Educational Equity, Politics & Policy in Texas

Feb. 21, 2005

FORT WORTH STAR-TELEGRAM
Failing third-graders promoted
Many who failed TAKS were promoted

By Cynthia L. Garza
Star-Telegram Staff Writer


More than half the third-graders in Texas who failed the TAKS reading test three times in 2003 were not held back as intended by state law but instead were promoted to the fourth grade.

The 5,077 students who failed the TAKS reading test three times in 2003 and were promoted were allowed to move up because a committee of the child's parents, teacher and principal agreed that the child was ready for fourth grade or because the child took an alternative test most often given to special-education students, according to the Texas Education Agency.

"It's not a loophole. It's not an out. It's an opportunity to provide those students who are just on the edge of passing to be promoted," TEA spokeswoman DeEtta Culbertson said.

The majority of third-graders in Texas, nearly 97 percent, passed the 2004 Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills reading exam.

Students statewide begin taking TAKS tests this week.

So far, only third-graders have had to pass a portion of the TAKS to be promoted. But this year, fifth-graders must pass the reading and math tests to advance to sixth grade. In 2007-08, eighth-graders will also have to pass reading and math to move on to high school.

All three checkpoints -- third, fifth and eighth grade -- allow for the grade-placement committees to promote students who fail the test.

But high school juniors -- with no exceptions -- must pass the TAKS exit exam to receive their diplomas.

Statewide figures for 2004 were not available, but in the Fort Worth school district, about 35 percent of the 225 third-graders who failed the TAKS reading test three times were promoted. In 2003, 55 percent of the 186 students who failed moved on, according to district data.

The Arlington school district promoted 16 percent of its 153 third-graders who failed in 2004, compared with 38 percent of the 97 students who failed in 2003.

Other area districts -- including Grapevine-Colleyville, Hurst-Euless-Bedford and Mansfield -- promoted from one-fourth to more than half the third-graders who failed.

Case by case

Educators don't necessarily see promoting students who fail the test as circumventing the law. Many believe that the decision to pass or fail a student should be made by those who work with the child.

Fort Worth district Deputy Superintendent Pat Linares said that moving the failing third-graders up a grade is not social promotion. In social promotions, students with failing marks are sent to the next grade so they can remain with children their own age.

"The fact of the matter is, I think these are very well-defined promotions because it does require a collaborative effort," among parents, teachers and principals who "make that decision based on data and information brought to the table," Linares said.

The committee takes into account the student's scores on other benchmark exams and progress in class work, Linares said. By looking at all factors, the committee can pinpoint a child's weaknesses and needs.

"I think anytime you are able to focus in on what is necessary for a child to succeed, that's a good thing," Linares said.

Many educators believe that failing children solely because they failed one high-stakes exam is too punitive.

"Obviously, these decisions need to be made on a case-by-case basis," said Donna New Haschke, president of the 65,000-member Texas State Teachers Association. "No child learns the same as another child. There are all kinds of variables that sometimes a school can't control."

Because of that, the committee considers any surrounding circumstances, Culbertson said. Sometimes the reasons for poor scores extend beyond the classroom, ranging from the child being a recent immigrant to the death of a parent or a sibling.

Sometimes, it may be just test anxiety.

Repercussions for failing -- or even the thought of failing the exam and being retained -- can affect those who educate students as well.

Recently, Westpark Elementary School Principal Lynn Allen was placed on administrative leave while school officials investigated a teacher's claim that Allen asked the teacher to have a parent withdraw a student during the TAKS.

School administrators were reportedly concerned that the fifth-grader -- who has severe test anxiety -- would fail the reading exam.

Allen returned to work Friday but is still being investigated by the state.

A third option

Many educators say standardized testing isn't just about passing and failing students, but pursuing a third option.

Third-graders who fail -- whether they are retained or promoted -- receive the extra attention school officials say is necessary to get them up to par.

The students will get extra tutoring before, during and after school and on weekends. Or perhaps the child will be taught in a smaller group setting.

In economic terms, paying for extra tutoring and advancing the student make more sense than paying for the child's education in the same grade twice, said Jack Jennings, president of the Center on Education Policy in Washington, D.C. The center is a national, independent advocate for public schools and for making them more effective.

Failing can also bruise a child's self-image.

The child may be "known as the dummy of the class, and this has an effect on how kids view them," Jennings said. That damaged self-image can become internalized and lead to further failure.

