Showing posts with label incompetence. Show all posts
Showing posts with label incompetence. Show all posts
Monday, April 22, 2019
Monday, July 30, 2018
Children Separated Because ICE Deported Their Parents
ICE ‘Deletes’ Families It Can’t Reunite
‘Deleted’ families: What went wrong with Trump’s family-separation effort. WaPo: “When a federal judge ordered the Trump administration to reunify migrant families separated at the border, the government’s cleanup crews faced an immediate problem. They weren’t sure who the families were, let alone what to call them. Customs and Border Protection databases had categories for ‘family units,’ and ‘unaccompanied alien children’ who arrive without parents. They did not have a distinct classification for more than 2,600 children who had been taken from their families and placed in government shelters. So agents came up with a new term: ‘deleted family units.’… Compounding failures to record, classify and keep track of migrant parents and children pulled apart by President Trump’s ‘zero tolerance’ border crackdown were at the core of what is now widely regarded as one of the biggest debacles of his presidency. The rapid implementation and sudden reversal of the policy whiplashed multiple federal agencies, forcing the activation of an HHS command center ordinarily used to handle hurricanes and other catastrophes.”
SABRAW FOCUSES ON DEPORTED PARENTS: U.S. District Court Judge Dana Sabraw on Friday called for both parties in a class-action lawsuit over family separations to focus on the task of reuniting parents who were deported to their home countries or released into the United States.
"That's the most pressing group," Sabraw said, according to a transcript of proceedings. "And all efforts have to be made to identify and locate those parents and then to reunify as quickly as possible." The Justice Department said Friday that it had provided a list of 468 migrant parents outside the country to the ACLU, which represents the plaintiffs. A separate group of 35 parents released into the U.S. haven't been located, a DOJ attorney said Friday. Sabraw said that going forward both parties must "devote enormous resources" to the undertaking.
Sabraw praised the Trump administration's efforts to reunify families it deemed "eligible" before a July 26 deadline for children ages 5 to 17. The administration reunited at least 1,442 children with parents who were in custody of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, according to a court filing last week, while another 378 were connected with parents or sponsors in the U.S. or turned 18 while in custody. The majority of reunited families were released into the U.S., DOJ attorney Scott Stewart said in court.
But 650 children remain separated from their parents, Stewart said. The legal proceedings will now turn to these cases, which include children whose parents were deported and families that the administration deemed ineligible for reunification. Any contested cases will be addressed "on a rolling basis," Sabraw said. The judge said he will require weekly status reports every Thursday and telephonic conferences every Friday until the missing parents are located and other issues are resolved.
Monday, January 27, 2014
Someone sues the schools to abolish teacher tenure ?
By Duane Campbell
Julie Watson of The Associated Press reports today in the
Sacramento Bee that nine public
school students are suing the state over laws on teacher tenure and seniority
which really means that the usual anti union corporate machine has launched a
new front in the war on teachers.
See https://sites.google.com/site/democracyandeducationorg/
These students ( or their parents) want to invalidate a series of current
laws which protect teachers from political interference. Their campaign foci
just happen to co-inside with campaigns of a variety of the usual corporate
suspects from Michellle Rhee, the Waltons, Students First, Democrats for
Educational Reform, and other well financed political action committees.
However, as we learned in the campaign against bi-lingual
education ( Prop.227), parent and student front groups can provide an effective
campaign strategy. A law suite designed for publicity was an important element in the abolition of bilingual education for the children of California. It will be
difficult to get past the framing of the AP article to real issues.
For example, one of the parents is listed as saying that her
child did not learn to read until 3rd. grade. Something we would all be concerned
about, but it is not clearly connected to teacher tenure and seniority.
More likely, the child was disadvantaged by large classroom
sizes, California’s over crowded
classrooms, and the budget cuts of
the recent economic crisis.
Or, it may have been because the child did not respond well to the
tightly organized scripted reading lessons now required in most classrooms.
Reading resource teachers prepared to assist children falling behind were
eliminated from most California classrooms in a long series of budget cuts.
Sunday, June 03, 2007
Is it incompetence or fraud in student loan scandal?
