California Education to Latinos: Sorry, we forgot that you exist !
After 20 years of using a California History-Social Science Framework which is ahistorical and misses the significant contributions of Mexicans, Latinos, and Asian to U.S. and California history, the State Board of Education will hold hearings on whether the current framework should be revised. I hope that you have an opinion.
California has the largest population of any state, with more than 6,286,000 students in school in 2006 California students make up more than 11 percent of the United States total. California, along with some 16 other states, adopts textbooks for the entire state instead of district by district. This makes the California adoption the largest single textbook sale in the nation. Succeeding in market is an important goal for textbook publishers. Many publishers write and edit their books in a targeted attempt to win control of the large and lucrative California and Texas markets. In an effort to increase their profits, publishers promote and try to sell throughout the nation books developed in California and Texas.
The election of 1982 began 16 years of conservative, Republican control of the California governorship. Governors appoint the members of the State Board of Education. The conservative control changed the history–social science, language, and reading curricula and textbooks for the state, and influenced textbook decisions throughout the United States.
The 1987 draft of the History-Social Science Framework (a guide for teachers and textbook selection still in use today ) excluded an accurate history of Latino and Native American settlement of the Southwest and did not cover the substantial Asian history in the West (see Almaguer, 1994). By electing to concentrate on a melting pot, consensus point of view, the History-Social Science Framework assumed that telling the history of European immigrants adequately explains the experiences of Mexicans, Native Americans, and Asians.
The Framework does not describe the displacement and destruction of Native American, Mexican, and Mexican American communities from 1850 to 1930 throughout the Southwest, including in Los Angeles and San Diego. The authors—among them, educational historian Diane Ravitch—failed to note that the present mosaic of Southwest culture was created by the subjugation and domination of previously existing groups, both Native American and Mexican American.
The California document won the praise of conservative reform advocates around the nation. Honig and Ravitch and numerous funded advocacy organizations such as the Brookings Institute cited it in their writings and speeches as a positive example of the kind of multiculturalism they supported.
In California, committees and the State Board of Education select texbooks for all the students in public schools. The U.S. history books submitted for the 1990 California adoption, and readopted in 1998 and 2005, were required to be based on the Framework. The 1987- 2005 document expanded African American, Native American, and women’s history coverage but were totally inadequate in their coverage of Latinos and Asians—both significant population groups in the development of history of the West. The only significant change between the 1985 and the 2005 adopted Framework was the addition of a new cover, a cover letter, and a photo of Cesar Chavez. Latinos make up 48.1 percent of California’s student population and Asians make up 8.1 %. Coverage of Native Americans in fourth-grade books was embarrassingly Euro-centric. The books do not accurately describe the interactive and interdependent nature of the African, European, Native American, Latino, and Asian communities. (For a detailed analysis of this curriculum conflict, see Cornbleth & Waugh, 1995. For an opposing view, see Gitlin, 1995.) Above Excerpt from Choosing Democracy: a practical guide to multicultural education. (2004)
Focus group: Friday, May, 9,2008. Sacramento.
An agenda for the focus group meetings are posted at the CDE Web site athttp://www.cde.ca.gov/ci/hs/cf/.
Monday, May 05, 2008
Sunday, May 04, 2008
When School reform works - and then is crushed
Liberating the Schoolhouse
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20080430_liberating_the_schoolhouse/
By Wellford Wilms
Eighteen teachers, Baldwin Park High School’s “leadership team,” sit in a semicircle with their arms folded across their chests looking at the floor. The year is 2003 and the new principal, Julie Infante, an exuberant 44-year-old woman, explains how they are going to lead this high school out of its academic doldrums together. The teachers are clearly skeptical, either distrusting what Infante is saying or disbelieving that they can do it. The Los Angeles County school has hit bottom. The campus is littered with trash, fights are common, students cut classes without penalty, test scores are so low that the school’s accreditation is in jeopardy, and the faculty is demoralized. The stakes are high because failure is an invitation for the state to take over.
Remarkably, in three years, between 2003 and 2006, with coaching from UCLA’s School Management Program, the teachers and the principal accomplished a stunning success. By every important academic measure, the school made impressive gains. The campus was cleaned up, the number of disciplinary cases fell, student absenteeism declined, and test scores improved dramatically. Not surprisingly, the teachers felt more positive about the administrators and less isolated from one another, and their job satisfaction increased. But, in 2006, in an equally astonishing turn of events, the board of education and the superintendent removed Infante, replacing her with a new principal who began to reverse the bold steps that had produced the turnaround.
What happened? Why would the board and superintendent undo the actions that had produced such remarkable results? It was because they failed to understand what Infante and the UCLA coaches had accomplished. They were blinded by their own ambitions and by their conviction that administrative top-down control is the only way to run the schools. What they could not see was that Infante had turned the leadership of the school upside down, leading from behind the scenes and encouraging teachers to take control. As the teachers expanded their responsibility, a new professional authority began to emerge among them that translated into new norms for the school. Instead of blaming everyone but themselves for the students’ failure, the teachers took on collective responsibility for the students’ success.
This is a story about why bottom-up educational reforms that work cannot survive in the face of top-down control. It is ultimately a story about the use of power. The dominant belief is that top-down control is the only way to hold principals and teachers accountable for measurable results. The less prevalent belief is that bottom-up collaboration between teachers and administrators is a source of innovation that builds commitment to and support for successful reforms. The conflict has become especially important in the face of the federal No Child Left Behind initiative, which requires administrators to produce high test scores or risk their jobs. The pressure for test scores leads school boards and superintendents to mandate what is to be taught and to reward principals and teachers who comply and punish those who do not. The effect of the law, says author Jonathan Kozol, is like placing a “sword of terror just above teachers’ heads,” causing many of the best of them to leave the profession.1 As boards and superintendents usurp authority, the teachers who stay often become docile, as do other workers in stifling bureaucracies, resigning themselves to being told what to do. It is little wonder that without authority and leadership at the schoolhouse, gains made one day are so often erased the next.
Amazingly little research has been done on the subject of why school reforms are rarely sustained. Most of what passes for research is really little more than polemics. Books with promising titles like “Failure Is NOT an Option” and “Creating a Positive School Culture” invoke rhetoric about what should be done, without analysis of the underlying problems. How many years has education been a top national priority, and how much have we learned from the billions of dollars spent? Quite a few, and not much. The few research studies that have been done show that reforms do not last because leadership changes, districts change their focus, teachers lose their motivation, and energy for innovation diminishes.2 But a close examination of the shakeup at Baldwin Park High School reveals an even more fundamental culprit: adherence to the belief that power can only flow from the top to the bottom.
I have seen the clash of these beliefs in every organization I have studied over the past 30 years, from schools and universities to trade and teacher unions, to corporations and police departments. The research is clear: Collaborative decision-making invariably improves employees’ productivity, the quality of their work lives, and their job satisfaction.3 But these improvements always wither with the introduction of top-down control, which strips employees of their professionalism, weakens their commitment to the organization’s goals and dampens their motivation to work hard and do a good job.4 In Baldwin Park we see both sides of the conflict play out. Once the board and superintendent decided to impose their control on the school, they destroyed the collaboration between the principal and teachers that had made it so vital. They also squandered the chance to build a new model of school-led reform that could have sustained the improvements over time. Unfortunately, Baldwin Park could be any school district in the country because the automatic and destructive use of top-down control is such a familiar and discouraging story.
The Turnaround
Baldwin Park is a medium-size city about 20 miles east of downtown Los Angeles. The school district comprises 14 elementary, four middle and three high schools, one of which is Baldwin Park High School. Baldwin Park High has an attractive campus built in the 1950s with low-slung buildings now housing about 2,400 students, 88 percent of whom are Latino. Nearly 20 percent speak little English. Students come from the lower rungs of the socioeconomic ladder, with more than half receiving reduced-cost or free lunches. The school employs 84 teachers, who have taught there for an average of 10 years.
Before 2003, for as long as anyone can remember, the school had operated in the traditional manner. Teachers talk about how power had always been held by administrators, which had been the cause of many of the school’s problems. Recalled one teacher, “We’d always had a top-down management style from time immemorial, and most of the problems on the campus were the result of the administration rather than the administration preventing them.” The school also had a reputation for being rough. Sergio Corona, a school board member who was its president during the turnaround, had attended Baldwin Park High School. He called it a “gladiator school.” “People would come in from other cities every day and there were fights. I’ve seen rumbles at that school, and they were bad,” said Corona. It was little wonder that Baldwin Park also suffered from a poor academic reputation. Mark Skvarna, a 53-year-old career Air Force man with a graying crew cut, came to the district in 1998 as its fiscal officer and became superintendent in 2001. He acknowledges that the school had the lowest possible statewide ranking on student test scores. “Its numbers were in the dumps. It was the worst of the worst,” Skvarna said.
By most accounts, hiring Infante was an act of desperation. The students’ low academic performance, measured by the California Academic Performance Index (API), was an embarrassment to the district, and the school badly needed new leadership. The API, a scale that runs from 200 to 1,000, is determined by annual testing. “At the time, the school was a 475 or 479, and it had been dropping and dropping. I think they were at a loss to know what to do with it,” said Infante. Corona recalled that he asked Infante during her hiring interview: “We know that it’s not the greatest school. What can you do?” Infante convinced him of her “game plan,” explaining that the teachers felt alienated and that she wanted to empower them. “She was not telling me things I wanted to hear, but she had a coherent, logical plan ... that focused on learning,” said Corona. Infante was hired. Though the board and district office hoped that her ideas would work, no one grasped how radical her plan really was.
Shortly after she took over as principal in 2002, Infante brought in UCLA’s School Management Program to help her organize the teachers to rebuild the school. The program had a reputation for teaching principals and teachers to work collaboratively. The UCLA staff had helped Infante when she was an assistant principal in El Monte, a neighboring district. Now in Baldwin Park, two UCLA coaches signed on to support Infante and the 18 teachers who made up a new “leadership team.”
In early 2003, Dan Chernow, executive director of UCLA’s School Management Program, who knew my research and my interest in education, asked if I would like to join the project to document its progress. He showed me the school’s abysmal statistics and described UCLA’s plan to coach teachers to take responsibility by running their own meetings on the assumption that, by setting their own priorities and being responsible for follow-through, they would become school leaders. I told Chernow that I thought his strategy would fail. I had learned from my industrial studies that changing an organization’s culture required changing how the work was done. In the case of Baldwin Park High School, I told Chernow, it meant changing what happened in the classroom. I was certain that his plan, like other reforms, would never reach the classroom or, more likely, that it would be swept aside by some new idea. But Chernow persisted, assuring me that I could write about whatever I found. Despite my skepticism, I agreed. Baldwin Park presented the chance to test my own ideas while I documented what I knew would be a certain failure. I was in for a surprise.
When I began the research, observing meetings, running focus groups and interviewing teachers and administrators, I was struck by the firmness of Infante’s convictions about sharing decision-making power. One day I asked her if being a woman had anything to do with it. She drew up her short body in her chair and retorted: “I’m not the nurturing kind. I’ll nurture kids, or someone in a professional way, but I’m not a touchy-feely person.” Though not “touchy-feely,” she had been deeply influenced by a principal in her former district who had taken her under his wing when she left teaching to become an administrator. He called her “the young one” and made sure that she was exposed to the school’s operations. Infante recalled that he “was looking at me as not just an assistant principal but thinking about what he could do to help me succeed. It shaped a lot of my dealings later with teachers because all of us want the same thing—to be motivated to try different things and to expand our horizons.” She said she had learned about sharing decision-making in El Monte, where she helped build a new school from the ground up. “It has to be a team effort,” she told me, weaving the fingers of both hands together. “Teachers and administrators have to do it together.”
Infante’s Vision
Months before Infante took over at Baldwin Park High, she visited the campus, talking with teachers to get a better picture of what was going on. She describes sitting in on meetings where teachers passed the time talking about housekeeping and pointing blaming fingers at the administrators and at each other. It was common to hear teachers talk about the school’s “culture of failure,” she recalls. “The teachers felt completely isolated. There was no trust among them, there was no concern to know what each other were doing. The teachers were overwhelmed and just trying to survive.” The teachers’ sense of isolation was passed along to students, who were oblivious to the shadow their test scores cast on the entire school community. “Students had no idea how their behavior shaped the school’s poor image and that their failure ultimately came back to hurt them,” said Infante. “The adults didn’t know how to communicate with the students, so it was clear that it was going to take a lot of dialogue to turn this into one school [community].”
To reverse the school’s course, Infante knew that the teachers had to become part of the decision-making process, something they had never done. “I wanted to develop a leadership team from a cross-section of the school—not just the cheerleaders,” she explained. John Otterness, a former mathematics teacher who was one of the UCLA coaches, recalled, “Julie tried to make it a diverse group, not just the traditional leadership thing where you pull in the department chairs and that’s about it.” Infante said she asked for volunteers who “wanted to be part of an earth-shattering experience. I wanted them to feel honored to be selected and to know that they were on the ground level of change.” Infante also included the local teachers’ union representative to ensure that the union would feel part of her plan. After consulting with members of the faculty and department heads, Infante chose 18 teachers to be the new leadership team.
Read the entire fascinating article at the web site:
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20080430_liberating_the_schoolhouse/
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20080430_liberating_the_schoolhouse/
By Wellford Wilms
Eighteen teachers, Baldwin Park High School’s “leadership team,” sit in a semicircle with their arms folded across their chests looking at the floor. The year is 2003 and the new principal, Julie Infante, an exuberant 44-year-old woman, explains how they are going to lead this high school out of its academic doldrums together. The teachers are clearly skeptical, either distrusting what Infante is saying or disbelieving that they can do it. The Los Angeles County school has hit bottom. The campus is littered with trash, fights are common, students cut classes without penalty, test scores are so low that the school’s accreditation is in jeopardy, and the faculty is demoralized. The stakes are high because failure is an invitation for the state to take over.
Remarkably, in three years, between 2003 and 2006, with coaching from UCLA’s School Management Program, the teachers and the principal accomplished a stunning success. By every important academic measure, the school made impressive gains. The campus was cleaned up, the number of disciplinary cases fell, student absenteeism declined, and test scores improved dramatically. Not surprisingly, the teachers felt more positive about the administrators and less isolated from one another, and their job satisfaction increased. But, in 2006, in an equally astonishing turn of events, the board of education and the superintendent removed Infante, replacing her with a new principal who began to reverse the bold steps that had produced the turnaround.
What happened? Why would the board and superintendent undo the actions that had produced such remarkable results? It was because they failed to understand what Infante and the UCLA coaches had accomplished. They were blinded by their own ambitions and by their conviction that administrative top-down control is the only way to run the schools. What they could not see was that Infante had turned the leadership of the school upside down, leading from behind the scenes and encouraging teachers to take control. As the teachers expanded their responsibility, a new professional authority began to emerge among them that translated into new norms for the school. Instead of blaming everyone but themselves for the students’ failure, the teachers took on collective responsibility for the students’ success.
This is a story about why bottom-up educational reforms that work cannot survive in the face of top-down control. It is ultimately a story about the use of power. The dominant belief is that top-down control is the only way to hold principals and teachers accountable for measurable results. The less prevalent belief is that bottom-up collaboration between teachers and administrators is a source of innovation that builds commitment to and support for successful reforms. The conflict has become especially important in the face of the federal No Child Left Behind initiative, which requires administrators to produce high test scores or risk their jobs. The pressure for test scores leads school boards and superintendents to mandate what is to be taught and to reward principals and teachers who comply and punish those who do not. The effect of the law, says author Jonathan Kozol, is like placing a “sword of terror just above teachers’ heads,” causing many of the best of them to leave the profession.1 As boards and superintendents usurp authority, the teachers who stay often become docile, as do other workers in stifling bureaucracies, resigning themselves to being told what to do. It is little wonder that without authority and leadership at the schoolhouse, gains made one day are so often erased the next.
Amazingly little research has been done on the subject of why school reforms are rarely sustained. Most of what passes for research is really little more than polemics. Books with promising titles like “Failure Is NOT an Option” and “Creating a Positive School Culture” invoke rhetoric about what should be done, without analysis of the underlying problems. How many years has education been a top national priority, and how much have we learned from the billions of dollars spent? Quite a few, and not much. The few research studies that have been done show that reforms do not last because leadership changes, districts change their focus, teachers lose their motivation, and energy for innovation diminishes.2 But a close examination of the shakeup at Baldwin Park High School reveals an even more fundamental culprit: adherence to the belief that power can only flow from the top to the bottom.