Research clearly shows that students who are retained, especially minority students, are more likely to drop out of school.

But students who are socially promoted graduate without the knowledge and skills a high school student should have, and, in turn, are ill-prepared for college and the work force.

The policy that would seem to make the most sense is to move the students on but give them the extra help they need, Jennings said.

As the fifth-grade promotion requirement takes effect this year, educators are not sure whether what has happened in the third grade will be replicated with the older students.

IN THE KNOW

A closer look

• Third-graders must pass the TAKS reading test to be promoted to fourth grade.

• Fifth-graders must pass the TAKS reading and math exams this year to be promoted to the sixth grade.

• In 2007-08, eighth-graders will have to pass the TAKS reading and math exams to move on to high school.

• Juniors must pass the TAKS exit exam -- which tests English/language arts, math, science and social studies -- to graduate.
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Cynthia L. Garza, (817) 390-7675 cgarza@star-telegram.com

by Felipe de Ortego y Gasca

Professor Emeritus of Engllish, Texas State University System–Sul Ross:Visiting Scholar and Lecturer in English, Texas A&M University–Kingsville

Almost 17 years ago, enroute to the Arizona Capitol during the October 22, 1988 march against the English Only Proposition, I was struck by the fallacies and inconsistencies persistent in the arguments of those pressing for its adoption. The English Only law was passed but later declared unconstitutional on First Amendment grounds. And here we are in the year 2005 still beset by those same arguments for English Only laws. What are the proponents of English Only afraid of? Recently, a Cuban American in Florida opined that "Spanish may be the native language of many Americans, but it is a language that includes only some, and alienates most." This is a puzzling utterance because there are more speakers of Spanish in the Americas than there are speakers of English.

As a professor of English (now retired), I am not surprised by how little Americans really know about their language and its linguistic roots. Unfortunately, many Americans believe that the linguistic foundation of the United States is English. In the strictest sense of the word it’s not English that we speak in the United States but "American," as H. L. Mencken correctly described it more than 75 years ago.

The American language is a melange of tongues brought to this country by its non-native citizens. When the country was first organized after the War of Independence, there existed a brew of languages spoken by the new Americans, not counting the myriad languages of the indigenous Native Americans. German was so popular at the time that it vied for contention as the language of choice. Domenico Maceri writes: "Indeed, German was so widely used in the eighteenth century that Benjamin Franklin com-plained about German-English bilingual street signs in Philadelphia" (hispanaicvista.com 2/16/05).

That notwithstanding, to institutionalize "English" as the official language of the country (or of Arizona) is to fossilize its growth, to fence it inside boundaries that would stifle its linguistic evolution. But fortunately, as much as one might seek that institutionalization, in the end that effort will prove futile. For languages are like consenting adults: they will "socialize"and produce linguistic issue with lexical dna drawn from borrowings, intrasentential alternations, cross coinages and blends of words that enrich vocabulary and meaning and life in all pluralistic societies. The American language is still a language under construction, as are all languages.

Be that as it may, only the most flawed kind of logic suggests that language is the glue of unity among a people. If that were so, then there should be no strife in Ireland or the Middle East. Nor in the former Soviet Union. Nor where internecine conflict rages between people who speak the same language. It is more than language that creates national character or national unity. More than anything it is "respect for individual differences" that strengthens national purpose. And speaking English does not assure us of equity in the American judicial or economic system. African Americans speak English but that has not assured them of equity in the American judicial and economic system. When the rights of individuals are subordinated to conformity, that way trouble lies. Conformity ne’er built democracy.

But I’m troubled by the minions of the English Only Movement who insist that rational debate on the merits of the English Only Movement are possible independent of the attitudes which brought it into being. That argument is much like one used by a defense attorney pleading leniency for his juvenile client (who murdered his parents) on grounds that being an orphan his client deserved consideration of the court on that score. Stanley Diamond, one of the early proponents of English Only bruited about the "real issues" of the English Only Movement, which is like saying that one can (or could) talk about the "real issues" of German economic reconstruction during the 1930's independent of the anti-Semitism that gave rise to the attitudes underlying the tenets of that reconstruction. Put another way, it’s like insisting on an assessment of Hitler as a good leader, independent of the holocaust. Try convincing American and international Jewry of that.

Indeed John Tanton, one of Diamond’s staunchest supporters issued a memo supporting English Only that "tainted" the issue, just as Hitler’s anti-Semitism tainted the issues in Nazi Germany. That is why John Tanton and Stanley Diamond were the crux of the issue in the English Only Movement of the 80's.