June 2, 2007
U.S. Puts Limits on Lenders’ Ties to Universities
By JONATHAN D. GLATER
The Education Department, criticized for lax oversight of student loans, released proposed rules yesterday that would set new standards for universities and ban lenders’ marketing practices that have resulted, in some cases, in loan company payoffs to university officials.
The 225-page package represents a change in direction by the department, which for years had ignored calls by its inspector general, Democratic lawmakers and even some loan-industry officials for it to be more aggressive in policing the $85 billion student loan industry.
The rules would for the first time require universities to include at least three loan companies on any list of lenders they recommend to students and would ban many of the gifts and payments to financial aid officials that lenders have been offering to win student loan volume. The rules would bar everything from travel and entertainment expenses to providing staffing for college aid offices.
They would modify the existing framework, which applies only to federally guaranteed loans, “to strengthen and improve the administration of the loan programs,” the proposal states. The agency said the rules had been sent to the Federal Register for a 60-day comment period. If approved, they would take effect next summer.
Education Secretary Margaret Spellings created a task force in April to draw up the rules after an effort to win consensus on a similar package among representatives of students, lenders and academic institutions in a process known as “negotiated rule making” collapsed.
In the past few months, investigations in Congress and in the states, led by Attorney General Andrew M. Cuomo of New York, turned up an array of undisclosed relationships between universities and lenders, and conflicts of interest on the part of aid administrators. Some university officials who were promoting particular lenders had received stock on favorable terms, consulting payments or gifts from loan companies.
Just this week, the Education Department’s own inspector general reported to Congress that the department had made “minimal” progress in dealing with complaints about abuse in the nation’s government-backed student loan program.
Lenders by law have long been barred from offering inducements to gain loan applications. But what is an inducement is not entirely clear. In 2003, an assistant inspector general criticized the department for not giving any updated opinions about what kinds of incentives were barred since 1995, even though competition for loan business had escalated sharply since then.
Department officials have said in the past that they did not have the authority to oversee many of these practices because they involved private loans — those not guaranteed by the government. They had said they wanted aid administrators and the loan industry to police themselves.
The proposed regulations would still cover only federally guaranteed loans. They identify specific practices that would be barred, including “offering, directly or indirectly, any points, premiums, payments or other benefits to any school or other party to secure” student loan volume. Lenders who offer inducements run the risk of losing the federal guarantee on affected loans, under the proposal.
The rules would also ban a college’s “access to a lender’s other financial products, computer hardware, and payment of the cost of printing and distribution of college catalogs and other materials at less than market rate.” They also make clear that lenders cannot try to get around them by offering benefits to “school-affiliated” groups, like alumni organizations.
In addition, they would require that a university’s list of recommended or “preferred” lenders exclude any that provided incentives. Perhaps most importantly for students, universities would be required to explain how and why they recommend specific lenders and to ensure that all students, not just a few, receive the benefits offered by a lender on a preferred list.
In explaining the need for the regulations on inducements, the department stated that “this guidance, and the general requirements of the law, may no longer be generally known and understood by lenders and other participants” in the federally guaranteed loan program, because the last guidance was provided in 1995.
The rules appeared to be unlikely to meet much resistance. The Consumer Bankers Association indicated that it would seek minimal changes, particularly since Congress is already moving to enact even tougher restrictions.
John Dean, special counsel to the Consumer Bankers Association, said, “I think that you’ll have a series of largely technical comments.”
Lenders, he said, “have come to embrace the inevitability of reform and in many cases welcome it.”
And on Thursday the trade group representing college financial aid officers agreed to bar its members from accepting most gifts and to stop allowing lenders to sponsor its conferences.
Democratic lawmakers in both the House and the Senate who have championed legislation on the student loan industry offered cautious support but also criticized the Education Department for not acting more quickly. So did Mr. Cuomo.
“It has taken far too long for the Department of Education to act,” Mr. Cuomo said in a statement. He noted that the proposed rules would not require preferred lenders to be selected solely on the basis of the best interests of student borrowers. “This seems to be a gaping hole in the regulations,” Mr. Cuomo said.