I have seen the clash of these beliefs in every organization I have studied over the past 30 years, from schools and universities to trade and teacher unions, to corporations and police departments. The research is clear: Collaborative decision-making invariably improves employees’ productivity, the quality of their work lives, and their job satisfaction.3 But these improvements always wither with the introduction of top-down control, which strips employees of their professionalism, weakens their commitment to the organization’s goals and dampens their motivation to work hard and do a good job.4 In Baldwin Park we see both sides of the conflict play out. Once the board and superintendent decided to impose their control on the school, they destroyed the collaboration between the principal and teachers that had made it so vital. They also squandered the chance to build a new model of school-led reform that could have sustained the improvements over time. Unfortunately, Baldwin Park could be any school district in the country because the automatic and destructive use of top-down control is such a familiar and discouraging story.
The Turnaround
Baldwin Park is a medium-size city about 20 miles east of downtown Los Angeles. The school district comprises 14 elementary, four middle and three high schools, one of which is Baldwin Park High School. Baldwin Park High has an attractive campus built in the 1950s with low-slung buildings now housing about 2,400 students, 88 percent of whom are Latino. Nearly 20 percent speak little English. Students come from the lower rungs of the socioeconomic ladder, with more than half receiving reduced-cost or free lunches. The school employs 84 teachers, who have taught there for an average of 10 years.
Before 2003, for as long as anyone can remember, the school had operated in the traditional manner. Teachers talk about how power had always been held by administrators, which had been the cause of many of the school’s problems. Recalled one teacher, “We’d always had a top-down management style from time immemorial, and most of the problems on the campus were the result of the administration rather than the administration preventing them.” The school also had a reputation for being rough. Sergio Corona, a school board member who was its president during the turnaround, had attended Baldwin Park High School. He called it a “gladiator school.” “People would come in from other cities every day and there were fights. I’ve seen rumbles at that school, and they were bad,” said Corona. It was little wonder that Baldwin Park also suffered from a poor academic reputation. Mark Skvarna, a 53-year-old career Air Force man with a graying crew cut, came to the district in 1998 as its fiscal officer and became superintendent in 2001. He acknowledges that the school had the lowest possible statewide ranking on student test scores. “Its numbers were in the dumps. It was the worst of the worst,” Skvarna said.
By most accounts, hiring Infante was an act of desperation. The students’ low academic performance, measured by the California Academic Performance Index (API), was an embarrassment to the district, and the school badly needed new leadership. The API, a scale that runs from 200 to 1,000, is determined by annual testing. “At the time, the school was a 475 or 479, and it had been dropping and dropping. I think they were at a loss to know what to do with it,” said Infante. Corona recalled that he asked Infante during her hiring interview: “We know that it’s not the greatest school. What can you do?” Infante convinced him of her “game plan,” explaining that the teachers felt alienated and that she wanted to empower them. “She was not telling me things I wanted to hear, but she had a coherent, logical plan ... that focused on learning,” said Corona. Infante was hired. Though the board and district office hoped that her ideas would work, no one grasped how radical her plan really was.
Shortly after she took over as principal in 2002, Infante brought in UCLA’s School Management Program to help her organize the teachers to rebuild the school. The program had a reputation for teaching principals and teachers to work collaboratively. The UCLA staff had helped Infante when she was an assistant principal in El Monte, a neighboring district. Now in Baldwin Park, two UCLA coaches signed on to support Infante and the 18 teachers who made up a new “leadership team.”
In early 2003, Dan Chernow, executive director of UCLA’s School Management Program, who knew my research and my interest in education, asked if I would like to join the project to document its progress. He showed me the school’s abysmal statistics and described UCLA’s plan to coach teachers to take responsibility by running their own meetings on the assumption that, by setting their own priorities and being responsible for follow-through, they would become school leaders. I told Chernow that I thought his strategy would fail. I had learned from my industrial studies that changing an organization’s culture required changing how the work was done. In the case of Baldwin Park High School, I told Chernow, it meant changing what happened in the classroom. I was certain that his plan, like other reforms, would never reach the classroom or, more likely, that it would be swept aside by some new idea. But Chernow persisted, assuring me that I could write about whatever I found. Despite my skepticism, I agreed. Baldwin Park presented the chance to test my own ideas while I documented what I knew would be a certain failure. I was in for a surprise.
When I began the research, observing meetings, running focus groups and interviewing teachers and administrators, I was struck by the firmness of Infante’s convictions about sharing decision-making power. One day I asked her if being a woman had anything to do with it. She drew up her short body in her chair and retorted: “I’m not the nurturing kind. I’ll nurture kids, or someone in a professional way, but I’m not a touchy-feely person.” Though not “touchy-feely,” she had been deeply influenced by a principal in her former district who had taken her under his wing when she left teaching to become an administrator. He called her “the young one” and made sure that she was exposed to the school’s operations. Infante recalled that he “was looking at me as not just an assistant principal but thinking about what he could do to help me succeed. It shaped a lot of my dealings later with teachers because all of us want the same thing—to be motivated to try different things and to expand our horizons.” She said she had learned about sharing decision-making in El Monte, where she helped build a new school from the ground up. “It has to be a team effort,” she told me, weaving the fingers of both hands together. “Teachers and administrators have to do it together.”
Infante’s Vision
Months before Infante took over at Baldwin Park High, she visited the campus, talking with teachers to get a better picture of what was going on. She describes sitting in on meetings where teachers passed the time talking about housekeeping and pointing blaming fingers at the administrators and at each other. It was common to hear teachers talk about the school’s “culture of failure,” she recalls. “The teachers felt completely isolated. There was no trust among them, there was no concern to know what each other were doing. The teachers were overwhelmed and just trying to survive.” The teachers’ sense of isolation was passed along to students, who were oblivious to the shadow their test scores cast on the entire school community. “Students had no idea how their behavior shaped the school’s poor image and that their failure ultimately came back to hurt them,” said Infante. “The adults didn’t know how to communicate with the students, so it was clear that it was going to take a lot of dialogue to turn this into one school [community].”
To reverse the school’s course, Infante knew that the teachers had to become part of the decision-making process, something they had never done. “I wanted to develop a leadership team from a cross-section of the school—not just the cheerleaders,” she explained. John Otterness, a former mathematics teacher who was one of the UCLA coaches, recalled, “Julie tried to make it a diverse group, not just the traditional leadership thing where you pull in the department chairs and that’s about it.” Infante said she asked for volunteers who “wanted to be part of an earth-shattering experience. I wanted them to feel honored to be selected and to know that they were on the ground level of change.” Infante also included the local teachers’ union representative to ensure that the union would feel part of her plan. After consulting with members of the faculty and department heads, Infante chose 18 teachers to be the new leadership team.
Read the entire fascinating article at the web site:
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20080430_liberating_the_schoolhouse/
Thursday, May 01, 2008
When Bush politicians decide- corruption
Katrina all over again.
EDUCATION & LABOR COMMITTEE
Congressman George Miller, Chairman
________________________________
Thursday, May 1, 2008
Press Office, 202-226-0853
Chairman Miller: Report Shows We Must Re-Evaluate Effectiveness of Reading First Program
WASHINGTON, D.C. – U.S. Rep. George Miller (D-CA), the chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee, issued the following statement on a new report on the federal Reading First program released today by the Institute for Education Services. The report found that the program has not made a significant difference in the reading comprehension levels of participating students. “From day one of the creation of the Reading First program, it has been corrupted by the Bush administration – plagued by severe mismanagement, poor implementation, and gross conflicts of interest. Despite these serious issues, I had nevertheless hoped that the program would produce better results than these. Billions of taxpayer dollars have been spent administering this program over the years. This report makes it shamefully clear that the only individuals benefiting from this significant investment were the President’s cronies – not the schoolchildren this program was intended to serve. Because of the corruption in the Reading First program, districts and schools were steered towards certain reading programs and products that may not have provided the most effective instruction for students. That may explain why we are seeing these results today.
“We all share the goal of helping all children learn to read. But this report, coupled with the scandals revealed last year, shows that we need to seriously re-examine this program and figure out how to make it work better for students. Our nation’s schoolchildren and taxpayers deserve a program that is both properly managed and successful in boosting the reading skills of students.”
The Reading First program was first created under the No Child Left Behind Act to help all children read at grade level by the end of third grade. An investigation conducted last year by the House Education and Labor Committee uncovered significant conflicts of interest among Department of Education officials and contractors involved with running the program. For more information on the results of that investigation, click here
When politicians decide on reading programs
http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/2008-05-01-reading-first_N.htm
Study: Bush's Reading First program ineffective
By Greg Toppo
USA TODAY
A $1 billion-a-year reading program that has been a pillar of the Bush administration's education plan doesn't have much impact on the reading skills of the young students it's supposed to help, a long-awaited federal study shows.
The results, issued Thursday, could serve as a knockout punch for the 6-year-old Reading First program — Congress has already slashed funding 60%. Reading First last year was the subject of a congressional investigation into whether top advisers improperly benefited from contracts for textbooks and testing materials they designed, and whether the advisers kept some textbook publishers from qualifying for funding.
Advocates of Reading First, an integral part of the 2002 No Child Left Behind law, have long maintained that its emphasis on phonics, scripted instruction by teachers and regular, detailed analyses of children's skills, would raise reading achievement, especially among the low-income kids it targets. But the new study by the U.S. Education Department's Institute of Education Sciences (IES) shows that children in schools receiving Reading First funding had virtually no better reading skills than those in schools that didn't get the funding.
The large-scale study looked at students in first through third grade from 2004 through 2006. For each of three samples, researchers studied 30,000 to 40,000 students, says IES Director Russ Whitehurst. "This is a big study."
On the plus side, researchers found that Reading First teachers spent more time emphasizing phonics and other aspects of what many experts consider solid instruction — about 10 minutes more a day, or nearly an hour more a week. "Teachers' behavior was changed," Whitehurst says.
But for all their effort, the study shows, their students' reading scores on standardized tests were nearly indistinguishable from those of students in other schools; in many cases, they may have been using the same materials, but their teachers may not have received the same training.
"For all intents and purposes, the kids read at the same level in each grade," Whitehurst says.
Congressional Democrats were quick to point out the program's ties to President Bush. In a statement, Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., said the Bush administration "has put cronyism first and the reading skills of our children last and this report shows the disturbing consequences. Instead of awarding scarce education dollars to reading programs that make a difference for our children, the administration chose to reward its friends instead."
Rep. George Miller, D-Calif., who presided over the April 2007 hearings, said the report, "coupled with the scandals revealed last year, shows that we need to seriously re-examine this program and figure out how to make it work better for students."
While critics will likely say the data portray Reading First as an expensive failure, Whitehurst speculates that the study may simply suggest that schools need to spend even more time on phonics and the like.
But he also notes that states that got Reading First money earlier in the program's history actually got worse results than those that more recently got their federal funding. The difference may be unrelated to years spent in the program, Whitehurst says, as schools in more recently funded states tend to spend more per student to implement the program.
He also says school districts may have spread their cash thin — they can use up to 20% of their Reading First funding outside of Reading First schools to improve reading skills districtwide. Eligible schools have high numbers of students from low-income families.
Education analyst Mike Petrilli of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a Washington think tank that supports Reading First, says the study was poorly designed and "certainly not the last word on Reading First's effectiveness."
For one thing, he says, researchers looked at "lackluster" Reading First schools that just barely qualified for grants, comparing them to schools that just barely missed getting grants.
Whitehurst stands by the research, saying researchers vetted the schools in advance. "It's not a valid criticism."
U.S. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings had no immediate comment, but in a statement, Amanda Farris, the deputy assistant secretary who oversees Reading First, said Spellings consistently hears from educators and administrators "about the effectiveness of the Reading First program in their schools and their disappointment with Congress for slashing Reading First funds."
"We know — and this IES study further proves — that Reading First funding has an impact on teaching practices," she said.
Thursday's results are part of an interim study; a more complete analysis that followed students through the 2006-2007 school year could show more promising results when it's released in November.
------
as in California where political control has forced a similar reading program on English Language Learners- with no positive results.
Study: Bush's Reading First program ineffective
By Greg Toppo
USA TODAY
A $1 billion-a-year reading program that has been a pillar of the Bush administration's education plan doesn't have much impact on the reading skills of the young students it's supposed to help, a long-awaited federal study shows.
The results, issued Thursday, could serve as a knockout punch for the 6-year-old Reading First program — Congress has already slashed funding 60%. Reading First last year was the subject of a congressional investigation into whether top advisers improperly benefited from contracts for textbooks and testing materials they designed, and whether the advisers kept some textbook publishers from qualifying for funding.
Advocates of Reading First, an integral part of the 2002 No Child Left Behind law, have long maintained that its emphasis on phonics, scripted instruction by teachers and regular, detailed analyses of children's skills, would raise reading achievement, especially among the low-income kids it targets. But the new study by the U.S. Education Department's Institute of Education Sciences (IES) shows that children in schools receiving Reading First funding had virtually no better reading skills than those in schools that didn't get the funding.
The large-scale study looked at students in first through third grade from 2004 through 2006. For each of three samples, researchers studied 30,000 to 40,000 students, says IES Director Russ Whitehurst. "This is a big study."
On the plus side, researchers found that Reading First teachers spent more time emphasizing phonics and other aspects of what many experts consider solid instruction — about 10 minutes more a day, or nearly an hour more a week. "Teachers' behavior was changed," Whitehurst says.
But for all their effort, the study shows, their students' reading scores on standardized tests were nearly indistinguishable from those of students in other schools; in many cases, they may have been using the same materials, but their teachers may not have received the same training.
"For all intents and purposes, the kids read at the same level in each grade," Whitehurst says.
Congressional Democrats were quick to point out the program's ties to President Bush. In a statement, Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., said the Bush administration "has put cronyism first and the reading skills of our children last and this report shows the disturbing consequences. Instead of awarding scarce education dollars to reading programs that make a difference for our children, the administration chose to reward its friends instead."
Rep. George Miller, D-Calif., who presided over the April 2007 hearings, said the report, "coupled with the scandals revealed last year, shows that we need to seriously re-examine this program and figure out how to make it work better for students."
While critics will likely say the data portray Reading First as an expensive failure, Whitehurst speculates that the study may simply suggest that schools need to spend even more time on phonics and the like.
But he also notes that states that got Reading First money earlier in the program's history actually got worse results than those that more recently got their federal funding. The difference may be unrelated to years spent in the program, Whitehurst says, as schools in more recently funded states tend to spend more per student to implement the program.
He also says school districts may have spread their cash thin — they can use up to 20% of their Reading First funding outside of Reading First schools to improve reading skills districtwide. Eligible schools have high numbers of students from low-income families.
Education analyst Mike Petrilli of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a Washington think tank that supports Reading First, says the study was poorly designed and "certainly not the last word on Reading First's effectiveness."
For one thing, he says, researchers looked at "lackluster" Reading First schools that just barely qualified for grants, comparing them to schools that just barely missed getting grants.
Whitehurst stands by the research, saying researchers vetted the schools in advance. "It's not a valid criticism."
U.S. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings had no immediate comment, but in a statement, Amanda Farris, the deputy assistant secretary who oversees Reading First, said Spellings consistently hears from educators and administrators "about the effectiveness of the Reading First program in their schools and their disappointment with Congress for slashing Reading First funds."
"We know — and this IES study further proves — that Reading First funding has an impact on teaching practices," she said.
Thursday's results are part of an interim study; a more complete analysis that followed students through the 2006-2007 school year could show more promising results when it's released in November.
------
as in California where political control has forced a similar reading program on English Language Learners- with no positive results.
Wednesday, April 30, 2008
Students First -California Public Schools and the legislature
In the recent report Students First: Renewing Hope for California’s Future by the Governor’s Committee on Education Excellence ( Nov.2007) the committee notes that California’s students rank 48th. out of the states in 4th. grade reading, 47th. in 4th. grade math, and 43rd. in 4th. grade science. California ranks 48th. in 8th. grade reading, 45th. in 8th. grade math, and 42nd in 8th. grade science.
This is not a problem of our unique demographics. California White students rank 29th. in 4th. grade reading when compared to White students in other states, Black students rank 29th. when compared to Black students in other states, and California Latino students rank 43rd. when compared to other Latino students.
That is, our schools are in crisis, particularly our schools serving Black, Latino and economically disadvantaged students. And, after 20 years of “school reform,” there has been no real progress.
So, what does the Legislature, the Commission on Teacher Credentialing, and the state’s Schools of Education do about this crisis?
They create a new video based test for new teachers (TPA or PACT). This new test no relationship to the crisis in school achievement. It will cost over $10 million per year. It does, however, provide career advancement for test writers and professors at Stanford and elsewhere, and keep them from having to work with real teachers in real classrooms to deal with the problems of real schools.
The Commission on Teacher Preparation has advises, and the Legislature has bought the notion that the testing-accountability model which hasn’t worked for the last 20 years in the k-12 system should be applied to teacher preparation. ( Fuller, 2007)
Perhaps someone will start to make sense some day.