The English Only Movement today cannot beg the question. Public scrutiny will reveal it for what it is--another Aryan manifestation in sheep’s clothing. Those of us who oppose the English Only Movement do not have to conjure up a series of perceived horrors as attorney Jim Henderson would have us believe. When he was Arizona Attorney General Bob Corbin was right in pointing out that the trouble with the English Only Proposition was its mean-spirited design, as Senator DeConcini correctly insisted, and racist in intent as many of us had perceived from the beginning.

Salomon Baldenegro correctly points out that the current Arizona bill (HCR 2030) being pushed by State Representative Russell Pearce is steeped in hate (letters@tucsncitizen.com ). He points out that "Russell Pearce’s disdain for Spanish speakers goes back to his teenage years " when he made fun of a teen-age co-worker who couldn’t speak English (Arizona Republic, 2/11/05)

One wonders if perhaps a comment by the Supreme Court Justices after ruling on the infamous Plessy vs. Ferguson case in 1896 might not have been: "This isn’t what it looks like. All we’re saying is that it’s alright to separate the races, provided we do it equitably." Where was the "common sense" then that Chuck Coughlin assured us would prevail in the future" As we all know, in the heat of the night common sense often loses its ground of being.

Both Henderson and Coughlin are adept at ad-hominem arguments: when your own position is shaky, attack the character of the opponent. That tack is certainly not "debating the issues" of the English-only Proposition as its proponents say they devoutly wish.

Which brings us to an important consideration. There are really two issues embedded in the brouhaha over State Representative Russell Pearce’s Proposition to make English the official language of Arizona: (1) an historical issue and (2) an ideological issue. Both have emotional roots and both are oftentimes severely misunderstood if not understood at all.

The ideological roots of Pearce’s proposition spring from a lexocentrism (linguistic chauvinism) that has historically pitted English against Spanish, dating back to the days of the Spanish Armada and the attempted invasion of England. The Black Legend is one outcome of that ideological conflict. Manifest Destiny, another--fomenting the U.S. war against Mexico in 1846 and against Spain in 1898. The 19th century is manifest with these attitudes. In 1847, one George Wilkins Kendall explained "(The Mexicans) pertinaciously cling to the customs of their forefathers . . . . Give them but tortillas, frijoles, and chile colorado to supply their animal wants for the day, and seven-tenths of the Mexicans are satisfied; and so they will continue to be until the race becomes extinct or amalgamated with Anglo-Saxon stock" (Baldenegro).

Closer to our time, however, American ideology has dressed itself with the garments of Anglo values that took root early in America’s Atlantic seaboard. The primacy of the English language in the United States is of relatively recent origin. The settlements of early-day America were a polyglot assortment of people, all eventually finding common ground in the English language, not because it was the language of unification but because it was the lingua franca between them, the koine of common parlance. There is nothing intrinsically superior about English that it should be our common language.

Consensus is what generated the primacy of the English language in the United States, not coercion. But, as I have already mentioned, the U.S. "English" language has been transformed into an American language whose vitality lies in the rich linguistic diversity of its people. All Americans, including Hispanics of the United States, understand the value and necessity of learning the "language of the country" in order to improve their lot and to carry out their civic functions.

Living in the United States, it’s important to learn English. I’ll vouch for that. I was a speaker of Spanish only until I was 6 years old. Later as a young adult, when I lived and worked in France, I learned French because it was necessary to learn the language in order to participate in the activities of the country. Later I became a highschool teacher of French before starting my university career as a professor of English.

The ideological roots of the English Only Movement create difficulty in determining what exactly its proponents expect it to do or want it to do--apart from what appears to be some inevitable outcomes of its passage. The Anglocentric roots of U.S. English and of its worthy English First ally raise once more the ideological stranglehold that English language and culture has had on its speakers in the United States. Never mind that the country’s population is more than 85 percent non-English. Never mind that Spanish is not a foreign language in the Hispanic Southwest, spoken long before the arrival of English-speaking marauders and intruders frenzied with Manifest Destiny.

This phenomenon illustrates well how a language captures people and develops a mentality–a mind-set–engendered from a linguistic template. This is not a pejoration of the English language or a diminution of its significance in American life and culture. On the contrary--the phenomenon attests to the strength of language to mold character..