Robert Shireman, a higher education policy adviser in the Clinton administration who is executive director of the Institute for College Access and Success, said that the rules could still allow philanthropic gifts by lenders to universities that might not be explicitly linked to loan volume.
“There can be the same kind of wink and a nod that occurs around campaign contributions,” Mr. Shireman said, adding that some of the proposals in Congress are stricter.
Separately, the Education Department announced Friday that Ms. Spellings had named Lawrence Warder as acting chief operating officer of the office of Federal Student Aid, previously overseen by Theresa S. Shaw, who stepped down.
Mr. Warder, who has been chief financial officer of the education agency since July 2006, previously worked for years as a management consultant at Deloitte Consulting.
Investigations of conduct in the student loan industry are not over. Yesterday, Senator Christopher J. Dodd, the Connecticut Democrat who is chairman of the Banking Committee, announced plans for a hearing on Wednesday to explore ties between lenders and colleges and universities.
Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company
Privacy Policy
Thursday, May 31, 2007
Most colassally inept and incompetent administration in U.S. history
As Colin Powell’s former chief of staff Lawrence Wilkerson put it, “This is the most colossally inept and incompetent administration in American history.”
And Wilkerson spent more than three decades in the Army
Iraq Intelligence Horror Stories Shouldn’t Be Old News By Jeff Stein, CQ National Security Editor Hearing horror stories about the manipulation of Iraq intelligence is like watching “The Exorcist” again and again: Each time you see something new and laugh at the parts that used to make your hair go up straight.
Patrick Lang told a hilarious story the other night, for example, about a job interview he had with Douglas Feith, a key architect of the invasion of Iraq. It was at the beginning of the first Bush term. Lang had been in charge of the Middle East, South Asia and terrorism for the Defense Intelligence Agency in the 1990s. Later he ran the Pentagon’s worldwide spying operations. In early 2001, his name was put forward as somebody who would be good at running the Pentagon’s office of special operations and low-intensity warfare, i.e., counterinsurgency. Lang had also been a Green Beret, with three tours in South Vietnam. One of the people he had to impress was Feith, the Defense Department’s number three official and a leading player in the clique of neoconservatives who had taken over the government’s national security apparatus. Lang went to see him, he recalled during a May 7 panel discussion at the University of the District of Columbia. “He was sitting there munching a sandwich while he was talking to me,” Lang recalled, “ which I thought was remarkable in itself, but he also had these briefing papers — they always had briefing papers, you know — about me. “He’s looking at this stuff, and he says, ‘I’ve heard of you. I heard of you.’ “He says, ‘Is it really true that you really know the Arabs this well, and that you speak Arabic this well? Is that really true? Is that really true?’ “And I said, ‘Yeah, that’s really true.’ ‘That’s too bad,” Feith said. The audience howled. “That was the end of the interview,” Lang said. “I’m not quite sure what he meant, but you can work it out.” Feith, of course, like the administration’s other Israel-connected hawks, didn’t want “Arabists” like Lang muddying the road to Baghdad, from where — according to the Bush administration theory — overthrowing Saddam Hussein would ignite mass demands for Western-style, pro-U.S. democracies across the entire Middle East. Lang’s story is merely an illumination of what the Senate Intelligence Committee said in drier language May 25, that the White House was warned before invading Iraq that creating a stable democracy there “would be a long, difficult and probably turbulent process.” Suddenly the Cassandras are everywhere. These days you can’t drop a Blackberry between Capitol Hill and Dupont Circle without it being stepped on by a former intelligence official with prepared testimony or a book proposal. For those of us who have been around Washington for more than awhile, it’s unprecedented. There were defections from the Johnson administration over Vietnam, more with the Nixon administration’s invasion of Cambodia — and of course there were Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers, which exposed a historical record of official deceit on Indochina. But back then intelligence officials didn’t quit one day and the next day write real-time books exposing the machinations of current, or near-current, defense and intelligence leaders. When one did in 1974 — dissident CIA executive Victor Marchetti, who wrote “The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence,” an expose of how the agency overthrew governments, etc. (with John Marks, a former State Department intelligence analyst), there was an uproar. Shrugs Today, there are fewer uproars than shrugs, weekend news blips. Even George Tenet’s memoir has already started falling down the rungs of The New York Times nonfiction best-seller list. One reason might be that readers don’t think he’s telling the truth — and too late, at that. But another