Duane Campbell
Professor of Education
Calif. State U-Sacramento
This is not a problem of our unique demographics. California White students rank 29th. in 4th. grade reading when compared to White students in other states, Black students rank 29th. when compared to Black students in other states, and California Latino students rank 43rd. when compared to other Latino students.
That is, our schools are in crisis, particularly our schools serving Black, Latino and economically disadvantaged students. And, after 20 years of “school reform,” there has been no real progress.
So, what does the Legislature, the Commission on Teacher Credentialing, and the state’s Schools of Education do about this crisis?
They create a new video based test for new teachers (TPA or PACT). This new test no relationship to the crisis in school achievement. It will cost over $10 million per year. It does, however, provide career advancement for test writers and professors at Stanford and elsewhere, and keep them from having to work with real teachers in real classrooms to deal with the problems of real schools.
The Commission on Teacher Preparation has advises, and the Legislature has bought the notion that the testing-accountability model which hasn’t worked for the last 20 years in the k-12 system should be applied to teacher preparation. ( Fuller, 2007)
Perhaps someone will start to make sense some day.
Duane Campbell
Professor of Education
Calif. State U-Sacramento
Tuesday, April 29, 2008
Students First - California
From; Students First: Renewing California's Future. The Governor's Committee on Educational Excellence. Nov.2007.
NAEP results show that California’s overall results rank low among the states
48th 4th grade reading
47rd 4th grade math
43rd 4th grade science (of 44 states)
48th 8th grade reading
45th 8th grade math
42nd 8th grade science (of 44 states)
And all student groups lag behind similar students in other states
4th grade reading:
29th Whites
29th Blacks
43rd Latinos
8th grade math:
35th Whites
33rd Blacks (of 40 states)
38th Latinos (of 42 states)
37th Children of college graduates
(of 49 states)
Comparing California to Other States
Source: California
Department of
Education and
National Center for
Source: California
Department of
Education and
National Center for
Education Statistics
NAEP results show that California’s overall results rank low among the states
48th 4th grade reading
47rd 4th grade math
43rd 4th grade science (of 44 states)
48th 8th grade reading
45th 8th grade math
42nd 8th grade science (of 44 states)
And all student groups lag behind similar students in other states
4th grade reading:
29th Whites
29th Blacks
43rd Latinos
8th grade math:
35th Whites
33rd Blacks (of 40 states)
38th Latinos (of 42 states)
37th Children of college graduates
(of 49 states)
Comparing California to Other States
Source: California
Department of
Education and
National Center for
Source: California
Department of
Education and
National Center for
Education Statistics
What school is like for some
From the Los Angeles Times
Many South L.A. students frightened and depressed, survey finds
The report, prepared by a youth group with help from Loyola Marymount, says that the conditions of their schools is contributing to a loss of hope and drive.
By Mitchell Landsberg
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
April 26, 2008
A survey of 6,008 South Los Angeles high school students shows that many are frightened by violence in school, deeply dissatisfied with their choices of college preparatory classes, and -- perhaps most striking -- exhibit symptoms of clinical depression.
"A lot of students are depressed because of the conditions in their school," said Anna Exiga, a junior at Jordan High School who was one of the organizers of the survey. "They see that their school is failing them, their teachers are failing them, there's racial tension and gang violence, and also many feel that their schools are not schools -- their schools look more like prisons."
The survey, released late Thursday, was conducted in seven South L.A. public schools by a community youth organization, South Central Youth Empowered Thru Action (SCYEA), with technical guidance from the psychology department at Loyola Marymount University. It suggested that many students in some of the city's poorest, most violent neighborhoods believe their schools set the bar for success too low -- and then shove students beneath it.
In fact, the student organizers said they don't like to use the word "dropout" to describe their many peers who leave school. They prefer "pushout," because they believe the school system is pushing students to fail.
"We're ignored -- our schools are ignored," said Susie Gonzalez, another Jordan 11th-grader who helped organize the survey. "They give us the short end of the stick. . . . They expect us not to amount to anything."
Only about one-quarter of the students surveyed said they felt safe at school while 35% said they don't. Just under half said their school is preparing them for college or a high-paying job, and 93% believe their school should offer more college-preparatory classes. Fewer than half could define the "A to G" curriculum that is the college prep standard in California. The youth organization, which advocates educational equality, fought for six years to push Los Angeles Unified School District to require such a curriculum for all students. The curriculum spells out the types of college prep classes and number of years they must be taken to qualify for UC and Cal State schools.
Two thirds of the students, nearly all of whom were African American or Latino, said they wanted their schools to offer more ethnic studies classes.
The schools surveyed are among the lowest performing in the Los Angeles Unified School District and are in an area where dissatisfaction with the traditional public school system is driving many students into charter schools.
The survey's findings contrasted with a February school district report in which 90% of students questioned at selected schools districtwide said they were being pushed to do their best and 80% said their classes "give me useful preparation for what I plan to do in life."
That same report was sharply critical of the district's efforts to get all students into a college-prep curriculum by 2012. "With the current school climate and instructional quality," it said, "a significant proportion of the students who enter the ninth grade in 2012 will not only fail to meet college eligibility, but will also fail to graduate from high school."
Monica Garcia, president of the Los Angeles Board of Education, said she welcomed the survey and believed the district was responding to the students' concerns. "This is energizing, this is encouraging," she said. "We need the consumers of our services to be advocates of change."
But Jordan High Principal Stephen Strachan took exception to some of the results, saying the survey was skewed to provoke negative responses. He said his school has made great strides in preparing students for college and has created a "safe haven" from a violent community.
He did not, however, dispute the findings about depression. "This morning at 10 o'clock at Simpson's Mortuary, a 16-year-old was buried. That's one of my students who was shot in the community," he said. "I hear kids say, 'Too many people are dying in our community.' And that plays on the psyche. . . . It's really hard to focus on Algebra 2 when your friends are getting shot in the community."
Cheryl Grills, a professor of clinical psychology at Loyola Marymount, said that she was struck by how many students volunteered answers to one question about why they sometimes skip school. More than half hinted at depression, saying they were tired, had trouble sleeping, felt helpless or hopeless, were bored or felt lazy, among other responses.
She compared those responses to the symptoms of clinical depression from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. "Much to my horror and shock, they almost completely matched up," she said.
That led her to conduct a follow-up survey among 52 students. Of them, 67% reported that they had "felt sad or hopeless almost every day for two weeks or more," and had "stopped doing some of their usual activities" as a result.
"That's clinical levels of depression," she said.
Grills said that while the initial survey did not select students randomly, she believed it was scientifically valid because of the large sample size. She said there was significant uniformity of results among the seven schools: Jordan, Crenshaw, Dorsey, Fremont, Locke, Manual Arts and Washington Prep. Students from Gardena High also participated, although the survey was conducted outside school.
Alice Rubenstein, a clinical psychologist in private practice in Rochester, N.Y., who has written widely about adolescent psychology, agreed that the survey hinted at widespread levels of clinical depression. Given the environment in which the students live, that's hardly surprising, she said.
Students in South L.A. "live in a depressive environment where they feel helpless or hopeless partly because their choices are so limited," she said. "These kids are living in an environment where this is their state much of the time. It's very much a sociological issue as well as a psychological issue."
Rubenstein added that surveys of the general adolescent population tend to show that anywhere from 15% to 30% are depressed, well below the levels suggested by the survey. She added that the survey did not include the students most likely to be depressed -- those who were not in school.
At the announcement of the survey results, at the headquarters of the Community Coalition of South L.A., students played a home-made version of Monopoly that told much the same story as the survey.
Where the familiar squares of Baltic, Atlantic and Marvin Gardens might be, the options included Drugs, Dean's Office and Drop Out. Jail was a place to go when you're pulled over by the cops for no apparent reason. Restroom was where the player was likely to encounter gang members. Where Boardwalk should have been, the square read: "Dead."
As the game began, one student landed on Liquor Store and was told that, on his way to school, "You wind up in front of a liquor store and you find one of your homies smoking a blunt." When Juan Zamora of Jordan landed on Chance, he was told that "you're one of the lucky students who actually know and see a college counselor." His choices: Go to UCLA or "stay on the block and wind up selling drugs to support your family."
And when Sam Anguiano of Locke landed on P.E. Field, he was told that shots had been fired while he was running during gym class -- should he hit the ground or run? When he answered that he'd run, he was told: "You run away and are safe, but later that evening you find out that your friend was the one who was shot."
That was about as good a roll of the dice as anybody got. The one exception was Juan, a 17-year-old junior, who hit the ultimate Chance: "Your friends and family support you," the card read. "You don't die."
mitchell.landsberg
@latimes.com
Take a look at The Homeroom, The Times' blog about education. We're interested in your views about your schools, education policy and learning.
Many South L.A. students frightened and depressed, survey finds
The report, prepared by a youth group with help from Loyola Marymount, says that the conditions of their schools is contributing to a loss of hope and drive.
By Mitchell Landsberg
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
April 26, 2008
A survey of 6,008 South Los Angeles high school students shows that many are frightened by violence in school, deeply dissatisfied with their choices of college preparatory classes, and -- perhaps most striking -- exhibit symptoms of clinical depression.
"A lot of students are depressed because of the conditions in their school," said Anna Exiga, a junior at Jordan High School who was one of the organizers of the survey. "They see that their school is failing them, their teachers are failing them, there's racial tension and gang violence, and also many feel that their schools are not schools -- their schools look more like prisons."
The survey, released late Thursday, was conducted in seven South L.A. public schools by a community youth organization, South Central Youth Empowered Thru Action (SCYEA), with technical guidance from the psychology department at Loyola Marymount University. It suggested that many students in some of the city's poorest, most violent neighborhoods believe their schools set the bar for success too low -- and then shove students beneath it.
In fact, the student organizers said they don't like to use the word "dropout" to describe their many peers who leave school. They prefer "pushout," because they believe the school system is pushing students to fail.
"We're ignored -- our schools are ignored," said Susie Gonzalez, another Jordan 11th-grader who helped organize the survey. "They give us the short end of the stick. . . . They expect us not to amount to anything."
Only about one-quarter of the students surveyed said they felt safe at school while 35% said they don't. Just under half said their school is preparing them for college or a high-paying job, and 93% believe their school should offer more college-preparatory classes. Fewer than half could define the "A to G" curriculum that is the college prep standard in California. The youth organization, which advocates educational equality, fought for six years to push Los Angeles Unified School District to require such a curriculum for all students. The curriculum spells out the types of college prep classes and number of years they must be taken to qualify for UC and Cal State schools.
Two thirds of the students, nearly all of whom were African American or Latino, said they wanted their schools to offer more ethnic studies classes.
The schools surveyed are among the lowest performing in the Los Angeles Unified School District and are in an area where dissatisfaction with the traditional public school system is driving many students into charter schools.
The survey's findings contrasted with a February school district report in which 90% of students questioned at selected schools districtwide said they were being pushed to do their best and 80% said their classes "give me useful preparation for what I plan to do in life."
That same report was sharply critical of the district's efforts to get all students into a college-prep curriculum by 2012. "With the current school climate and instructional quality," it said, "a significant proportion of the students who enter the ninth grade in 2012 will not only fail to meet college eligibility, but will also fail to graduate from high school."
Monica Garcia, president of the Los Angeles Board of Education, said she welcomed the survey and believed the district was responding to the students' concerns. "This is energizing, this is encouraging," she said. "We need the consumers of our services to be advocates of change."
But Jordan High Principal Stephen Strachan took exception to some of the results, saying the survey was skewed to provoke negative responses. He said his school has made great strides in preparing students for college and has created a "safe haven" from a violent community.
He did not, however, dispute the findings about depression. "This morning at 10 o'clock at Simpson's Mortuary, a 16-year-old was buried. That's one of my students who was shot in the community," he said. "I hear kids say, 'Too many people are dying in our community.' And that plays on the psyche. . . . It's really hard to focus on Algebra 2 when your friends are getting shot in the community."
Cheryl Grills, a professor of clinical psychology at Loyola Marymount, said that she was struck by how many students volunteered answers to one question about why they sometimes skip school. More than half hinted at depression, saying they were tired, had trouble sleeping, felt helpless or hopeless, were bored or felt lazy, among other responses.
She compared those responses to the symptoms of clinical depression from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. "Much to my horror and shock, they almost completely matched up," she said.
That led her to conduct a follow-up survey among 52 students. Of them, 67% reported that they had "felt sad or hopeless almost every day for two weeks or more," and had "stopped doing some of their usual activities" as a result.
"That's clinical levels of depression," she said.
Grills said that while the initial survey did not select students randomly, she believed it was scientifically valid because of the large sample size. She said there was significant uniformity of results among the seven schools: Jordan, Crenshaw, Dorsey, Fremont, Locke, Manual Arts and Washington Prep. Students from Gardena High also participated, although the survey was conducted outside school.
Alice Rubenstein, a clinical psychologist in private practice in Rochester, N.Y., who has written widely about adolescent psychology, agreed that the survey hinted at widespread levels of clinical depression. Given the environment in which the students live, that's hardly surprising, she said.
Students in South L.A. "live in a depressive environment where they feel helpless or hopeless partly because their choices are so limited," she said. "These kids are living in an environment where this is their state much of the time. It's very much a sociological issue as well as a psychological issue."
Rubenstein added that surveys of the general adolescent population tend to show that anywhere from 15% to 30% are depressed, well below the levels suggested by the survey. She added that the survey did not include the students most likely to be depressed -- those who were not in school.
At the announcement of the survey results, at the headquarters of the Community Coalition of South L.A., students played a home-made version of Monopoly that told much the same story as the survey.
Where the familiar squares of Baltic, Atlantic and Marvin Gardens might be, the options included Drugs, Dean's Office and Drop Out. Jail was a place to go when you're pulled over by the cops for no apparent reason. Restroom was where the player was likely to encounter gang members. Where Boardwalk should have been, the square read: "Dead."
As the game began, one student landed on Liquor Store and was told that, on his way to school, "You wind up in front of a liquor store and you find one of your homies smoking a blunt." When Juan Zamora of Jordan landed on Chance, he was told that "you're one of the lucky students who actually know and see a college counselor." His choices: Go to UCLA or "stay on the block and wind up selling drugs to support your family."
And when Sam Anguiano of Locke landed on P.E. Field, he was told that shots had been fired while he was running during gym class -- should he hit the ground or run? When he answered that he'd run, he was told: "You run away and are safe, but later that evening you find out that your friend was the one who was shot."
That was about as good a roll of the dice as anybody got. The one exception was Juan, a 17-year-old junior, who hit the ultimate Chance: "Your friends and family support you," the card read. "You don't die."
mitchell.landsberg
@latimes.com
Take a look at The Homeroom, The Times' blog about education. We're interested in your views about your schools, education policy and learning.
Monday, April 28, 2008
Cesar Chavez: Social Change
Once social change begins, it cannot be reversed. You cannot un-educate the person who has learned to read. You cannot humiliate the person who feels pride. You cannot oppress the people who are not afraid anymore.
Cesar Chavez
Address to the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco, Nov. 9, 1984
Cesar Chavez
Address to the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco, Nov. 9, 1984
Rev. Jeremiah Wright
The presentation at the National Press Club was outstanding. You can watch the entire talk at
CSPAN.org or the 5 parts at Youtube.
CSPAN.org or the 5 parts at Youtube.
Sunday, April 27, 2008
Second chance at the Bee
Well. The Sacramento Bee has shown itself at its best and at its least insightful in the same edition.
In the Sunday Bee, reporters Laurel Rosenhall and Phillip Reese write a valuable article, “Second Change to make grade; schools reclassify students, meet U.S. standards.” It is interesting reading. It shows that schools have approached students to renegotiate their ethnicity in order to pass the requirements of No Child Left Behind. The reporters did their job.
They did not, however, explore the closely related issues of how arbitrary cut scores usually lead to this kind of statistical manipulation. That story you will find in the excellent resource: Collateral Damage: How High Stakes Testing Corrupts America’s schools, ( 2007. Nichols and Berliner). The problem is called Campbell’s Law , named for well respected social scientist and philosopher Donald Campbell ( no relation).
It argues, “ 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 was intended to monitor.”
Campbell’s law applies. Since NCLB, and state laws require using one time tests to measure school achievement, the testing has corrupted the processes of determining who is Black, who is White, who is an English Language Learner.
Now conservatives, and poorly informed liberal media, will chuckle and assume that they know better. But, the don’t. And, they will focus on the abnormality of shifting a few kids rather than the more important issue of how high stakes testing corrupts the entire education system by controlling curriculum, underfunding schools, and dozens of closely related issues. These are well laid out in the Nichols and Berliner book.