But in the United States that strength draws principally from the linguistic mix the language is subjected to in the Americanization process its citizens undergo. That mix is an annealing process, tempering the country’s language to fit the needs of its citizens in place and time as the 18th century philosopher Taine argued.

In the 18th century Samuel Johnson sought to codify the English language, that is, keep it from "deteriorating" as he perceived. He succeeded in creating the beginnings of English dictionaries but failed miserably in halting the "deterioration" of the English language as a consequence of his work. He failed because language is like a living organism whose evolution is inextricably linked to the evolution of humankind and of speech.

The historical issue which receives little attention but which is embedded in the English-only Movement has to do with the native peoples of the United States and their languages. Per the objectives of the English Only advocates the languages of American Indians would be imperiled. What would happen to the languages of Native Hawaiians? What would the status of Spanish be in Puerto Rico? What about the Spanish language of the Southwest? Place names of the region attest to an Hispanic presence prior to the arrival of Americans from elsewhere in the country.

A great number of Hispanics in the American Southwest have long roots in the area. One part of my mother’s family, for example, arrived in San Antonio Texas, in 1731. That predates the Declaration of Independence by some 45 years. A hundred years later members of that family fought for Texas Independence. Since 1848--when by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo more than half of Mexico was dismembered and annexed by the United States--members of my family have fought and died for the American flag and its causes. I served as a Marine during World War II, serving later in the Air Force during the Korean Conflict and into the Vietnam era.

Calling attention to Arizona, Baldenegro writes: "To the extent that our state is ’great,’ people of Mexican descent have contributed immensely to that greatness through their decency, heroism, honest work and strong work ethic. Quite simply, Arizona history cannot be told without discussion of the substantial and substantive contributions of Mexicanos and Chicanos. Indeed, some of the greatest aspects of Arizona’s history were made in Spanish."

ispanics are not newcomers to the American experience. They are part of that experience. Hispanic children learn about John Smith, the Mayflower, Ellis Island. But they do not learn that their forebears were not part of that experience. But that’s not the only history of Americans in the United States.

All American children ought to learn as Hispanic children of the Southwest and Puerto Rico know that the American experience has a different form in those areas. As it does in Hawaii. And as it does where Asian Americans and African Americans came into the country.

Even though I was an American, when I started school in San Antonio, Texas, in 1932 I was forced to attend a segregated school for "Mexicans" as we were generically identified then. The public schools of Texas did not end their segregation of "Mexicans" until 1969 when ordered to by a federal court (see "Montezuma’s Children," The Center Magazine, November/December 1970). Ultimately I mastered the English language, and several others along the way.

The United States is not just a land of immigrants. The preponderance of African Americans are not immigrants to the United States. Puerto Ricans are not immigrants to the United States. Asians from Hawaii are not immigrants to the United States. By and large, Mexican Americans (especially of the conquest generation) are not immigrants to the United States. The United States came to them. To impose by force of fiat the conqueror’s language upon them is not the way to win friends and influence people--especially when a preponderance of Hispanics have already learned the language of the country, despite the erroneous impression that they don’t want to make or have not made the effort to learn English.

The agenda of the English Only advocates is dark and sinister, full of sound and fury auguring turmoil for the country. The begining of fascism takes many forms. In Nazi Germany it was the Jews. Are Hispanics to be scapegoats for American fascism?

It’s surprising how people are ready to give up their freedoms in the name of "unity," how they are ready to replace one tyranny with another, as described in George Orwell’s superb fable, Animal Farm. The lessons of Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union and Cuba ought not to be lost on us. The Russi-fication of the Soviet Union--establishing the primacy of the Russian language in all the jurisdictions of the Soviet Union–did not work. Not because the ethnic peoples of the Soviet Union with all their linguistic diversity opposed the Russian language, but because the proponents of Russian Only opposed all other languages in their domain.

The issues of language are not easy, any more than the issues of culture are not easy. What makes the issue of language particularly difficult is that language lies at the core of one’s existence, it is the primary vehicle by which one mediates the world about one. Therefore to attack the language one speaks is to attack the very heart of one’s identity. That’s why helping people bridge from one language to another is so important. Yet Russell Pearce opposes funding for community-based English classes, believing, erroneously perhaps, in the "permeation theory" of second-language acquisition –that the sonic emanations of the English language permeate the bodies of second-language learners investing them thus with the meanings of English words. That ‘s not the silver bullet of second-language learning, though many Anglo Teachers thought it was when I started to learn English.