may be that the public has already concluded that, at least when it comes to the Middle East, the president and his men are — not to put too fine a point on it — dopes. Or worse. As Colin Powell’s former chief of staff Lawrence Wilkerson, appearing on the same panel with Lang, put it, “This is the most colossally inept and incompetent administration in American history.” And Wilkerson spent more than three decades in the Army. Even coming from the right hand man to the Bush administration’s former secretary of State, however, who was at the center of every intelligence controversy related to Iraq, that’s hardly news anymore. Still, with the added value of hindsight, their anecdotes still have a fresh punch. Here’s Another From Lang “I remember talking to [Paul] Wolfowitz, in his office, in the Pentagon, and telling him — this was after the propaganda build up had started, before the war. I said, ‘You know, these guys are not going to welcome you.’ “He said, ‘Why?’ I said, ‘For one thing, these guys detest foreigners, and the few who really like you are the least representative of the various breeds of people there. They’re going to fight you, then, if you occupy the place there’s going to be a massive insurgency.’” “He said, ‘No, no, they’ll be glad to see us,’” Lang continued. “This will start the process of revolution around the Middle East that will transform everything.’ No, Lang told Wolfowitz, “that’s not gonna happen. It’s just an impossibility. They’re not like that. They don’t want to be us.” Not everyone agrees with all of Lang’s views about the Arab world, but on this issue he was prescient, of course, as were almost all experts on the region outside of the neocon faithful. How come we learned so much of this dispute only after the war? Face Time Wilkerson provides a damning clue. In February 2003, Powell’s top aide relates, he “spent five of the most intimate days of my life, and five nights, without sleeping, as did my team, staring into . . . the face” of George Tenet, Tenet’s deputy John McLaughlin, and other top CIA officials working on Iraq, at the agency’s headquarters at Langley. It was the eve of Powell’s now infamous speech at the United Nations detailing Iraq’s alleged biological, chemical and nuclear programs. “One of the things Secretary Powell and I told Mr. Tenet and Mr. McLaughlin at the outset of our frenetic five or six days, trying to get ready for the U.N., was ‘multiple sources.’ We will not take anything and put it in this presentation, unless there are multiple, independently corroborated sources for the items we’re putting in the testimony,” Wilkerson said. “That was the going-in position.” Subsequently, he learned that there was but “a single source for the mobile biological laboratories; that his code name was Curveball; and that there were several very key dissents as to this individual’s testimony, during or before the preparation of the secretary of State.” Curveball, an Iraqi refugee, turned out to be a liar. “None of that, ladies and gentlemen, none of that was revealed to the secretary of State, or to me, or to any member of my team, by either John McLaughlin or George Tenet,” Wilkerson said. Tenet says in his memoir that he never heard of any serious questions about Curveball. As readers of this column know , however, Tenet’s chief of European operations, Tyler Drumheller, insists he sent a flurry of warnings about Curveball to Tenet’s deputies. Both can’t be right. “Either George Tenet is lying through his teeth, or Tyler Drumheller is lying through his teeth,” Wilkerson says, “with regard to one of the most important pillars of Secretary Powell’s presentation at the United Nations: the mobile biological laboratories.” We’re waiting now for a third CIA official to come forth with an answer. Duped The other “pillar” for the invasion, of course, was Saddam Hussein’s alleged connection to al Qaeda. Now everybody knows that, too, was bogus. But in Wilkerson’s hands this “old news” seems fresh — like watching Tony Perkins creep up on Janet Leigh in “Psycho” again. Wilkerson relates how he and Powell were dubious about the Saddam-al Qaeda link the White House was pushing, and were trimming back that section of Powell’s draft on the eve of the speech. “All of a sudden, we were told that a high-level al Qaeda operative . . . had been interrogated and . . . revealed that there was major training going on by . . . Saddam Hussein’s people — of al Qaeda operatives in how to use chemical and biological weapons,” Wilkerson said. “This was quite a revelation, and, as you can imagine, changed the secretary’s mind about how much he was going to include about contacts between al Qaeda and Iraq in his presentation.” But that, too, it turned out, was phony. “One definition of news,” a mentor told me long ago, “is what people have forgotten.” If that’s so, then the horror stories of Iraq can be told again and again. And here’s one reason why they should be: CIA veterans are leaving in droves. The other night I was talking with a recently retired top CIA operations officer, a man who had been a station chief in several foreign capitals. “This government — what have they done to themselves?” he vented. “They took a fine intelligence service,” he said, “and managed to destroy it in two administrations.” I’m probably way out of step, but to me that’s still news.