Covering only the reclassification of students, which is important, and not covering how NCLB and high stakes testing produces this and many other corruptions is the media equivalent of Fox news showing the 30 second clips of Rev. Jeremiah Wrights sermons and not showing the 15 minute full sermons. It is out of context and thus distorting.
While the Bee reporters did a positive service with their story- even though it has a limited context- the Bee editorial board wrote an essay High Expectations which uses as a foil the incident at Madison Elementary School Principal Jana Fields. Again, what the Principal was doing was seeking to effect the overly simplistic use of test data- to make decisions. She probably handled it poorly. So, the Bee lectures her as if it was obvious that African American kids should not be talked to separately. That is not thinking. Most educators working in the field know of the effort known as The Village Nation- covered on Oprah no less- where African American kids in California were taken aside and talked to straight up by African American faculty about the poor test scores. Educators, including the Superintendent of Public Instruction, praise this case. The Bee editors, however, assume that they know better.
This kind of test prep is problematic. A case can be made on both sides. Was it better to have the Sacramento Kings Cheerleaders speak to an integrated audience at Kennedy High. I am certain the kids were looking at these cheerleaders as math mentors not rather attractive young women.
In the case of Madison Elementary it probably was a poor idea, in part because very young kids can not sort out the messages. Having one ethnic group, or one gender group meetings and discussions works better with high school students. And it should only be used when there is a proper relationship established for such discussions. But it is not, as opined by the Bee editors, self evident that having a separate meeting to discuss low test scores is always a bad idea.
The editors say, “ Yet research consistently shows that what works is high expectations for all students. Focusing on subgroups does not work. “ I know of no research supporting this statement. Please provide it.
Yes, there is data for high expectations for all. But, for example, you need to focus on English Language learners- that is a subgroup. And, there is no research that I am aware of showing that- for example- having an all girls math class does not work.
I think that the editors have misstated the case.
The editors are correct to state, “ All kids need adults and teachers who believe in their potential.”
Duane Campbell
In the Sunday Bee, reporters Laurel Rosenhall and Phillip Reese write a valuable article, “Second Change to make grade; schools reclassify students, meet U.S. standards.” It is interesting reading. It shows that schools have approached students to renegotiate their ethnicity in order to pass the requirements of No Child Left Behind. The reporters did their job.
They did not, however, explore the closely related issues of how arbitrary cut scores usually lead to this kind of statistical manipulation. That story you will find in the excellent resource: Collateral Damage: How High Stakes Testing Corrupts America’s schools, ( 2007. Nichols and Berliner). The problem is called Campbell’s Law , named for well respected social scientist and philosopher Donald Campbell ( no relation).
It argues, “ 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 was intended to monitor.”
Campbell’s law applies. Since NCLB, and state laws require using one time tests to measure school achievement, the testing has corrupted the processes of determining who is Black, who is White, who is an English Language Learner.
Now conservatives, and poorly informed liberal media, will chuckle and assume that they know better. But, the don’t. And, they will focus on the abnormality of shifting a few kids rather than the more important issue of how high stakes testing corrupts the entire education system by controlling curriculum, underfunding schools, and dozens of closely related issues. These are well laid out in the Nichols and Berliner book.
Covering only the reclassification of students, which is important, and not covering how NCLB and high stakes testing produces this and many other corruptions is the media equivalent of Fox news showing the 30 second clips of Rev. Jeremiah Wrights sermons and not showing the 15 minute full sermons. It is out of context and thus distorting.
While the Bee reporters did a positive service with their story- even though it has a limited context- the Bee editorial board wrote an essay High Expectations which uses as a foil the incident at Madison Elementary School Principal Jana Fields. Again, what the Principal was doing was seeking to effect the overly simplistic use of test data- to make decisions. She probably handled it poorly. So, the Bee lectures her as if it was obvious that African American kids should not be talked to separately. That is not thinking. Most educators working in the field know of the effort known as The Village Nation- covered on Oprah no less- where African American kids in California were taken aside and talked to straight up by African American faculty about the poor test scores. Educators, including the Superintendent of Public Instruction, praise this case. The Bee editors, however, assume that they know better.
This kind of test prep is problematic. A case can be made on both sides. Was it better to have the Sacramento Kings Cheerleaders speak to an integrated audience at Kennedy High. I am certain the kids were looking at these cheerleaders as math mentors not rather attractive young women.
In the case of Madison Elementary it probably was a poor idea, in part because very young kids can not sort out the messages. Having one ethnic group, or one gender group meetings and discussions works better with high school students. And it should only be used when there is a proper relationship established for such discussions. But it is not, as opined by the Bee editors, self evident that having a separate meeting to discuss low test scores is always a bad idea.
The editors say, “ Yet research consistently shows that what works is high expectations for all students. Focusing on subgroups does not work. “ I know of no research supporting this statement. Please provide it.
Yes, there is data for high expectations for all. But, for example, you need to focus on English Language learners- that is a subgroup. And, there is no research that I am aware of showing that- for example- having an all girls math class does not work.
I think that the editors have misstated the case.
The editors are correct to state, “ All kids need adults and teachers who believe in their potential.”
Duane Campbell
Wednesday, April 23, 2008
Shrag: Budget cuts degrade education
Old news: Like most other major state programs, California's public universities and colleges are up against devastating budget cuts in the coming year, and probably longer. Those cuts will drive up fees, force larger classes and eliminate courses, services and programs.
What hardly anyone is discussing, either among the regents or the trustees – nor was it mentioned at a briefing by the Campaign for College Opportunity last week – is the need to increase state revenues to bring taxes at least to the rates they were in 2003.
The governor continues to perpetuate the belief that California's real budgetary problem is excessive spending, not inadequate revenues, a belief that's a core mantra of the state GOP and Grover Norquist's "starve the beast" theology.
To do that the governor uses a chart – probably his favorite – showing spending is climbing more steeply than revenues. But as the recent UC "Cuts Report" (universityofcalifornia.edu/senate/ reports/cuts.report.04.08.pdf) points out, "the chart has a number of flaws: is not corrected for inflation, for population growth, for growth in any agency's client base or legal mandate, or for the great variation in growth among different agencies."
More important, the chart omits the fact that $6 billion a year – far and away the biggest part of that alleged spending increase – is in fact the result of Schwarzenegger's cut in the vehicle license fee. Because he rolled back that fee by two-thirds, the state has had to backfill to local governments the money the levy would have raised. Were it not for the car tax cut, the state would probably have no need to cut any spending, either for K-12 schools or higher education or anything else.
And that's not counting the corporate tax loopholes that the Legislature handed out in the past decade and that, in tax reformer Lenny Goldberg's immortal words, make the tax code like a roach motel: Once the loopholes creep in, they never come out.
…But so far, there's still far too much silence from the universities' leaders on the choices: quality schools, colleges and parks in a state to which productive and creative people are attracted, or the no-new-tax mantra and life on the cheap.
Peter Schrag: Sacramento Bee April 23, 2008
http://www.sacbee.com/schrag/story/882328.html
What hardly anyone is discussing, either among the regents or the trustees – nor was it mentioned at a briefing by the Campaign for College Opportunity last week – is the need to increase state revenues to bring taxes at least to the rates they were in 2003.
The governor continues to perpetuate the belief that California's real budgetary problem is excessive spending, not inadequate revenues, a belief that's a core mantra of the state GOP and Grover Norquist's "starve the beast" theology.
To do that the governor uses a chart – probably his favorite – showing spending is climbing more steeply than revenues. But as the recent UC "Cuts Report" (universityofcalifornia.edu/senate/ reports/cuts.report.04.08.pdf) points out, "the chart has a number of flaws: is not corrected for inflation, for population growth, for growth in any agency's client base or legal mandate, or for the great variation in growth among different agencies."
More important, the chart omits the fact that $6 billion a year – far and away the biggest part of that alleged spending increase – is in fact the result of Schwarzenegger's cut in the vehicle license fee. Because he rolled back that fee by two-thirds, the state has had to backfill to local governments the money the levy would have raised. Were it not for the car tax cut, the state would probably have no need to cut any spending, either for K-12 schools or higher education or anything else.
And that's not counting the corporate tax loopholes that the Legislature handed out in the past decade and that, in tax reformer Lenny Goldberg's immortal words, make the tax code like a roach motel: Once the loopholes creep in, they never come out.
…But so far, there's still far too much silence from the universities' leaders on the choices: quality schools, colleges and parks in a state to which productive and creative people are attracted, or the no-new-tax mantra and life on the cheap.
Peter Schrag: Sacramento Bee April 23, 2008
http://www.sacbee.com/schrag/story/882328.html
Tuesday, April 22, 2008
Students oppose education cuts
By Frank D. Russo
They came by the busloads to Sacramento from all across the length and breadth of the state of California and marched to the state Capitol for a rally. Not only were there numbers large—perhaps as large as 2000 in Sacramento in addition to those taking part in rallies in other locations—but they were loud and energized. Folks working inside their offices three blocks away could hear students chanting as could those inside the Capitol.
The Governor was out of town, but the message was clear. After the rally and throughout the day, students roamed the hallways of the legislature talking to their representatives. They represented 3.2 million students—who have registered to vote in record numbers—and will be looking closely to see what is done after the May Revise of the budget is available in about three weeks. There will be a huge backlash if the cuts go through.
In addressing the crowd, Lieutenant Governor John Garamendi, who by virtue of his office sits on the University of California Board of Regents and is a Trustee of the California State University system, said: “You are all here because you have a message for the legislature and for the Governor. And the message is simple: Kick us out and we’ll vote you out.” This brought out repeated chants from the students who had repeated “Kick us out and we’ll vote you out,” earlier as they marched from Raley Field up to the Capitol. Garamendi also asked the students to make a pledge that “This is the first day and not the last day.”
The message was not lost on those who gave up a day to come to Sacramento. Frank Fernandez, President of the Student Senate for California Community Colleges, said that this coalition will continue their lobbying efforts and actions statewide until the Governor releases his revised budget in May and until the budget is passed. “We hope the May Revise budget reflects a reinvestment in higher education,” he noted.
The theme of higher education as an investment in California’s future was another point being driven home by students and others who spoke. Return on Investment: Educational Choices and Demographic Change in California,” a study by UC Berkeley professors, Henry Brady, Michael Hout, and John Stiles, shows that for every dollar California spends graduating students from college, there is a return on that investment of three dollars. That translates to $3 billion in additional tax revenues for each group of students over their lives. In addition, there are increased costs associated with incarceration and other losses to the state if a student’s education stops with high school and does not continue to completion of college.
Governor Schwarzenegger proposed cutting the Community College system by $418 million, the UC system by $332 million, and the CSU system by $313 million, totaling over $1 billion in proposed cuts for higher education in California. Students are concerned that these cuts could be translated into fee hikes for current students or cause the campuses to run out of space for all the students covered under California’s Master Plan.
Students see this not only as a problem with higher education, but also look at this in the context of $5 billion in proposed cuts to all levels of education. Dina Cervantes, California State Student Association Board Chair, said yesterday was “the day no student should be silent in the face of $5.3 billion in cuts to education. The proposed budget should increase investment in education from preschool to Ph.D., not the opposite.”
Cervantes continued, and stress that students across the state are already facing an affordability crisis.” These fee hikes force students to drop out of school or take on a 20 hour plus work week in addition to their classes,” she stated. “Even if we work and go to school, many of us still end up thousands of dollars in debt after we graduate.”
Louise Hendrickson, Board President of the University of California Student Association, said: “Our generation has yet to see another issue with the power to singlehandedly affect multitudes of Californians the way these budget cuts could. Now is the time to put aside differences, come together, and ensure a better, brighter future for all.”
Hendrickson noted that Students in both the CSU and UC systems have seen their fees almost double since 2001. “Fee hikes are back-door tax hikes on students and their families. I’s not acceptable for legislators to take revenue raising off the table for everyone else and continue to balance the state budget on the backs of students,” she said. Hendrickson has experienced the increased costs of education herself, owing over $120,000 in debt from school loans. Others spoke of working and struggling to stay in school—some with two jobs to make ends meet.
The students were joined in by legislators including , Senate President Pro Tem Don Perata, Assembly Speaker Fabian Nunez, Senate President Pro Tem elect Darrell Steinberg (pictured at left), and the Chair of the Assembly Higher Education Committee Anthony Portantino, all of whom spoke out against the $1.1 billion in proposed cuts much to the delight and deafening roar from the crowd.
Garamendi framed the fee increases that will be necessary if the UC budget is cut further as a tax cut. He said: “There is no more important investment than the investment in students. We must stop taxing our young people, and we must once again invest in the intellectual infrastructure of our state.”
To boos from the crowd, he brought up the names of former Republican governors of California Ronald Reagan and Pete Wilson. After the boos quieted down, he then told the students that those two conservatives saw the value of investing in kids and raised taxes to fund education.
The budget cuts are also a threat to many graduating seniors. If the Governor’s proposed cuts are put in place, the community colleges and UC campuses will not be funded with enough money to increase the number of students eligible to enroll on their campuses in the fall. Next year’s high school seniors graduating class will be the largest ever seen in the Golden State. The California Master Plan should allow for the top 12% of high school students to attend a UC school, 50% to attend a CSU campus and all high school graduates to attend a Community College in California.
“The Community College System is supposed to be the most accessible to young people,” said Frank Fernandez. “Telling students that we don’t have enough money to give them an available chair in a classroom, is not an option,” he said. “It would break the promise of the California’s Master Plan for education.” The Master Plan, approved by the Legislature, guides all policies of higher education in the state.
The UC Regents recently agreed to absorb additional costs for increased enrollment this year, but if funding is not provided from the state it will cause the UC System to take on further internal cuts.
Expect to hear more about education—a red hot issue—in what is supposed to be the “year of education” in California.
Posted on April 22, 2008
From California Progress Report.
They came by the busloads to Sacramento from all across the length and breadth of the state of California and marched to the state Capitol for a rally. Not only were there numbers large—perhaps as large as 2000 in Sacramento in addition to those taking part in rallies in other locations—but they were loud and energized. Folks working inside their offices three blocks away could hear students chanting as could those inside the Capitol.
The Governor was out of town, but the message was clear. After the rally and throughout the day, students roamed the hallways of the legislature talking to their representatives. They represented 3.2 million students—who have registered to vote in record numbers—and will be looking closely to see what is done after the May Revise of the budget is available in about three weeks. There will be a huge backlash if the cuts go through.
In addressing the crowd, Lieutenant Governor John Garamendi, who by virtue of his office sits on the University of California Board of Regents and is a Trustee of the California State University system, said: “You are all here because you have a message for the legislature and for the Governor. And the message is simple: Kick us out and we’ll vote you out.” This brought out repeated chants from the students who had repeated “Kick us out and we’ll vote you out,” earlier as they marched from Raley Field up to the Capitol. Garamendi also asked the students to make a pledge that “This is the first day and not the last day.”
The message was not lost on those who gave up a day to come to Sacramento. Frank Fernandez, President of the Student Senate for California Community Colleges, said that this coalition will continue their lobbying efforts and actions statewide until the Governor releases his revised budget in May and until the budget is passed. “We hope the May Revise budget reflects a reinvestment in higher education,” he noted.
The theme of higher education as an investment in California’s future was another point being driven home by students and others who spoke. Return on Investment: Educational Choices and Demographic Change in California,” a study by UC Berkeley professors, Henry Brady, Michael Hout, and John Stiles, shows that for every dollar California spends graduating students from college, there is a return on that investment of three dollars. That translates to $3 billion in additional tax revenues for each group of students over their lives. In addition, there are increased costs associated with incarceration and other losses to the state if a student’s education stops with high school and does not continue to completion of college.
Governor Schwarzenegger proposed cutting the Community College system by $418 million, the UC system by $332 million, and the CSU system by $313 million, totaling over $1 billion in proposed cuts for higher education in California. Students are concerned that these cuts could be translated into fee hikes for current students or cause the campuses to run out of space for all the students covered under California’s Master Plan.
Students see this not only as a problem with higher education, but also look at this in the context of $5 billion in proposed cuts to all levels of education. Dina Cervantes, California State Student Association Board Chair, said yesterday was “the day no student should be silent in the face of $5.3 billion in cuts to education. The proposed budget should increase investment in education from preschool to Ph.D., not the opposite.”
Cervantes continued, and stress that students across the state are already facing an affordability crisis.” These fee hikes force students to drop out of school or take on a 20 hour plus work week in addition to their classes,” she stated. “Even if we work and go to school, many of us still end up thousands of dollars in debt after we graduate.”
Louise Hendrickson, Board President of the University of California Student Association, said: “Our generation has yet to see another issue with the power to singlehandedly affect multitudes of Californians the way these budget cuts could. Now is the time to put aside differences, come together, and ensure a better, brighter future for all.”