People should not be made to feel that they must give up one linguistic identity to become members of another linguistic group. We have surely progressed to the point where we understand that the Americanization process ought to be an additive one. That, in this case, to become an American is to add the American language to one’s linguistic repertoire.

As Hamlet muses during the play within the play: This is miching malecho (mischief badly done). English Only propositions are acts full of mischief and mean-spiritedness. It is not an act by which we shall all come together but an act that will surely divide us as a people where no division need exist and where none should. English Only propositions will bestow to our heirs a legacy of discord. That is not what Arizona nor the country needs at the onset of the 21st century and the struggle against terrorism.

The United States is not what it was 200 years ago. It will not be in 200 years what it is now. It will be, we can hope, the bastion of democracy and the refuge of people seeking liberty as it was in the beginning and as it has been into our time. The United States belongs to its people: the Marshalls, the Blackmuns, the O’Connors, the Scalias, the Singhs, the Renquists, the Garcias, et al. It does not belong to the English, the Italians, the Irish, the Africans, the Hispanics. It belongs to all of us who are American citizens at this moment in time. Our American patrimony cannot be bought, nor can it be sold.

I daresay, should the English-only mentality become national dogma, American Hispanics will not wait three-score years for a Brown v. Board of Education decision to free them from linguistic shackles. They will not go gently into that good night. Nor should they. Hispanics have a history of fighting for American freedoms.

Recently, Senator Mel Martinez (R-Florida) delivered his maiden speech to the Senate in Spanish. While that distressed some folks, I regarded that as a genuine effort on the part of the Senator to remind his fellow Senators that the United States is not a monolithically linguistic enclave. The Senator’s speech in Spanish ought to be a wake-up call for lexocentric monolingual Americans that leadership in a polyglot world requires encouraging our children to learn as many languages as they can.

Because of the diversity of its population at its birth and because of the myriad languages of that population, the founding fathers were wise not to proclaim English as the official language of the newly-founded country. We should value that wisdom and not tie up Americans with linguistic straight-jackets. An example of judicial straight-jacketing occurred recently in Lebanon, Tennessee, where a judge has been ordering "Mexican" women who are American citizens who have run afoul of the law to learn English, or else. If they make no effort to learn English they run the risk of losing their children The court would terminate their parental rights.

The issue here is about assimilation not second-language acquisition. Arbitrarily and capriciously, the judge ordered one "Mexican" woman to achieve a fourth grade level of English in six months. What is astonishing is hat the citizens of Lebanon, Tennessee, are in full support of the judge’s rulings.


Copyright © 2005 by the Author. All rights reserved. Some of the material herein is drawn from an earlier version of this text published by Caravel Press in 1989.

http://www.hispanicvista.com/HVC/Opinion/Guest_Columns/022105OrtegayGasca.htm

Dr. Felipe de Ortego y Gasca, Ph.D., Professor Emeritus of English Language and Literature
Retired Tenured Faculty, Texas State University System--Sul Ross
English, Linguistics, Journalism, Information Studies, Bilingual Education, Chicano Studies
Dean Emeritus, Hispanic Leadership Institute, Arizona State University
Chair Emeritus, The Hispanic Foundation, Washington DC

1317 E. FM 1717, Kingsville, Texas 78363
Phone: 361-592-2030 Email: felipeo@usawide.net

Visiting Scholar and Lecturer in English and Bilingual Studies
Texas A&M University at Kingsville
Phone: 361-522-8256 Email: p-ortego@tamuk.edu

Feb. 21, 2005, 10:30PM

Privatization is Put On Hold

Saavedra opts to create advisory groups to improve 3 low-performing HISD high schools
By MIKE SNYDER
Copyright 2005 Houston Chronicle

Houston school administrators will not replace the management of three low-performing high schools without the support of parents and community leaders, Superintendent Abe Saavedra said Monday.

After meeting with leaders of the NAACP and other groups opposed to privatizing Yates, Kashmere and Sam Houston high schools, Saavedra said he will form advisory committees of parents and community leaders to help develop reform plans for each school.

In his State of the Schools speech last week, Saavedra called for reforming the schools, saying HISD would solicit proposals to "totally redesign" them because incremental reform efforts had failed. The state has ranked the schools as low-performing since 2001.

"No recommendation to outsource will move forward (to the school board) unless the community has embraced it," Saavedra said Monday.

He said the advisory groups will consult with Houston Independent School District officials as they seek proposals from nonprofit groups, for-profit firms or HISD employees to improve student performance at the three schools.

