened by a first-quarter moon.
When the song finished, the men in our trenches applauded. Yes,
British soldiers applauding Germans! Then one of our own men started
singing, and we all joined in.
"The first Nowell, the angel did say...."
In truth, we sounded not nearly as good as the Germans, with their
fine harmonies. But they responded with enthusiastic applause of their
own and then began another.
"O Tannenbaum, o Tannenbaum...."
Then we replied.
"O come all ye faithful...."
But this time they joined in, singing the same words in Latin.
"Adeste fideles...."
British and German harmonizing across No Man's Land! I would have
thought nothing could be more amazing -- but what came next was more
so.
"English, come over!" we heard one of them shout. "You no shoot, we no
shoot."
There in the trenches, we looked at each other in bewilderment. Then
one of us shouted jokingly, "You come over here."
To our astonishment, we saw two figures rise from the trench, climb
over their barbed wire, and advance unprotected across No Man's Land.
One of them called, "Send officer to talk."
I saw one of our men lift his rifle to the ready, and no doubt others
did the same -- but our captain called out, "Hold your fire." Then he
climbed out and went to meet the Germans halfway. We heard them
talking, and a few minutes later, the captain came back with a German
cigar in his mouth!
"We've agreed there will be no shooting before midnight tomorrow," he
announced. "But sentries are to remain on duty, and the rest of you,
stay alert."
Across the way, we could make out groups of two or three men starting
out of trenches and coming toward us. Then some of us were climbing
out too, and in minutes more, there we were in No Man's Land, over a
hundred soldiers and officers of each side, shaking hands with men
we'd been trying to kill just hours earlier!
Before long a bonfire was built, and around it we mingled -- British
khaki and German grey. I must say, the Germans were the better
dressed, with fresh uniforms for the holiday.
Only a couple of our men knew German, but more of the Germans knew
English. I asked one of them why that was.
"Because many have worked in England!" he said. "Before all this, I
was a waiter at the Hotel Cecil. Perhaps I waited on your table!"
"Perhaps you did!" I said, laughing.
He told me he had a girlfriend in London and that the war had
interrupted their plans for marriage. I told him, "Don't worry. We'll
have you beat by Easter, then you can come back and marry the girl."
He laughed at that. Then he asked if I'd send her a postcard he'd give
me later, and I promised I would.
Another German had been a porter at Victoria Station. He showed me a
picture of his family back in Munich. His eldest sister was so lovely,
I said I should like to meet her someday. He beamed and said he would
like that very much and gave me his family's address.
Even those who could not converse could still exchange gifts -- our
cigarettes for their cigars, our tea for their coffee, our corned beef
for their sausage. Badges and buttons from uniforms changed owners,
and one of our lads walked off with the infamous spiked helmet! I
myself traded a jackknife for a leather equipment belt -- a fine
souvenir to show when I get home.
Newspapers too changed hands, and the Germans howled with laughter at
ours. They assured us that France was finished and Russia nearly
beaten too. We told them that was nonsense, and one of them said,
"Well, you believe your newspapers and we'll believe ours."
Clearly they are lied to -- yet after meeting these men, I wonder how
truthful our own newspapers have been. These are not the "savage
barbarians" we've read so much about. They are men with homes and
families, hopes and fears, principles and, yes, love of country. In
other words, men like ourselves. Why are we led to believe otherwise?
As it grew late, a few more songs were traded around the fire, and
then all joined in for -- I am not lying to you -- "Auld Lang Syne."
Then we parted with promises to meet again tomorrow, and even some
talk of a football match.
I was just starting back to the trenches when an older German clutched
my arm. "My God," he said, "why cannot we have peace and all go home?"
I told him gently, "That you must ask your emperor."
He looked at me then, searchingly. "Perhaps, my friend. But also we
must ask our hearts."
And so, dear sister, tell me, has there ever been such a Christmas Eve
in all history? And what does it all mean, this impossible befriending
of enemies?