Hendrickson noted that Students in both the CSU and UC systems have seen their fees almost double since 2001. “Fee hikes are back-door tax hikes on students and their families. I’s not acceptable for legislators to take revenue raising off the table for everyone else and continue to balance the state budget on the backs of students,” she said. Hendrickson has experienced the increased costs of education herself, owing over $120,000 in debt from school loans. Others spoke of working and struggling to stay in school—some with two jobs to make ends meet.
The students were joined in by legislators including , Senate President Pro Tem Don Perata, Assembly Speaker Fabian Nunez, Senate President Pro Tem elect Darrell Steinberg (pictured at left), and the Chair of the Assembly Higher Education Committee Anthony Portantino, all of whom spoke out against the $1.1 billion in proposed cuts much to the delight and deafening roar from the crowd.
Garamendi framed the fee increases that will be necessary if the UC budget is cut further as a tax cut. He said: “There is no more important investment than the investment in students. We must stop taxing our young people, and we must once again invest in the intellectual infrastructure of our state.”
To boos from the crowd, he brought up the names of former Republican governors of California Ronald Reagan and Pete Wilson. After the boos quieted down, he then told the students that those two conservatives saw the value of investing in kids and raised taxes to fund education.
The budget cuts are also a threat to many graduating seniors. If the Governor’s proposed cuts are put in place, the community colleges and UC campuses will not be funded with enough money to increase the number of students eligible to enroll on their campuses in the fall. Next year’s high school seniors graduating class will be the largest ever seen in the Golden State. The California Master Plan should allow for the top 12% of high school students to attend a UC school, 50% to attend a CSU campus and all high school graduates to attend a Community College in California.
“The Community College System is supposed to be the most accessible to young people,” said Frank Fernandez. “Telling students that we don’t have enough money to give them an available chair in a classroom, is not an option,” he said. “It would break the promise of the California’s Master Plan for education.” The Master Plan, approved by the Legislature, guides all policies of higher education in the state.
The UC Regents recently agreed to absorb additional costs for increased enrollment this year, but if funding is not provided from the state it will cause the UC System to take on further internal cuts.
Expect to hear more about education—a red hot issue—in what is supposed to be the “year of education” in California.
Posted on April 22, 2008
From California Progress Report.
Sunday, April 20, 2008
Security and Prosperity Summit:
April 21, 2008
Dear Member of Congress,
On the occasion of the 4th Leaders Summit of the Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP), to be held in New Orleans on April 21-22, we take this opportunity to call on all members of Congress to educate themselves on the SPP, which was never brought to Congress for debate or vote. Our concerns include the opaque and undemocratic nature of the SPP, its definition of “prosperity” as the expansion of a failed trade model, and its definition of “security” as the expansion of military force and the restricting of civil liberties.
Congress has been entrusted with oversight on such issues of trade and security. It is imperative that they exercise their responsibility on this matter by examining what prosperity and security really mean. Rather than proceeding along the failed path of NAFTA, all efforts should be made to implement a trade agenda that focuses on the needs of communities and people. That agenda should include the voices of those populations most affected, as well as their advocates in civil society.
Therefore, as civil society advocates, we call upon the U.S. Congress to:
0. Require the Bush administration to immediately halt SPP implementation and submit the process to Congressional oversight.
0. Hold congressional hearings in which the process and goals of the SPP are thoroughly aired and input is invited from a broad cross-section of the public.
Make subject to congressional vote the decision of whether SPP implementation should proceed.
http://talkingunion.wordpress.com/2008/04/20/security-and-prosperity-partnership-open-letter-to-congress/#more-105
Dear Member of Congress,
On the occasion of the 4th Leaders Summit of the Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP), to be held in New Orleans on April 21-22, we take this opportunity to call on all members of Congress to educate themselves on the SPP, which was never brought to Congress for debate or vote. Our concerns include the opaque and undemocratic nature of the SPP, its definition of “prosperity” as the expansion of a failed trade model, and its definition of “security” as the expansion of military force and the restricting of civil liberties.
Congress has been entrusted with oversight on such issues of trade and security. It is imperative that they exercise their responsibility on this matter by examining what prosperity and security really mean. Rather than proceeding along the failed path of NAFTA, all efforts should be made to implement a trade agenda that focuses on the needs of communities and people. That agenda should include the voices of those populations most affected, as well as their advocates in civil society.
Therefore, as civil society advocates, we call upon the U.S. Congress to:
0. Require the Bush administration to immediately halt SPP implementation and submit the process to Congressional oversight.
0. Hold congressional hearings in which the process and goals of the SPP are thoroughly aired and input is invited from a broad cross-section of the public.
Make subject to congressional vote the decision of whether SPP implementation should proceed.
http://talkingunion.wordpress.com/2008/04/20/security-and-prosperity-partnership-open-letter-to-congress/#more-105
Wednesday, April 16, 2008
Texas Legislature considers revising testing
TAKS may lose its sting
Texas lawmakers consider school ratings that reward student progress
08:43 AM CDT on Monday, April 14, 2008
By TERRENCE STUTZ / The Dallas Morning News
tstutz@dallasnews.com
AUSTIN – Lawmakers who lead the way on education policy are warming to the idea of major changes to Texas' report card system for public schools, which already gets failing marks from superintendents and teachers.
A new version, as currently envisioned, would dramatically alter the focus of student testing, which forms the basis for school report cards, and introduce new incentives for schools that make gains.
Also Online
Survey: What would make a better testing system than TAKS?
Blog: Education/DISD
At the same time, educators and lawmakers – not to mention parents – want to see less drilling of students for the annual Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills and less severe penalties for schools that have trouble meeting their achievement goals.
All in all, dissatisfaction with the current testing-and-rating regimen is building momentum for significant changes when the Legislature next meets in January.
"The stick can work, but the carrot works better," said House Public Education Committee Chairman Rob Eissler, co-chairman of the committee that is considering revisions of the accountability system.
"Our system should be recognizing and rewarding the best schools and helping repair those that are low performing," said Mr. Eissler, a Republican from The Woodlands.
The current system annually grades every school and district in the state based on their TAKS scores and student dropout rates. Schools are graded exemplary, recognized, acceptable or unacceptable.
Superintendents, school boards, teachers and parents anxiously await the performance ratings each year, as they represent the chief measure of how well schools are doing in educating their students. Parents and real estate agents typically use the evaluations to locate neighborhoods with the best schools.
Increasingly, though, educators and parents have voiced dissatisfaction with the grading system, arguing that the massive changes in education since the system was first implemented in 1994 have made it obsolete. Among those changes are increased federal attention and a stronger state curriculum.
"It fails to address the individual needs of students," said Plano Senior High School science teacher Karen Shepherd. "It looks at students en masse as numbers, not as individuals."
Ms. Shepherd, who was the state's 2005 secondary school teacher of the year, said teachers want a system that is diagnostic instead of punitive. "It needs to determine where students start and look at their growth over a year instead of expecting them all to meet a certain level of proficiency" on a single test, she said.
"I know as a person I don't like being judged on one action, and I would never look at my students on just one day," she said.
Senate Education Committee Chairwoman Florence Shapiro, R-Plano, agrees. She would like to see a major shift in the testing program so that it focuses on academic growth of students over the school year rather than requiring them to meet minimum standards, as the state now does with the TAKS.
Acceptable performance ratings for schools are based on a minimum percentage of all students at each campus passing the exam in the spring, along with a certain share of various student subgroups. For example, schools last year had to have 65 percent of their students pass in reading and 45 percent pass in math to be graded "acceptable."
"We need to look at a system that shows the progress of youngsters over a school year and not base everything on a one-shot test," said Ms. Shapiro, who leads the Select Committee on Public School Accountability with Mr. Eissler.
One way to do that, she said, is to measure the improvement in skills from one year's TAKS to the next. If students at a particular campus registered enough improvement over a year's time, it would result in an acceptable rating. If the average improvement in test scores was good enough, it would bring the school a higher rating.
Ms. Shapiro said many lawmakers also want more concentration on how to improve low-performing schools and less focus on punishing failure.
Incentives could include expanding the state's merit-pay plans or giving schools more flexibility on state requirements.
Another reason to revamp the accountability system is the new testing program that will be launched in high schools in the 2011-12 school year. Beginning with ninth-graders that year, students will be required to take a dozen end-of-course exams through high school and get a passing score in each subject area to earn a diploma.
--- ---- -----
Perhaps someone could get the attention of the California legislature
Texas lawmakers consider school ratings that reward student progress
08:43 AM CDT on Monday, April 14, 2008
By TERRENCE STUTZ / The Dallas Morning News
tstutz@dallasnews.com
AUSTIN – Lawmakers who lead the way on education policy are warming to the idea of major changes to Texas' report card system for public schools, which already gets failing marks from superintendents and teachers.
A new version, as currently envisioned, would dramatically alter the focus of student testing, which forms the basis for school report cards, and introduce new incentives for schools that make gains.
Also Online
Survey: What would make a better testing system than TAKS?
Blog: Education/DISD
At the same time, educators and lawmakers – not to mention parents – want to see less drilling of students for the annual Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills and less severe penalties for schools that have trouble meeting their achievement goals.
All in all, dissatisfaction with the current testing-and-rating regimen is building momentum for significant changes when the Legislature next meets in January.
"The stick can work, but the carrot works better," said House Public Education Committee Chairman Rob Eissler, co-chairman of the committee that is considering revisions of the accountability system.
"Our system should be recognizing and rewarding the best schools and helping repair those that are low performing," said Mr. Eissler, a Republican from The Woodlands.
The current system annually grades every school and district in the state based on their TAKS scores and student dropout rates. Schools are graded exemplary, recognized, acceptable or unacceptable.
Superintendents, school boards, teachers and parents anxiously await the performance ratings each year, as they represent the chief measure of how well schools are doing in educating their students. Parents and real estate agents typically use the evaluations to locate neighborhoods with the best schools.
Increasingly, though, educators and parents have voiced dissatisfaction with the grading system, arguing that the massive changes in education since the system was first implemented in 1994 have made it obsolete. Among those changes are increased federal attention and a stronger state curriculum.
"It fails to address the individual needs of students," said Plano Senior High School science teacher Karen Shepherd. "It looks at students en masse as numbers, not as individuals."
Ms. Shepherd, who was the state's 2005 secondary school teacher of the year, said teachers want a system that is diagnostic instead of punitive. "It needs to determine where students start and look at their growth over a year instead of expecting them all to meet a certain level of proficiency" on a single test, she said.
"I know as a person I don't like being judged on one action, and I would never look at my students on just one day," she said.
Senate Education Committee Chairwoman Florence Shapiro, R-Plano, agrees. She would like to see a major shift in the testing program so that it focuses on academic growth of students over the school year rather than requiring them to meet minimum standards, as the state now does with the TAKS.
Acceptable performance ratings for schools are based on a minimum percentage of all students at each campus passing the exam in the spring, along with a certain share of various student subgroups. For example, schools last year had to have 65 percent of their students pass in reading and 45 percent pass in math to be graded "acceptable."
"We need to look at a system that shows the progress of youngsters over a school year and not base everything on a one-shot test," said Ms. Shapiro, who leads the Select Committee on Public School Accountability with Mr. Eissler.
One way to do that, she said, is to measure the improvement in skills from one year's TAKS to the next. If students at a particular campus registered enough improvement over a year's time, it would result in an acceptable rating. If the average improvement in test scores was good enough, it would bring the school a higher rating.
Ms. Shapiro said many lawmakers also want more concentration on how to improve low-performing schools and less focus on punishing failure.
Incentives could include expanding the state's merit-pay plans or giving schools more flexibility on state requirements.
Another reason to revamp the accountability system is the new testing program that will be launched in high schools in the 2011-12 school year. Beginning with ninth-graders that year, students will be required to take a dozen end-of-course exams through high school and get a passing score in each subject area to earn a diploma.
--- ---- -----
Perhaps someone could get the attention of the California legislature
Tuesday, April 15, 2008
Bitterness: What bitterness?
Obama, Bitterness, Meet the Press, and the Old Politics
By Robert Reich
April 15, 2008
http://robertreich.blogspot.com/2008/04/obama-bitterness-meet-press-and-old.html
I was born in Scranton, Pennsylvania, 61 years ago. My
father sold $1.98 cotton blouses to blue-collar women
and women whose husbands worked in factories. Years
later, I was secretary of labor of the United States,
and I tried the best I could - which wasn't nearly good
enough - to help reverse one of the most troublesome
trends America has faced: The stagnation of middle-
class wages and the expansion of poverty. Male hourly
wages began to drop in the early 1970s, adjusted for
inflation. The average man in his 30s is earning less
than his father did thirty years ago. Yet America is
far richer. Where did the money go? To the top.
Are Americans who have been left behind frustrated? Of
course. And their frustrations, their anger and, yes,
sometimes their bitterness, have been used since then -
by demagogues, by nationalists and xenophobes, by
radical conservatives, by political nuts and fanatical
fruitcakes - to blame immigrants and foreign traders,
to blame blacks and the poor, to blame 'liberal
elites,' to blame anyone and anything.
Rather than counter all this, the American media have
wallowed in it. Some, like Fox News and talk radio,
have given the haters and blamers their very own
megaphones. The rest have merely 'reported on' it.
Instead of focusing on how to get Americans good jobs
again; instead of admitting too many of our schools are
failing and our kids are falling behind their
contemporaries in Europe, Japan, and even China;
instead of showing why we need a more progressive tax
system to finance better schools and access to health
care, and green technologies that might create new
manufacturing jobs, our national discussion has been
mired in the old politics.
Listen to this morning's 'Meet the Press' if you want
an example. Tim Russert, one of the smartest guys on
television, interviewed four political consultants -
Carville and Matalin, Bob Schrum, and Michael Murphy.
Political consultants are paid huge sums to help
politicians spin words and avoid real talk. They're
part of the problem. And what do Russert and these four
consultants talk about? The potential damage to Barack
Obama from saying that lots of people in Pennsylvania
are bitter that the economy has left them behind; about
HRC's spin on Obama's words (he's an 'elitist,' she
said); and John McCain's similarly puerile attack.
Does Russert really believe he's doing the nation a
service for this parade of spin doctors talking about
potential spins and the spin-offs from the words Obama
used to state what everyone knows is true? Or is
Russert merely in the business of selling TV airtime
for a network that doesn't give a hoot about its
supposed commitment to the public interest but wants to
up its ratings by pandering to the nation's ongoing
desire for gladiator entertainment instead of real talk
about real problems.
We're heading into the worst economic crisis in a half
century or more. Many of the Americans who have been
getting nowhere for decades are in even deeper trouble.
Large numbers of people in Pennsylvania and across the
nation are losing their homes and losing their jobs,
and the situation is likely to grow worse. Consumers
are at the end of their ropes, fuel and food costs are
skyrocketing, they can't go deeper into debt, they
can't pay their bills. They aren't buying, which means
every business from the auto industry to housing to
even giant GE is hurting. Which means they'll begin
laying off more people, and as they do, we will
experience an even more dangerous downward spiral.
Bitter? You ain't seen nothing yet. And as much as
people like Russert, Carville, Matalin, Schrum, and
Murphy want to divert our attention from what's really
happening; as much as HRC and McCain seek to make
political hay out of choices of words that can be spun
cynically by the mindless spinners of the old politics;
as much as demagogues on the right and left continue to
try to channel the cumulative frustrations of Americans
into a politics of resentment - all these attempts
will, I hope, prove futile. Eighty percent of Americans
know the nation is on the wrong track. The old
politics, and the old media that feeds it, are
irrelevant now.
[Robert Reich is Professor of Public Policy at the
Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of
California at Berkeley. He has served in three national
administrations, most recently as secretary of labor
under President Bill Clinton. He has written ten books,
including The Work of Nations, which has been
translated into 22 languages; the best-sellers The
Future of Success and Locked in the Cabinet, and his
most recent book, Reason. His articles have appeared in
the New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, New York Times,
Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal. Mr. Reich is
co-founding editor of The American Prospect magazine.]
By Robert Reich
April 15, 2008
http://robertreich.blogspot.com/2008/04/obama-bitterness-meet-press-and-old.html
I was born in Scranton, Pennsylvania, 61 years ago. My
father sold $1.98 cotton blouses to blue-collar women
and women whose husbands worked in factories. Years
later, I was secretary of labor of the United States,
and I tried the best I could - which wasn't nearly good
enough - to help reverse one of the most troublesome
trends America has faced: The stagnation of middle-
class wages and the expansion of poverty. Male hourly
wages began to drop in the early 1970s, adjusted for
inflation. The average man in his 30s is earning less
than his father did thirty years ago. Yet America is
far richer. Where did the money go? To the top.