from Congressional Quarterly http://public.cq.com/docs/hs/hsnews110-000002520554.html Jeff Stein can be reached at jstein@cq.com.
Iraq Intelligence Horror Stories Shouldn’t Be Old News By Jeff Stein, CQ National Security Editor Hearing horror stories about the manipulation of Iraq intelligence is like watching “The Exorcist” again and again: Each time you see something new and laugh at the parts that used to make your hair go up straight.
Patrick Lang told a hilarious story the other night, for example, about a job interview he had with Douglas Feith, a key architect of the invasion of Iraq. It was at the beginning of the first Bush term. Lang had been in charge of the Middle East, South Asia and terrorism for the Defense Intelligence Agency in the 1990s. Later he ran the Pentagon’s worldwide spying operations. In early 2001, his name was put forward as somebody who would be good at running the Pentagon’s office of special operations and low-intensity warfare, i.e., counterinsurgency. Lang had also been a Green Beret, with three tours in South Vietnam. One of the people he had to impress was Feith, the Defense Department’s number three official and a leading player in the clique of neoconservatives who had taken over the government’s national security apparatus. Lang went to see him, he recalled during a May 7 panel discussion at the University of the District of Columbia. “He was sitting there munching a sandwich while he was talking to me,” Lang recalled, “ which I thought was remarkable in itself, but he also had these briefing papers — they always had briefing papers, you know — about me. “He’s looking at this stuff, and he says, ‘I’ve heard of you. I heard of you.’ “He says, ‘Is it really true that you really know the Arabs this well, and that you speak Arabic this well? Is that really true? Is that really true?’ “And I said, ‘Yeah, that’s really true.’ ‘That’s too bad,” Feith said. The audience howled. “That was the end of the interview,” Lang said. “I’m not quite sure what he meant, but you can work it out.” Feith, of course, like the administration’s other Israel-connected hawks, didn’t want “Arabists” like Lang muddying the road to Baghdad, from where — according to the Bush administration theory — overthrowing Saddam Hussein would ignite mass demands for Western-style, pro-U.S. democracies across the entire Middle East. Lang’s story is merely an illumination of what the Senate Intelligence Committee said in drier language May 25, that the White House was warned before invading Iraq that creating a stable democracy there “would be a long, difficult and probably turbulent process.” Suddenly the Cassandras are everywhere. These days you can’t drop a Blackberry between Capitol Hill and Dupont Circle without it being stepped on by a former intelligence official with prepared testimony or a book proposal. For those of us who have been around Washington for more than awhile, it’s unprecedented. There were defections from the Johnson administration over Vietnam, more with the Nixon administration’s invasion of Cambodia — and of course there were Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers, which exposed a historical record of official deceit on Indochina. But back then intelligence officials didn’t quit one day and the next day write real-time books exposing the machinations of current, or near-current, defense and intelligence leaders. When one did in 1974 — dissident CIA executive Victor Marchetti, who wrote “The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence,” an expose of how the agency overthrew governments, etc. (with John Marks, a former State Department intelligence analyst), there was an uproar. Shrugs Today, there are fewer uproars than shrugs, weekend news blips. Even George Tenet’s memoir has already started falling down the rungs of The New York Times nonfiction best-seller list. One reason might be that readers don’t think he’s telling the truth — and too late, at that. But another may be that the public has already concluded that, at least when it comes to the Middle East, the president and his men are — not to put too fine a point on it — dopes. Or worse. As Colin Powell’s former chief of staff Lawrence Wilkerson, appearing on the same panel with Lang, put it, “This is the most colossally inept and incompetent administration in American history.” And Wilkerson spent more than three decades in the Army. Even coming from the right hand man to the Bush administration’s former secretary of State, however, who was at the center of every intelligence controversy related to Iraq, that’s hardly news anymore. Still, with the added value of hindsight, their anecdotes still have a fresh punch. Here’s Another From Lang “I remember talking to [Paul] Wolfowitz, in his office, in the Pentagon, and telling him — this was after the propaganda build up had started, before the war. I said, ‘You know, these guys are not going to welcome you.’ “He said, ‘Why?’ I said, ‘For one thing, these guys detest foreigners, and the few who really like you are the least representative of the various breeds of people there. They’re going to fight you, then, if you occupy the place there’s going to be a massive insurgency.’” “He said, ‘No, no, they’ll be glad to see us,’” Lang continued. “This will start the process of revolution around the Middle East that will transform everything.’ No, Lang told Wolfowitz, “that’s not gonna happen. It’s just an impossibility. They’re not like that. They don’t want to be us.” Not everyone agrees with all of Lang’s views about the Arab world, but on this issue he was prescient, of course, as were almost all experts on the region outside of the neocon faithful. How come we learned so much of this dispute only after the war? Face Time Wilkerson provides a damning clue. In February 2003, Powell’s top aide relates, he “spent five of the most intimate days of my life, and five nights, without sleeping, as did my team, staring into . . . the face” of George Tenet, Tenet’s deputy John McLaughlin, and other top CIA officials working on Iraq, at the agency’s headquarters at Langley. It was the eve of Powell’s now infamous speech at the United Nations detailing Iraq’s alleged biological, chemical and nuclear programs. “One of the things Secretary Powell and I told Mr. Tenet and Mr. McLaughlin at the outset of our frenetic five or six days, trying to get ready for the U.N., was ‘multiple sources.’ We will not take anything and put it in this presentation, unless there are multiple, independently corroborated sources for the items we’re putting in the testimony,” Wilkerson said. “That was the going-in position.” Subsequently, he learned that there was but “a single source for the mobile biological laboratories; that his code name was Curveball; and that there were several very key dissents as to this individual’s testimony, during or before the preparation of the secretary of State.” Curveball, an Iraqi refugee, turned out to be a liar. “None of that, ladies and gentlemen, none of that was revealed to the secretary of State, or to me, or to any member of my team, by either John McLaughlin or George Tenet,” Wilkerson said. Tenet says in his memoir that he never heard of any serious questions about Curveball. As readers of this column know , however, Tenet’s chief of European operations, Tyler Drumheller, insists he sent a flurry of warnings about Curveball to Tenet’s deputies. Both can’t be right. “Either George Tenet is lying through his teeth, or Tyler Drumheller is lying through his teeth,” Wilkerson says, “with regard to one of the most important pillars of Secretary Powell’s presentation at the United Nations: the mobile biological laboratories.” We’re waiting now for a third CIA official to come forth with an answer. Duped The other “pillar” for the invasion, of course, was Saddam Hussein’s alleged connection to al Qaeda. Now everybody knows that, too, was bogus. But in Wilkerson’s hands this “old news” seems fresh — like watching Tony Perkins creep up on Janet Leigh in “Psycho” again. Wilkerson relates how he and Powell were dubious about the Saddam-al Qaeda link the White House was pushing, and were trimming back that section of Powell’s draft on the eve of the speech. “All of a sudden, we were told that a high-level al Qaeda operative . . . had been interrogated and . . . revealed that there was major training going on by . . . Saddam Hussein’s people — of al Qaeda operatives in how to use chemical and biological weapons,” Wilkerson said. “This was quite a revelation, and, as you can imagine, changed the secretary’s mind about how much he was going to include about contacts between al Qaeda and Iraq in his presentation.” But that, too, it turned out, was phony. “One definition of news,” a mentor told me long ago, “is what people have forgotten.” If that’s so, then the horror stories of Iraq can be told again and again. And here’s one reason why they should be: CIA veterans are leaving in droves. The other night I was talking with a recently retired top CIA operations officer, a man who had been a station chief in several foreign capitals. “This government — what have they done to themselves?” he vented. “They took a fine intelligence service,” he said, “and managed to destroy it in two administrations.” I’m probably way out of step, but to me that’s still news.
from Congressional Quarterly http://public.cq.com/docs/hs/hsnews110-000002520554.html Jeff Stein can be reached at jstein@cq.com.