For the fighting here, of course, it means regrettably little. Decent
fellows those soldiers may be, but they follow orders and we do the
same. Besides, we are here to stop their army and send it home, and
never could we shirk that duty.
Still, one cannot help imagine what would happen if the spirit shown
here were caught by the nations of the world. Of course, disputes must
always arise. But what if our leaders were to offer well wishes in
place of warnings? Songs in place of slurs? Presents in place of
reprisals? Would not all war end at once?
All nations say they want peace. Yet on this Christmas morning, I
wonder if we want it quite enough.
Your loving brother,
Tom
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The two songs below are about what is described above. The
first song is written by Joe Henry and Garth Brooks, the second by John
McCutcheon.
BELLEAU WOOD
Oh, the snowflakes fell in silence
Over Belleau Wood that night
For a Christmas truce had been declared
By both sides of the fight
As we lay there in our trenches
The silence broke in two
By a German soldier singing
A song that we all knew.
Though I did not know the language
The song was "Silent Night"
Then I heard by buddy whisper,
"All is calm and all is bright"
Then the fear and doubt surrounded me
'Cause I'd die if I was wrong
But I stood up in my trench
And I began to sing along
Then across the frozen battlefield
Another's voice joined in
Until one by one each man became
A singer of the hymn
Then I thought that I was dreaming
For right there in my sight
Stood the German soldier
'Neath the falling flakes of white
And he raised his hand and smiled at me
As if he hoped to say
Here's hoping we both live
To see us find a better way
Then the devil's clock struck midnight
And the skies lit up again
And the battlefield where heaven stood
Was blown to hell again
But for just one fleeting moment
The answer seemed so clear
Heaven's not beyond the clouds
It's just beyond the fear
No, heaven's not beyond the clouds
It's for us to find it here.
CHRISTMAS IN THE TRENCHES
My name is Francis Tolliver, I come from Liverpool.
Two years ago the war was waiting for me after school.
To Belgium and to Flanders, to Germany to here
I fought for King and country I love dear.
'Twas Christmas in the trenches, where the frost so bitter hung,
The frozen fields of France were still, no Christmas song was sung
Our families back in England were toasting us that day
Their brave and glorious lads so far away.
I was lying with my messmate on the cold and rocky ground
When across the lines of battle came a most peculiar sound
Says I, ``Now listen up, me boys!'' each soldier strained to hear
As one young German voice sang out so clear.
``He's singing bloody well, you know!'' my partner says to me
Soon, one by one, each German voice joined in harmony
The cannons rested silent, the gas clouds rolled no more
As Christmas brought us respite from the war
As soon as they were finished and a reverent pause was spent
``God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen'' struck up some lads from Kent
The next they sang was ``Stille Nacht.'' ``Tis `Silent Night','' says I
And in two tongues one song filled up that sky
``There's someone coming toward us!'' the front line sentry cried
All sights were fixed on one long figure trudging from their side
His truce flag, like a Christmas star, shown on that plain so bright
As he, bravely, strode unarmed into the night
Soon one by one on either side walked into No Man's Land
With neither gun nor bayonet we met there hand to hand
We shared some secret brandy and we wished each other well
And in a flare-lit soccer game we gave 'em hell
We traded chocolates, cigarettes, and photographs from home
These sons and fathers far away from families of their own
Young Sanders played his squeezebox and they had a violin
This curious and unlikely band of men
Soon daylight stole upon us and France was France once more
With sad farewells we each prepared to settle back to war
But the question haunted every heart that lived that wonderous night
``Whose family have I fixed within my sights?''
'Twas Christmas in the trenches where the frost, so bitter hung
The frozen fields of France were warmed as songs of peace were sung
For the walls they'd kept between us to exact the work of war
Had been crumbled and were gone forevermore
My name is Francis Tolliver, in Liverpool I dwell
Each Christmas come since World War I, I've learned its lessons well
That the ones who call the shots won't be among the dead and lame
And on each end of the rifle we're the same.
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