Are Americans who have been left behind frustrated? Of
course. And their frustrations, their anger and, yes,
sometimes their bitterness, have been used since then -
by demagogues, by nationalists and xenophobes, by
radical conservatives, by political nuts and fanatical
fruitcakes - to blame immigrants and foreign traders,
to blame blacks and the poor, to blame 'liberal
elites,' to blame anyone and anything.
Rather than counter all this, the American media have
wallowed in it. Some, like Fox News and talk radio,
have given the haters and blamers their very own
megaphones. The rest have merely 'reported on' it.
Instead of focusing on how to get Americans good jobs
again; instead of admitting too many of our schools are
failing and our kids are falling behind their
contemporaries in Europe, Japan, and even China;
instead of showing why we need a more progressive tax
system to finance better schools and access to health
care, and green technologies that might create new
manufacturing jobs, our national discussion has been
mired in the old politics.
Listen to this morning's 'Meet the Press' if you want
an example. Tim Russert, one of the smartest guys on
television, interviewed four political consultants -
Carville and Matalin, Bob Schrum, and Michael Murphy.
Political consultants are paid huge sums to help
politicians spin words and avoid real talk. They're
part of the problem. And what do Russert and these four
consultants talk about? The potential damage to Barack
Obama from saying that lots of people in Pennsylvania
are bitter that the economy has left them behind; about
HRC's spin on Obama's words (he's an 'elitist,' she
said); and John McCain's similarly puerile attack.
Does Russert really believe he's doing the nation a
service for this parade of spin doctors talking about
potential spins and the spin-offs from the words Obama
used to state what everyone knows is true? Or is
Russert merely in the business of selling TV airtime
for a network that doesn't give a hoot about its
supposed commitment to the public interest but wants to
up its ratings by pandering to the nation's ongoing
desire for gladiator entertainment instead of real talk
about real problems.
We're heading into the worst economic crisis in a half
century or more. Many of the Americans who have been
getting nowhere for decades are in even deeper trouble.
Large numbers of people in Pennsylvania and across the
nation are losing their homes and losing their jobs,
and the situation is likely to grow worse. Consumers
are at the end of their ropes, fuel and food costs are
skyrocketing, they can't go deeper into debt, they
can't pay their bills. They aren't buying, which means
every business from the auto industry to housing to
even giant GE is hurting. Which means they'll begin
laying off more people, and as they do, we will
experience an even more dangerous downward spiral.
Bitter? You ain't seen nothing yet. And as much as
people like Russert, Carville, Matalin, Schrum, and
Murphy want to divert our attention from what's really
happening; as much as HRC and McCain seek to make
political hay out of choices of words that can be spun
cynically by the mindless spinners of the old politics;
as much as demagogues on the right and left continue to
try to channel the cumulative frustrations of Americans
into a politics of resentment - all these attempts
will, I hope, prove futile. Eighty percent of Americans
know the nation is on the wrong track. The old
politics, and the old media that feeds it, are
irrelevant now.
[Robert Reich is Professor of Public Policy at the
Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of
California at Berkeley. He has served in three national
administrations, most recently as secretary of labor
under President Bill Clinton. He has written ten books,
including The Work of Nations, which has been
translated into 22 languages; the best-sellers The
Future of Success and Locked in the Cabinet, and his
most recent book, Reason. His articles have appeared in
the New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, New York Times,
Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal. Mr. Reich is
co-founding editor of The American Prospect magazine.]
Saturday, April 12, 2008
NCLB: Obama and Clinton
Obama and Clinton: Latest statements on NCLB
Posted by James Crawford on 9 April 2008 at 11:04 am
It’s encouraging to see that both Democratic candidates are increasingly critical of the No Child Left Behind Act, as illustrated by a comprehensive report in today’s Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Obviously, they are responding to voter sentiment they encounter every day on the campaign trail. Attacking NCLB has become a sure-fire applause line, as illustrated last week in Montana. But their statements remain rather general and they have yet to propose any coherent alternative, leaving themselves plenty of wiggle room.
For example, when Sen. Clinton — who has taken semantic games to new heights in this campaign — says she would “put an end to the unfunded mandate called No Child Left Behind,” she could end up voting later to make it a “funded mandate” with only marginal changes. Indeed, that’s what many Democrats have advocated all along.
Sen. Obama points out that Clinton was an enthusiastic backer of NCLB in 2001, which she called “landmark legislation [that] sends a clear message that all American children deserve a world class education.” Perhaps, as with her vote to authorize the Iraq war, this was another case of Hillary being cruelly deceived by George Bush. She hasn’t explained, but Bill Clinton helpfully recalled in a recent speech that “Hillary was facing this impossible vote. She said ‘Bill this is not going to work, [NCLB] is going to be a disaster.’” Prophetic (if true), but apparently political calculations won out.
Meanwhile Obama has been, if anything, even more vague than Clinton on what changes he would favor in NCLB. While both candidates have criticized the overemphasis on standardized testing, neither has explicitly called for repealing the testing mandate or the high stakes attached. Nor have they promised to eliminate the absurd requirement of “100% proficiency by 2014.”
So it would be illuminating if Sen. Kennedy introduces his long-promised bill to reauthorize NCLB and holds a vote in the HELP Committee this spring. As committee members, Obama and Clinton would then have to commit themselves to specifics. Or reveal their unwillingness to do so.
Jim Crawford. ELL Advocates
Posted by James Crawford on 9 April 2008 at 11:04 am
It’s encouraging to see that both Democratic candidates are increasingly critical of the No Child Left Behind Act, as illustrated by a comprehensive report in today’s Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Obviously, they are responding to voter sentiment they encounter every day on the campaign trail. Attacking NCLB has become a sure-fire applause line, as illustrated last week in Montana. But their statements remain rather general and they have yet to propose any coherent alternative, leaving themselves plenty of wiggle room.
For example, when Sen. Clinton — who has taken semantic games to new heights in this campaign — says she would “put an end to the unfunded mandate called No Child Left Behind,” she could end up voting later to make it a “funded mandate” with only marginal changes. Indeed, that’s what many Democrats have advocated all along.
Sen. Obama points out that Clinton was an enthusiastic backer of NCLB in 2001, which she called “landmark legislation [that] sends a clear message that all American children deserve a world class education.” Perhaps, as with her vote to authorize the Iraq war, this was another case of Hillary being cruelly deceived by George Bush. She hasn’t explained, but Bill Clinton helpfully recalled in a recent speech that “Hillary was facing this impossible vote. She said ‘Bill this is not going to work, [NCLB] is going to be a disaster.’” Prophetic (if true), but apparently political calculations won out.
Meanwhile Obama has been, if anything, even more vague than Clinton on what changes he would favor in NCLB. While both candidates have criticized the overemphasis on standardized testing, neither has explicitly called for repealing the testing mandate or the high stakes attached. Nor have they promised to eliminate the absurd requirement of “100% proficiency by 2014.”
So it would be illuminating if Sen. Kennedy introduces his long-promised bill to reauthorize NCLB and holds a vote in the HELP Committee this spring. As committee members, Obama and Clinton would then have to commit themselves to specifics. Or reveal their unwillingness to do so.
Jim Crawford. ELL Advocates
Thursday, April 10, 2008
California School budget cuts
Dr. Francisco Reveles Is Keynote Speaker at Multicultural Education Conference
Dr. Francisco Reveles will be the keynote speaker at the annual Multicultural Education Conference sponsored by the department of Bilingual/Multicultural Education on Saturday, April 12, 2008, at Sacramento State University. The event will run from 8:30 Am -1:30 PM. in the University Union.
The conference is designed for teachers and future teachers to bring them new and interesting approaches to teaching. Dr. Reveles topic will be: “Closing the Achievement Gap: Building Networks to Success.”
Dr. Reveles is a Professor in Educational Leadership and Policy Studies and a graduate of bilingual programs at CSUS. Over 45 workshops will offer ideas on teaching strategies, test taking, the current crisis in education budgets, and more.
“According to Governor Schwarzenegger, 2008 was supposed to be the year of education,” said Reveles. “Given the massive and destructive budget cuts that are currently being considered across the board, one is forced to conclude that either the governor was woefully misinformed regarding the looming state fiscal crises or, more likely, purposefully and with calculating political foresight engaged in the kind of rhetoric that we have come to expect from our lawmakers.”
More to the point, the state’s current proposed budget cuts to education are still another example of simplistic political thinking that does nothing to address the needs of our growing diverse student population, according to Reveles.
“Tragically, we are now facing cuts of 4.1 billion in K-12 education and $386 million in the CSU system,” he said. “Public schools that have been working hard to make lasting gains in achievement and retain committed teachers and counselors will see their efforts further eroded. School administrators, already struggling with the unpredictability of year-to-year funding cycles will see an increase in class size along with teacher layoffs."
The CSU system will also suffer as unfunded mandates relating to teacher education are enforced and tuition increases are implemented. Clearly, we are at a crossroads in education, observes Reveles.
“Can we fiscally prioritize in a way that invests in California’s future through better schools and teacher training, or will we blindly accept the proposed cuts to education that the governor and the legislature are considering? As educators, it is our responsibility, indeed our charge, to critically examine and challenge any such cuts to education,” he concluded.
The Conference program is available at www.edweb.csus.edu, For more information, contact Maggie Beddow, Conference Chair, beddow@csus.edu.
Dr. Francisco Reveles will be the keynote speaker at the annual Multicultural Education Conference sponsored by the department of Bilingual/Multicultural Education on Saturday, April 12, 2008, at Sacramento State University. The event will run from 8:30 Am -1:30 PM. in the University Union.
The conference is designed for teachers and future teachers to bring them new and interesting approaches to teaching. Dr. Reveles topic will be: “Closing the Achievement Gap: Building Networks to Success.”
Dr. Reveles is a Professor in Educational Leadership and Policy Studies and a graduate of bilingual programs at CSUS. Over 45 workshops will offer ideas on teaching strategies, test taking, the current crisis in education budgets, and more.
“According to Governor Schwarzenegger, 2008 was supposed to be the year of education,” said Reveles. “Given the massive and destructive budget cuts that are currently being considered across the board, one is forced to conclude that either the governor was woefully misinformed regarding the looming state fiscal crises or, more likely, purposefully and with calculating political foresight engaged in the kind of rhetoric that we have come to expect from our lawmakers.”
More to the point, the state’s current proposed budget cuts to education are still another example of simplistic political thinking that does nothing to address the needs of our growing diverse student population, according to Reveles.
“Tragically, we are now facing cuts of 4.1 billion in K-12 education and $386 million in the CSU system,” he said. “Public schools that have been working hard to make lasting gains in achievement and retain committed teachers and counselors will see their efforts further eroded. School administrators, already struggling with the unpredictability of year-to-year funding cycles will see an increase in class size along with teacher layoffs."
The CSU system will also suffer as unfunded mandates relating to teacher education are enforced and tuition increases are implemented. Clearly, we are at a crossroads in education, observes Reveles.
“Can we fiscally prioritize in a way that invests in California’s future through better schools and teacher training, or will we blindly accept the proposed cuts to education that the governor and the legislature are considering? As educators, it is our responsibility, indeed our charge, to critically examine and challenge any such cuts to education,” he concluded.
The Conference program is available at www.edweb.csus.edu, For more information, contact Maggie Beddow, Conference Chair, beddow@csus.edu.
Tuesday, April 08, 2008
Conference for Teachers: Sacramento
Dr. Francisco Reveles will be the keynote speaker at the annual Multicultural Education Conference sponsored by the department of Bilingual/Multicultural Education on April 12, 2008, in the university union of the Sacramento State Campus.
8:30 Am - 1:30 PM. in the University Union
The conference is designed for teachers and future teachers to bring them new and interesting approaches to teaching. Dr. Reveles topic will be:
“Closing the Achievement Gap: Building Networks to Success.”
Dr. Reveles is a Professor in Educational Leadership and Policy Studies and a graduate of bilingual programs here at CSUS.
Over 45 workshops will offer ideas on teaching strategies, test taking, the current crisis in education budgets, and more.
Conference program at
www.edweb.csus.edu
For more information:
Friday, April 04, 2008
Multicultural Education conference: Free: Sacramento
Dr. Francisco Reveles will be the keynote speaker at the annual Multicultural Education Conference sponsored by the department of Bilingual/Multicultural Education on April 12, 2008, in the university union of the Sacramento State Campus.
8:30 Am - 1:30 PM. in the University Union
The conference is designed for teachers and future teachers to bring them new and interesting approaches to teaching. Dr. Reveles topic will be:
“Closing the Achievement Gap: Building Networks to Success.”
Dr. Reveles is a Professor in Educational Leadership and Policy Studies and a graduate of bilingual programs here at CSUS.
Over 45 workshops will offer ideas on teaching strategies, test taking, the current crisis in education budgets, and more.
Conference program at
www.edweb.csus.edu
For more information:
Thursday, April 03, 2008
Congress: Help the rich
Housing Policy: Free Market Vs. Help the Rich
By Dean Baker - April 3, 2008, 8:46PM
As we all know there is an ongoing debate in politics between those who favor market solutions and those who believe that the government must intervene to protect the rich.
Okay, the first group may not exactly be market fundamentalists, but the government intervention help-the-rich faction is definitely calling the shots these days, especially when it comes to housing policy.
The economy is in recession and job loss is soaring. The banking system is on life support, with the Fed handing tens of billions of dollars to the country’s biggest banks at below market interest rates. Millions of homeowners are facing foreclosure, and more than ten million are now underwater in their mortgages, owing more than the value of their house.
In such dire circumstances, Congress did the only thing it could; it gave more tax breaks to banks and homebuilders.
Yes, that is really what Congress, or least the Senate, proposes as the answer to the crisis facing the country’s homeowners. The Senate has approved a bill that would give a tax break worth more than $6 billion to homebuilders facing losses due to unsold homes and banks facing losses due to bad mortgages. That should make troubled homeowners sleep more securely.
Read more at Talking Points Memo
By Dean Baker - April 3, 2008, 8:46PM
As we all know there is an ongoing debate in politics between those who favor market solutions and those who believe that the government must intervene to protect the rich.
Okay, the first group may not exactly be market fundamentalists, but the government intervention help-the-rich faction is definitely calling the shots these days, especially when it comes to housing policy.
The economy is in recession and job loss is soaring. The banking system is on life support, with the Fed handing tens of billions of dollars to the country’s biggest banks at below market interest rates. Millions of homeowners are facing foreclosure, and more than ten million are now underwater in their mortgages, owing more than the value of their house.
In such dire circumstances, Congress did the only thing it could; it gave more tax breaks to banks and homebuilders.
Yes, that is really what Congress, or least the Senate, proposes as the answer to the crisis facing the country’s homeowners. The Senate has approved a bill that would give a tax break worth more than $6 billion to homebuilders facing losses due to unsold homes and banks facing losses due to bad mortgages. That should make troubled homeowners sleep more securely.
Read more at Talking Points Memo
Tuesday, April 01, 2008
Obama and economy
Obama v. Krugman
ROBERT KUTTNER | March 28, 2008 | web only The American Prospect.
Barack Obama's speech on the financial crisis was a remarkable breakthrough.
First, he connected all the dots -- between the complete dismantling of financial regulation, the declining economic opportunity and security for ordinary people, the current financial meltdown, and the political influence of Wall Street as the driver of these changes. Astounding! I wish I had written the speech. It is this kind of leadership and truth-telling that is the predicate for the shift in public opinion required to produce legislative change. A radical, appropriately nuanced, and deeply public-minded description of what has occurred, the speech was Roosevelt quality: the president as teacher-in-chief. Those who felt that Obama was capable of real growth that will transcend the campaign's early and somewhat feeble domestic policy proposals should feel vindicated.
The speech also showed real understanding and subtlety in grasping how financial "innovation" had outrun regulation, as well as a historical sense of the abuses of the 1920s repeating themselves. Obama is one of the few mainstream leaders -- Barney Frank is another -- calling for capital requirements to be extended to every category of financial institution that creates credit. This is exactly what's needed to prevent the next meltdown, but if it were put to a vote now, it would be rejected by legislators from both parties because they are still in thrall to market fundamentalism and Wall Street. That's where presidential leadership comes in.
So the speech was courageous, in that it goes well beyond the current Democratic party consensus, and one can only wonder about the reaction of some of Obama's own financial backers. He also took on a couple of other sacred cows, such as electricity and telecom deregulation, proven failures to everyone but industry defenders and their allies in the economics profession.
We should not focus too much attention on the oblique dig at the Clinton presidency, which indeed fomented the pattern of excessive deregulation. Let's remember, Bill was president, she wasn't. This is a totally fair drawing of a distinction on the issues, and not a cheap shot or ad hominem attack.