Thursday, March 08, 2007
Tuesday, February 13, 2007
Republican incompetence: again
Would You Buy a Used Law from This Woman?
U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings made headlines last summer when she declared that the No Child Left Behind Act is "like Ivory Soap. It's 99.9 percent pure." That was just the beginning of her unabashed sales pitch.
Spellings has been touting NCLB as a rip-roaring success in boosting academic achievement. "According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress [NAEP]," she says, "9-year-olds made greater reading gains in five years than in the previous 28 years combined." In fact, as Stephen Krashen has shown, virtually all of those gains occurred before the 2002-03 school year, when NCLB took effect.
Now Spellings has issued a misleading report about the progress of English language learners. In a letter to the Washington Post, she claims that ELLs' 4th grade reading scores "increased by 20 points from 2000 to 2005, more than three times better than their peers." And she credits NCLB for this accomplishment, which suggests remarkable progress toward overcoming the achievement gap.
If only it were true.
Technically speaking, the reported increase is accurate. But that's because ELLs' performance took a nosedive in 2000. Then their scores rebounded over the next three years – that is, before schools began to implement NCLB. The graph below, from the Education Department's own web site, provides a more instructive picture of what's going on. It's clear that no statistically significant gains have occurred for 4th grade ELLs in reading since 2003. (That's true for 8th graders as well.)
NAEP Scale Scores, 4th Grade Reading, 1998-2005
*Significantly different from 2005 Source: National Center for Education Statistics, Nation's Report Card, 2005
Independent analyses of NAEP scores for all students, conducted by the Harvard Civil Rights Project and Policy Analysis for California Education (PACE), have also shown virtually no progress in reading or math since 2003. Nor could they find any evidence that NCLB has reduced the achievement gap between racial and ethnic groups.
But the Saleswoman-in-Chief remains undaunted. She continues to "cherry pick" data designed to bamboozle Congress and the public into believing that this law is working for kids. Don't buy it.
From http://www.elladvocates.org/index.html#selling
U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings made headlines last summer when she declared that the No Child Left Behind Act is "like Ivory Soap. It's 99.9 percent pure." That was just the beginning of her unabashed sales pitch.
Spellings has been touting NCLB as a rip-roaring success in boosting academic achievement. "According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress [NAEP]," she says, "9-year-olds made greater reading gains in five years than in the previous 28 years combined." In fact, as Stephen Krashen has shown, virtually all of those gains occurred before the 2002-03 school year, when NCLB took effect.
Now Spellings has issued a misleading report about the progress of English language learners. In a letter to the Washington Post, she claims that ELLs' 4th grade reading scores "increased by 20 points from 2000 to 2005, more than three times better than their peers." And she credits NCLB for this accomplishment, which suggests remarkable progress toward overcoming the achievement gap.
If only it were true.
Technically speaking, the reported increase is accurate. But that's because ELLs' performance took a nosedive in 2000. Then their scores rebounded over the next three years – that is, before schools began to implement NCLB. The graph below, from the Education Department's own web site, provides a more instructive picture of what's going on. It's clear that no statistically significant gains have occurred for 4th grade ELLs in reading since 2003. (That's true for 8th graders as well.)
NAEP Scale Scores, 4th Grade Reading, 1998-2005
*Significantly different from 2005 Source: National Center for Education Statistics, Nation's Report Card, 2005
Independent analyses of NAEP scores for all students, conducted by the Harvard Civil Rights Project and Policy Analysis for California Education (PACE), have also shown virtually no progress in reading or math since 2003. Nor could they find any evidence that NCLB has reduced the achievement gap between racial and ethnic groups.
But the Saleswoman-in-Chief remains undaunted. She continues to "cherry pick" data designed to bamboozle Congress and the public into believing that this law is working for kids. Don't buy it.
From http://www.elladvocates.org/index.html#selling
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