The Clinton camp's rejoinder -- that Hillary is proposing to do more for the victims of the housing bust -- is totally unpersuasive. All along, she has treated the housing mess as its own self-contained scandal, rather than connecting it to the larger set of financial bubbles of which it is a part. The Frank-Dodd bill, which Obama is co-sponsoring, is a realistic remedy for purely the housing part of the crisis. If you read Clinton's March 24 speech on the housing crisis and how to fix it -- supposedly more robust than Obama's remedy -- she offers the same Frank-Dodd bill. She does not locate the mortgage crisis in the deeper financial one. And her idea of turning, for wise men, to Robert Rubin and Alan Greenspan -- more than anyone the people who gave us this crisis -- is appalling.
The one slightly disappointing part of the Obama speech was his call for $30 billion more in "stimulus." It's not nearly enough. He -- and we -- should stop even using the word "stimulus." To dig out of this mess, at a time when we already have large deficits, the federal government will need to fund a multi-year, public investment-led recovery program well into the hundreds of billions. It will need to be funded by restoring taxes on rich people. But this is a topic for another day.
A real puzzle here is the repeated assertion by columnist Paul Krugman, in the face of mounting evidence to the contrary, that Clinton's views on economic policy are more progressive than Obama's. Indeed, Obama's stunning speech read as if it were informed by recent Krugman columns on the meltdown. Hillary has not said anything close to what Obama (or Krugman) has suggested.
Unlike some of my friends, I have not fallen in love with Obama. I have been at this too long, and you risk getting your heart broken. I actually shared Krugman's critique of Obama's health insurance individual mandate and his proposal to tax the upper middle class to pay for a much exaggerated Social Security shortfall that is more like a rounding error. I simply conclude, based on what I've seen, that Obama is capable of real learning and real transformation, both of himself and of public opinion. Nothing I've seen suggests that's true of Hillary Clinton.
But Krugman, ordinarily an ornament of fair-minded progressive economics commentary, writes almost as if he has become part of the Clinton campaign. His latest characterization of Obama's proposals in commenting on the New York speech -- "cautious and relatively orthodox" -- was preposterous. Even if Krugman's sympathies are with Clinton, he owes it to his readers and to his own credibility to play it straight and credit Obama with a breakthrough when credit is due. This was surely one of those times.
http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=obama_v_krugman
ROBERT KUTTNER | March 28, 2008 | web only The American Prospect.
Barack Obama's speech on the financial crisis was a remarkable breakthrough.
First, he connected all the dots -- between the complete dismantling of financial regulation, the declining economic opportunity and security for ordinary people, the current financial meltdown, and the political influence of Wall Street as the driver of these changes. Astounding! I wish I had written the speech. It is this kind of leadership and truth-telling that is the predicate for the shift in public opinion required to produce legislative change. A radical, appropriately nuanced, and deeply public-minded description of what has occurred, the speech was Roosevelt quality: the president as teacher-in-chief. Those who felt that Obama was capable of real growth that will transcend the campaign's early and somewhat feeble domestic policy proposals should feel vindicated.
The speech also showed real understanding and subtlety in grasping how financial "innovation" had outrun regulation, as well as a historical sense of the abuses of the 1920s repeating themselves. Obama is one of the few mainstream leaders -- Barney Frank is another -- calling for capital requirements to be extended to every category of financial institution that creates credit. This is exactly what's needed to prevent the next meltdown, but if it were put to a vote now, it would be rejected by legislators from both parties because they are still in thrall to market fundamentalism and Wall Street. That's where presidential leadership comes in.
So the speech was courageous, in that it goes well beyond the current Democratic party consensus, and one can only wonder about the reaction of some of Obama's own financial backers. He also took on a couple of other sacred cows, such as electricity and telecom deregulation, proven failures to everyone but industry defenders and their allies in the economics profession.
We should not focus too much attention on the oblique dig at the Clinton presidency, which indeed fomented the pattern of excessive deregulation. Let's remember, Bill was president, she wasn't. This is a totally fair drawing of a distinction on the issues, and not a cheap shot or ad hominem attack.
The Clinton camp's rejoinder -- that Hillary is proposing to do more for the victims of the housing bust -- is totally unpersuasive. All along, she has treated the housing mess as its own self-contained scandal, rather than connecting it to the larger set of financial bubbles of which it is a part. The Frank-Dodd bill, which Obama is co-sponsoring, is a realistic remedy for purely the housing part of the crisis. If you read Clinton's March 24 speech on the housing crisis and how to fix it -- supposedly more robust than Obama's remedy -- she offers the same Frank-Dodd bill. She does not locate the mortgage crisis in the deeper financial one. And her idea of turning, for wise men, to Robert Rubin and Alan Greenspan -- more than anyone the people who gave us this crisis -- is appalling.
The one slightly disappointing part of the Obama speech was his call for $30 billion more in "stimulus." It's not nearly enough. He -- and we -- should stop even using the word "stimulus." To dig out of this mess, at a time when we already have large deficits, the federal government will need to fund a multi-year, public investment-led recovery program well into the hundreds of billions. It will need to be funded by restoring taxes on rich people. But this is a topic for another day.
A real puzzle here is the repeated assertion by columnist Paul Krugman, in the face of mounting evidence to the contrary, that Clinton's views on economic policy are more progressive than Obama's. Indeed, Obama's stunning speech read as if it were informed by recent Krugman columns on the meltdown. Hillary has not said anything close to what Obama (or Krugman) has suggested.
Unlike some of my friends, I have not fallen in love with Obama. I have been at this too long, and you risk getting your heart broken. I actually shared Krugman's critique of Obama's health insurance individual mandate and his proposal to tax the upper middle class to pay for a much exaggerated Social Security shortfall that is more like a rounding error. I simply conclude, based on what I've seen, that Obama is capable of real learning and real transformation, both of himself and of public opinion. Nothing I've seen suggests that's true of Hillary Clinton.
But Krugman, ordinarily an ornament of fair-minded progressive economics commentary, writes almost as if he has become part of the Clinton campaign. His latest characterization of Obama's proposals in commenting on the New York speech -- "cautious and relatively orthodox" -- was preposterous. Even if Krugman's sympathies are with Clinton, he owes it to his readers and to his own credibility to play it straight and credit Obama with a breakthrough when credit is due. This was surely one of those times.
http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=obama_v_krugman
Wednesday, March 26, 2008
Cesar Chavez , a tribute
César Chávez: "Presente"
By Duane E. Campbell
The spirit of Cesar Chavez lives on in the struggle for union rights and justice in the fields of California. Along with Dolores Huerta, Philip Vera Cruz, and others, César created the United Farm Workers (UFW) the first successful union of farm workers in U.S. history. There had been more than ten prior attempts to build a farm workers union.
The United Cannery and Packinghouse Workers (UCAPAWA) organized in the 1930's, the National Farm Workers Union (NFW) led by Ernesto Galarza tried to organize Farm workers in the 40's and 50's. In 1959, the AFL-CIO tried to organize again with the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee (AWOC). AWOC had several weaknesses, including a top down leadership selected by AFL-CIO leaders, not by farm workers, and a strategy of working cooperatively with labor contractors. AWOC continued the prior efforts of Ernesto Galarza and the NFW in struggling against "braceros" or guest workers, contract workers imported from Mexico, from breaking strikes. A renewed "guest worker" bill is presently before Congress.
Each of the prior attempts to organize farm worker unions were destroyed by racism and corporate power. Chávez chose to build a union that incorporated the strategies of social movements and allied itself with the churches, students, and organized labor. The successful creation of the UFW changed the nature of labor organizing in the Southwest and contributed significantly to the birth of Latino politics in the U.S.
Today, under the leadership of UFW president Arturo Rodriguez, over 28,000 farm workers enjoy benefits on the job. They are incorporated into California's educational, health and civic communities. The UFW has shown the AFL-CIO that immigrants can and must be organized. In 2002 we won significant victories in the legislature and numerous elections.
César Chavez, Dolores Huerta, Philip Vera Cruz, and others deliberately created a multiracial organization, Mexican, Mexican American, Filipino, African-American, Dominican, Puerto Rican and Arab workers, among others, have been part of the UFW. This cross racial organizing was necessary in order to combat the prior divisions and exploitations of workers based upon race and language. Dividing the workers on racial and language lines always left the corporations the winners.
In the 60's Chávez became the pre-eminent civil rights leader for the Mexican and Chicano workers, helping with local union struggles throughout the nation. He worked tirelessly to make people aware of the struggles of farm workers for better pay and safer working conditions. It is a testament to Cesar Chavez's skills and courage that the UFW even survived. They were opposed by major interests in corporate agriculture including the Bruce Church and Gallo Corporations as well as the leadership of the Republican Party then led by Ronald Reagan. Workers were fired, beaten, threatened and even killed in pursuit of union benefits . Non union farm workers today continue to live on sub-poverty wages while producing the abundant crops in the richest valley, in the richest state in the richest nation in the world.
In response to corporate power, Cesar developed new strategies, such as the boycott, based upon his personal commitment to non-violence in the tradition of Ghandi and Martin Luther King Jr. César Chavez died in his sleep on April 23, 1993 near Yuma, Arizona.
Today Mexican, Mexican American and Puerto Rican union leadership is common in our major cities and in several industries. For myself and others, the UFW was a school for organizing. Hundreds of activists in labor and community organizations owe their skills to UFW training and experience. Along with improved working conditions, salaries, and benefits, training this cadre of organizers remains a major legacy of the UFW.
César taught us that all organizations have problems, that all organizations are imperfect. But, if you wait for the perfect organization, nothing gets done. Building popular organizations builds people's power, and democracy.
In creating the UFW Chavez organized thousands into a union and inspired millions. Children in school study his life. Many curriculum packages stress his emphasis on service to others. The service side of Cesar’s work was certainly inspiring.
The organizing side changed the Southwest and organized labor. In a 1988 campaign and fast Cesar focused attention on the many dangerous problems of pesticides used in the fields. Artists have captured his image in hundreds of ways. Schools, parks, and highways have been named for him. Establishing Cesar Chavez holiday in California and other states has increased knowledge of his contributions.
The movement led by Cesar created a union and reduced the oppression of farm workers. Many people, descendents of earlier generations of farm workers, learned to take a stand for justice. We learned to not accept poor jobs, poor pay, unsafe working conditions as natural or inevitable. Rather, these are social creations which can be changed through organizing for economic and political power. Dolores Huerta continues her important education and organizing work throughout the nation.
Now, thousands of new immigrants harvest the crops and only a small percent are in unions. The new generations of immigrants and migrant labor hardly know Chavez’ name nor his contributions. Yet, in other regions immigrants are being organized into unions such as Justice for Janitors, by activists who learned their organizing skills working with the UFW. And, Latino political leaders often made their first commitments on a UFW picket line.
Again, that generation is passing. A new generation of political activists, mostly within the Democratic Party, have emerged since the Chavez generations. (Hispanic Republicans seldom see Chavez as a hero figure). In the 2006 massive immigrant rights movements, several new organizing practices emerged. A new, significant Latino union and political base has been created.
Chavez' legacy to popular struggles, to Chicano/Mexicano self determination and to unions for the immigrant workers is beyond measure. He is present in all of our work. I plan to march on March March 29,2008 in memory of Cesar Chavez' contributions building a more democratic society for working people. You can find our more about this remarkable leader at www.ufw.org
And, www.cesarchavezfoundation.org
Duane Campbell is a Professor of Bilingual/Multicultural Education at Calif. State University-Sacramento and the author of Choosing Democracy; a practical guide to multicultural education. (Merrill/Pren Hall.2004)
Tuesday, March 25, 2008
Progressives for Obama
Progressives For Obama
Barack Is Our
Best Option
–And You’re
Needed Now!
March 24, 2008
by Tom Hayden, Bill Fletcher, Jr.,
Barbara Ehrenreich, and Danny Glover
All American progressives should unite for Barack Obama. We descend from the proud tradition of independent social movements that have made America a more just and democratic country. We believe that the movement today supporting Barack Obama continues this great tradition of grass-roots participation drawing millions of people out of apathy and into participation in the decisions that affect all our lives. We believe that Barack Obama’s very biography reflects the positive potential of the globalization process that also contains such grave threats to our democracy when shaped only by the narrow interests of private corporations in an unregulated global marketplace. We should instead be globalizing the values of equality, a living wage and environmental sustainability in the new world order, not hoping our deepest concerns will be protected by trickle down economics or charitable billionaires. By its very existence, the Obama campaign will stimulate a vision of globalization from below.
As progressives we believe this sudden and unexpected new movement is just what America needs. The future has arrived. The alternative would mean a return to the dismal status quo party politics that have failed so far to deliver peace, health care, full employment and effective answers to crises like global warming.
During past progressive peaks in our political history—the late Thirties, the early Sixties—social movements have provided the relentless pressure and innovative ideas that allowed centrist leaders to embrace visionary solutions. We find ourselves in just such a situation today.
We intend to join and engage with our brothers and sisters in the vast rainbow of social movements to come together in support of Obama’s unprecedented campaign and candidacy. Even though it is candidate-centered, there is no doubt that the campaign is a social movement, one greater than the candidate himself ever imagined.
Progressives can make a difference in close primary races like Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Oregon, Puerto Rico, and in the November general election. We can contribute our dollars. We have the proven online capacity to reach millions of swing voters in the primary and general election. We can and will defend Obama against negative attacks from any quarter. We will seek Green support against the claim of some that there are no real differences between Obama and McCain. We will criticize any efforts by Democratic super-delegates to suppress the winner of the popular and delegate votes, or to legitimize the flawed elections in Michigan and Florida. We will make our agenda known at the Democratic national convention and fight for a platform emphasizing progressive priorities as the path to victory.
Obama’s March 17 speech on racism was as great a speech as ever given by a presidential candidate, revealing a philosophical depth, personal authenticity, and political intelligence that should convince any but the hardest of ideologues that he carries unmatched leadership potentials for overcoming the divide-and-conquer tactics which have sundered Americans since the first slaves arrived here in chains.
Only words? What words they were.
However, the fact that Barack Obama openly defines himself as a centrist invites the formation of this progressive force within his coalition. Anything less could allow his eventual drift towards the right as the general election approaches. It was the industrial strikes and radical organizers in the 1930s who pushed Roosevelt to support the New Deal. It was the civil rights and student movements that brought about voting rights legislation under Lyndon Johnson and propelled Eugene McCarthy and Bobby Kennedy’s anti-war campaigns. It was the original Earth Day that led Richard Nixon to sign environmental laws. And it will be the Obama movement that makes it necessary and possible to end the war in Iraq, renew our economy with a populist emphasis, and confront the challenge of global warming.
We should not only keep the pressure on, but we also should connect the issues that Barack Obama has made central to his campaign into an overarching progressive vision.
- The Iraq War must end as rapidly as possible, not in five years. All our troops must be withdrawn. Diplomacy and trade must replace further military occupation or military escalation into Iran and Pakistan. We should not stop urging Barack Obama to avoid leaving American advisers behind in Iraq in a counterinsurgency quagmire like Afghanistan today or Central America in the 1970s and 1980s. Nor should he simply transfer American combat troops from the quagmire in Iraq to the quagmire in Afghanistan.
- Iraq cannot be separated from our economic crisis. Iraq is costing trillions of dollars that should be invested in jobs, universal health care, education, housing and public works here at home. Our own Gulf Coast requires the attention and funds now spent on Gulf oil.
- Iraq cannot be separated from our energy crisis. We are spending an unheard-of $100/barrel for oil. We are officially committed to wars over oil supplies far into the future. We instead need a war against global warming and for energy independence from Middle Eastern police states and multinational corporations.
Progressives should support Obama’s 16-month combat troop withdrawal plan in comparison to Clinton’s open-ended one, and demand that both candidates avoid a slide into four more years of low-visibility counterinsurgency.
The Democratic candidates should listen more to the blunt advice of the voters instead of the timid talk of their national security advisers. Two-thirds of American voters, and a much higher percentage of Democrats, oppose this war and favor withdrawal in less than two years, nearly half of them in less than one year. The same percentage believe the war has had a negative effect on life in the United States, while only 15 percent believe the war has been positive. Without this solid peace sentiment, neither Obama nor Clinton would be taking the stands they do today.
Further, the battered and abused people of Iraq favor an American withdrawal by a 70 percent margin.
The American government’s arrogant defiance of these strong popular majorities in both America and Iraq should be ended this November by a powerful peace mandate.
The profound transition from the policies of the past will not be easy, and fortunately the Obama campaign is lifted by the fresh wind of change. We seek not only to change the faces in high places, however, but to save our country from slow death by greed, status quo politics, and loss of vision. The status quo cannot stand much longer, neither that of politics-as-usual nor that of our security, energy and economic policies. We are stealing from the next generation’s future, and living on borrowed time.
The Bush Administration has replaced the Cold War with the War on Terrorism led by the same military-industrial complex that President Eisenhower warned against. The reality and public fear of terrorism today is no less real than fear of communism and nuclear annihilation a generation ago. But we simply cannot continue multiple military interventions in many Muslim countries without increasing the vast number of violent jihadists against us, bleeding our military and our economy, becoming more dependent on Middle East oil, creating unsavory alliances with police states, shrinking our own civil liberties and putting ourselves at permanent risk of another 9/11 attack.
We need a brave turn towards peace and conflict resolution in the Middle East and the Muslim world. Getting out of Iraq, sponsoring a two-state solution between Israel and the Palestinians, ending alliances with police states in the Arab world, unilaterally initiating real energy independence and moving the world away from the global warming crises are the steps that must be taken.
Nor can we impose NAFTA-style trade agreements on so many nations that seek only to control their own national resources and economic destinies. We cannot globalize corporate and financial power over democratic values and institutions. Since the Clinton Administration pushed through NAFTA against the Democratic majority in Congress, one Latin American nation after another has elected progressive governments that reject US trade deals and hegemony. We are isolated in Latin America by our Cold War and drug war crusades, by the $500 million counter-insurgency in Columbia, support for the 2002 coup attempt in Venezuela, and the ineffectual blockade of Cuba. We need to return to the Good Neighbor policies of Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1930s, which rejected Yankee military intervention and accepted Mexico’s right to nationalize its oil in the face of industry opposition. The pursuit of NAFTA-style trade policies inflames our immigration crisis as well, by uprooting countless campesinos who inevitably seek low-wage jobs north of the border in order to survive. We need balanced and democratically-approved trade agreements that focus on the needs of workers, consumers and the environment. The Banana Republic is a retail chain, not an American colony protected by the Monroe Doctrine.
We are pleased that Hillary Clinton has been responsive to the tide of voter opinion this year, and we applaud the possibility of at last electing an American woman president. But progressives should be disturbed at her duplicitous positions on Iraq and NAFTA. She still denies that her 2002 vote for legislation which was called the war authorization bill was a vote for war authorization. She now promises to “end the war” but will not set a timeline for combat troop withdrawal, and remains committed to leaving tens of thousands of counter-terrorism troops and trainers in Iraq amidst a sectarian conflict. While Obama needs to clarify his own position on counterinsurgency, Clinton’s “end the war” rhetoric conceals an open commitment to keep American troops in Iraq until all our ill-defined enemies are defeated—a treadmill which guarantees only the spawning of more enemies. On NAFTA, she claims to have opposed the trade deal behind closed doors when she was First Lady. But the public record, and documents recently disclosed in response to litigation, proves that she was a cheerleader for NAFTA against the strong opposition of rank-and-file Democrats. The Clintons ushered in the Wall Street Democrats whose deregulation ethos has widened inequality while leaving millions of Americans without their rightful protections against market shocks.
Clinton’s most bizarre claim is that Obama is unqualified to be commander-in-chief. Clinton herself never served in the military, and has no experience in the armed services apart from the Senate armed services committee. Her husband had no military experience before becoming president. In fact he was a draft opponent during Vietnam, a stance we respected. She was the first lady, and he the governor, of one of our smallest states. They brought no more experience, and arguably less, to the White House than Obama would in 2009.
We take very seriously the argument that Americans should elect a first woman president, and we abhor the surfacing of sexism in this supposedly post-feminist era. But none of us would vote for Condoleeza Rice as either the first woman or first African-American president. We regret that the choice divides so many progressive friends and allies, but believe that a Clinton presidency would be a Clinton presidency all over again, not a triumph of feminism but a restoration of the aging, power-driven Wall Street Democratic Hawks at a moment when so much more fresh imagination is possible and needed. A Clinton victory could only be achieved by the dashing of hope among millions of young people on whom a better future depends. The style of the Clintons’ attacks on Obama, which are likely to escalate as her chances of winning decline, already risks losing too many Democratic and independent voters in November. We believe that the Hillary Clinton of 1968 would be an Obama volunteer today, just as she once marched in the snows of New Hampshire for Eugene McCarthy against the Democratic establishment.
We did not foresee the exciting social movement that is the Obama campaign. Many of us supported other candidates, or waited skeptically as weeks and months passed. But the closeness of the race makes it imperative that everyone on the sidelines, everyone in doubt, everyone vacillating, everyone fearing betrayals and the blasting of hope, everyone quarreling over political correctness, must join this fight to the finish. Not since Robert Kennedy’s 1968 campaign has there been a passion to imagine the world anew like the passion and unprecedented numbers of people mobilized in this campaign.
[TOM HAYDEN is author of Ending the War in Iraq, a five-time Democratic convention delegate, former state senator, and board member of the Progressive Democrats of America. BILL FLETCHER, JR., who originated the call for founding “Progressives for Obama,” is the executive editor of Black Commentator, and founder of the Center for Labor Renewal; BARBARA EHRENREICH is the author of Dancing in the Streets[2007] and other popular works and, with Hayden, a member of The Nation’s editorial board. DANNY GLOVER is the respected actor, activist, and chairman of the board of TransAfrica Forum. ]
Barack Is Our
Best Option
–And You’re
Needed Now!
March 24, 2008
by Tom Hayden, Bill Fletcher, Jr.,
Barbara Ehrenreich, and Danny Glover
All American progressives should unite for Barack Obama. We descend from the proud tradition of independent social movements that have made America a more just and democratic country. We believe that the movement today supporting Barack Obama continues this great tradition of grass-roots participation drawing millions of people out of apathy and into participation in the decisions that affect all our lives. We believe that Barack Obama’s very biography reflects the positive potential of the globalization process that also contains such grave threats to our democracy when shaped only by the narrow interests of private corporations in an unregulated global marketplace. We should instead be globalizing the values of equality, a living wage and environmental sustainability in the new world order, not hoping our deepest concerns will be protected by trickle down economics or charitable billionaires. By its very existence, the Obama campaign will stimulate a vision of globalization from below.
As progressives we believe this sudden and unexpected new movement is just what America needs. The future has arrived. The alternative would mean a return to the dismal status quo party politics that have failed so far to deliver peace, health care, full employment and effective answers to crises like global warming.
During past progressive peaks in our political history—the late Thirties, the early Sixties—social movements have provided the relentless pressure and innovative ideas that allowed centrist leaders to embrace visionary solutions. We find ourselves in just such a situation today.
We intend to join and engage with our brothers and sisters in the vast rainbow of social movements to come together in support of Obama’s unprecedented campaign and candidacy. Even though it is candidate-centered, there is no doubt that the campaign is a social movement, one greater than the candidate himself ever imagined.
Progressives can make a difference in close primary races like Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Oregon, Puerto Rico, and in the November general election. We can contribute our dollars. We have the proven online capacity to reach millions of swing voters in the primary and general election. We can and will defend Obama against negative attacks from any quarter. We will seek Green support against the claim of some that there are no real differences between Obama and McCain. We will criticize any efforts by Democratic super-delegates to suppress the winner of the popular and delegate votes, or to legitimize the flawed elections in Michigan and Florida. We will make our agenda known at the Democratic national convention and fight for a platform emphasizing progressive priorities as the path to victory.
Obama’s March 17 speech on racism was as great a speech as ever given by a presidential candidate, revealing a philosophical depth, personal authenticity, and political intelligence that should convince any but the hardest of ideologues that he carries unmatched leadership potentials for overcoming the divide-and-conquer tactics which have sundered Americans since the first slaves arrived here in chains.
Only words? What words they were.
However, the fact that Barack Obama openly defines himself as a centrist invites the formation of this progressive force within his coalition. Anything less could allow his eventual drift towards the right as the general election approaches. It was the industrial strikes and radical organizers in the 1930s who pushed Roosevelt to support the New Deal. It was the civil rights and student movements that brought about voting rights legislation under Lyndon Johnson and propelled Eugene McCarthy and Bobby Kennedy’s anti-war campaigns. It was the original Earth Day that led Richard Nixon to sign environmental laws. And it will be the Obama movement that makes it necessary and possible to end the war in Iraq, renew our economy with a populist emphasis, and confront the challenge of global warming.
We should not only keep the pressure on, but we also should connect the issues that Barack Obama has made central to his campaign into an overarching progressive vision.
- The Iraq War must end as rapidly as possible, not in five years. All our troops must be withdrawn. Diplomacy and trade must replace further military occupation or military escalation into Iran and Pakistan. We should not stop urging Barack Obama to avoid leaving American advisers behind in Iraq in a counterinsurgency quagmire like Afghanistan today or Central America in the 1970s and 1980s. Nor should he simply transfer American combat troops from the quagmire in Iraq to the quagmire in Afghanistan.
- Iraq cannot be separated from our economic crisis. Iraq is costing trillions of dollars that should be invested in jobs, universal health care, education, housing and public works here at home. Our own Gulf Coast requires the attention and funds now spent on Gulf oil.
- Iraq cannot be separated from our energy crisis. We are spending an unheard-of $100/barrel for oil. We are officially committed to wars over oil supplies far into the future. We instead need a war against global warming and for energy independence from Middle Eastern police states and multinational corporations.
Progressives should support Obama’s 16-month combat troop withdrawal plan in comparison to Clinton’s open-ended one, and demand that both candidates avoid a slide into four more years of low-visibility counterinsurgency.
The Democratic candidates should listen more to the blunt advice of the voters instead of the timid talk of their national security advisers. Two-thirds of American voters, and a much higher percentage of Democrats, oppose this war and favor withdrawal in less than two years, nearly half of them in less than one year. The same percentage believe the war has had a negative effect on life in the United States, while only 15 percent believe the war has been positive. Without this solid peace sentiment, neither Obama nor Clinton would be taking the stands they do today.
Further, the battered and abused people of Iraq favor an American withdrawal by a 70 percent margin.
The American government’s arrogant defiance of these strong popular majorities in both America and Iraq should be ended this November by a powerful peace mandate.
The profound transition from the policies of the past will not be easy, and fortunately the Obama campaign is lifted by the fresh wind of change. We seek not only to change the faces in high places, however, but to save our country from slow death by greed, status quo politics, and loss of vision. The status quo cannot stand much longer, neither that of politics-as-usual nor that of our security, energy and economic policies. We are stealing from the next generation’s future, and living on borrowed time.
The Bush Administration has replaced the Cold War with the War on Terrorism led by the same military-industrial complex that President Eisenhower warned against. The reality and public fear of terrorism today is no less real than fear of communism and nuclear annihilation a generation ago. But we simply cannot continue multiple military interventions in many Muslim countries without increasing the vast number of violent jihadists against us, bleeding our military and our economy, becoming more dependent on Middle East oil, creating unsavory alliances with police states, shrinking our own civil liberties and putting ourselves at permanent risk of another 9/11 attack.
We need a brave turn towards peace and conflict resolution in the Middle East and the Muslim world. Getting out of Iraq, sponsoring a two-state solution between Israel and the Palestinians, ending alliances with police states in the Arab world, unilaterally initiating real energy independence and moving the world away from the global warming crises are the steps that must be taken.
Nor can we impose NAFTA-style trade agreements on so many nations that seek only to control their own national resources and economic destinies. We cannot globalize corporate and financial power over democratic values and institutions. Since the Clinton Administration pushed through NAFTA against the Democratic majority in Congress, one Latin American nation after another has elected progressive governments that reject US trade deals and hegemony. We are isolated in Latin America by our Cold War and drug war crusades, by the $500 million counter-insurgency in Columbia, support for the 2002 coup attempt in Venezuela, and the ineffectual blockade of Cuba. We need to return to the Good Neighbor policies of Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1930s, which rejected Yankee military intervention and accepted Mexico’s right to nationalize its oil in the face of industry opposition. The pursuit of NAFTA-style trade policies inflames our immigration crisis as well, by uprooting countless campesinos who inevitably seek low-wage jobs north of the border in order to survive. We need balanced and democratically-approved trade agreements that focus on the needs of workers, consumers and the environment. The Banana Republic is a retail chain, not an American colony protected by the Monroe Doctrine.
We are pleased that Hillary Clinton has been responsive to the tide of voter opinion this year, and we applaud the possibility of at last electing an American woman president. But progressives should be disturbed at her duplicitous positions on Iraq and NAFTA. She still denies that her 2002 vote for legislation which was called the war authorization bill was a vote for war authorization. She now promises to “end the war” but will not set a timeline for combat troop withdrawal, and remains committed to leaving tens of thousands of counter-terrorism troops and trainers in Iraq amidst a sectarian conflict. While Obama needs to clarify his own position on counterinsurgency, Clinton’s “end the war” rhetoric conceals an open commitment to keep American troops in Iraq until all our ill-defined enemies are defeated—a treadmill which guarantees only the spawning of more enemies. On NAFTA, she claims to have opposed the trade deal behind closed doors when she was First Lady. But the public record, and documents recently disclosed in response to litigation, proves that she was a cheerleader for NAFTA against the strong opposition of rank-and-file Democrats. The Clintons ushered in the Wall Street Democrats whose deregulation ethos has widened inequality while leaving millions of Americans without their rightful protections against market shocks.
Clinton’s most bizarre claim is that Obama is unqualified to be commander-in-chief. Clinton herself never served in the military, and has no experience in the armed services apart from the Senate armed services committee. Her husband had no military experience before becoming president. In fact he was a draft opponent during Vietnam, a stance we respected. She was the first lady, and he the governor, of one of our smallest states. They brought no more experience, and arguably less, to the White House than Obama would in 2009.
We take very seriously the argument that Americans should elect a first woman president, and we abhor the surfacing of sexism in this supposedly post-feminist era. But none of us would vote for Condoleeza Rice as either the first woman or first African-American president. We regret that the choice divides so many progressive friends and allies, but believe that a Clinton presidency would be a Clinton presidency all over again, not a triumph of feminism but a restoration of the aging, power-driven Wall Street Democratic Hawks at a moment when so much more fresh imagination is possible and needed. A Clinton victory could only be achieved by the dashing of hope among millions of young people on whom a better future depends. The style of the Clintons’ attacks on Obama, which are likely to escalate as her chances of winning decline, already risks losing too many Democratic and independent voters in November. We believe that the Hillary Clinton of 1968 would be an Obama volunteer today, just as she once marched in the snows of New Hampshire for Eugene McCarthy against the Democratic establishment.
We did not foresee the exciting social movement that is the Obama campaign. Many of us supported other candidates, or waited skeptically as weeks and months passed. But the closeness of the race makes it imperative that everyone on the sidelines, everyone in doubt, everyone vacillating, everyone fearing betrayals and the blasting of hope, everyone quarreling over political correctness, must join this fight to the finish. Not since Robert Kennedy’s 1968 campaign has there been a passion to imagine the world anew like the passion and unprecedented numbers of people mobilized in this campaign.
[TOM HAYDEN is author of Ending the War in Iraq, a five-time Democratic convention delegate, former state senator, and board member of the Progressive Democrats of America. BILL FLETCHER, JR., who originated the call for founding “Progressives for Obama,” is the executive editor of Black Commentator, and founder of the Center for Labor Renewal; BARBARA EHRENREICH is the author of Dancing in the Streets[2007] and other popular works and, with Hayden, a member of The Nation’s editorial board. DANNY GLOVER is the respected actor, activist, and chairman of the board of TransAfrica Forum. ]
Monday, March 24, 2008
The Real Rev. Wright: The Footage Fox and the Other Networks Won't Show [VIDEO]
The Real Rev. Wright: The Footage Fox and the Other Networks Won't Show [VIDEO]
http://www.alternet.org/blogs/election08/80481/
Martin Luther King
Listen to what King said about the Vietnam War at his own Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta on Feb. 4, 1968: "God didn't call America to engage in a senseless, unjust war. . . . And we are criminals in that war. We've committed more war crimes almost than any nation in the world, and I'm going to continue to say it. And we won't stop it because of our pride and our arrogance as a nation. But God has a way of even putting nations in their place." King then predicted this response from the Almighty: "And if you don't stop your reckless course, I'll rise up and break the backbone of your power."
http://www.alternet.org/blogs/election08/80481/
Martin Luther King
Listen to what King said about the Vietnam War at his own Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta on Feb. 4, 1968: "God didn't call America to engage in a senseless, unjust war. . . . And we are criminals in that war. We've committed more war crimes almost than any nation in the world, and I'm going to continue to say it. And we won't stop it because of our pride and our arrogance as a nation. But God has a way of even putting nations in their place." King then predicted this response from the Almighty: "And if you don't stop your reckless course, I'll rise up and break the backbone of your power."
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