James Douglas, the general counsel for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People's Houston chapter, said the organization would oppose any plan to shift management of the schools away from HISD. Opposition to outsourcing was overwhelming among more than 200 parents who met with Saavedra later Monday at Kashmere, said U.S. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Houston.

"They (Kashmere parents) equate outsourcing with closing the schools," Jackson Lee said, adding that outside managers would not understand the schools' or communities' history. Her district includes Kashmere and Yates.

School trustees on Friday approved Saavedra's plan to seek proposals for new management at the schools. Jackson Lee said Kashmere parents want trustees to amend their vote to reflect Saavedra's commitment not to move forward without community support.

The NAACP, along with some other groups and parents, has said problems at the three schools are the result of years of neglect and inadequate funding.

U.S. Rep. Al Green, D-Houston, said the three high schools have historic importance in their communities. Kashmere and Yates are predominantly black schools, while Sam Houston is predominantly Hispanic.

"Yates is one of the most historic schools in this city," Green said. "It is a shame that during Black History Month we are having this conversation."

Green said misconceptions had arisen in the aftermath of Saavedra's speech, including the idea that HISD was considering closing the high schools.

Saavedra said that was never his intention.

"HISD totally agrees that these schools will not be closed," he said.

mike.snyder@chron.com
http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/metropolitan/3050964

Topics such as marriage edited for school board

By Scott Gold
Los Angeles Times

February 20, 2005

SPRING, Texas - Outside the Spring Church of Christ, a large roadside sign says a lot about the prevailing sensibility in this cordial town. It reads: "Support New Testament Morality."

This is the home and power base of Terri Leo, a state Board of Education member representing 2.5 million people in east Texas. At the urging of Leo and several other members - who describe themselves as Christian conservatives - the board approved new health textbooks for high school and middle school students in November after publishers said they would tweak references to marriage and sexuality.

One agreed to define marriage as a "lifelong union between a husband and a wife." Another deleted words that were attacked by conservatives as "stealth" references to gay relationships; "partners," for example, was changed to "husbands and wives." A passage explaining that adolescence brings the onset of "attraction to others" became "attraction to the opposite sex."

Leo said she pushed for the changes to combat the influence of "liberal New York publishers" who by "censoring" the definition of marriage are legitimizing same-sex unions.

Some education advocates have criticized the board.

"This was never about defining marriage," said Samantha Smoot, president of the Texas Freedom Network, an Austin-based nonprofit that opposes what it calls religious "extremism." "It was an effort to get anti-gay propaganda in the books."

Gilbert Sewall, director of the New York-based American Textbook Council - an independent organization that reviews textbooks - also criticized the Texas-approved books' promotion of abstinence-only sex education. Such programs are "naive and confused," said Sewall, who described himself as an "educational conservative."

Research, much of it conducted by the federal government, has raised a host of questions about the effectiveness of abstinence programs in preventing disease and pregnancy. Teenage girls who are taught in the programs do wait longer before having sex, many experts believe, but are less likely to use protection when they do - causing them to contract sexually transmitted diseases at the same rates as those who have sex earlier.

"I have very little use for this religion-driven curriculum," Sewall said. "This confuses sex and moral education."

Texas is the second-largest buyer of textbooks in the nation, after California. Books purchased here wind up in classrooms across the nation because publishers are loath to create new editions for smaller states. As a result, five social conservatives on the 15-member Texas board, frequently joined by five more moderate Republicans, have enormous clout.

Publishers have no choice but to heed many of the group's wishes, said Don McLeroy, a dentist, Sunday school teacher and Texas Board of Education member.

"They've got to sell books," he said. "It's business."

Conservatives' efforts over the years to edit textbooks are legendary here. In a nod to those who believe God created the Earth 6,000 years ago, a sentence saying the ice age took place "millions of years ago" was changed to "in the distant past." Descriptions of environmentalism have been attacked as antithetical to free-enterprise ideals; a passage describing the cruelty of slavery was derided as "overkill."

The board's stance on the health texts, some observers said, speaks to a critical factor in the GOP's recent success: a recognition by evangelical conservatives that all politics is local.

The political ascendance of Christian conservatives in the 1980s and 1990s was fueled by their coordinated effort to win seats on school boards, city councils and other local bodies. A leader of the Christian Coalition said at the time that he'd be willing to train an evangelical to run for dogcatcher.

Copyright © 2005, The Baltimore Sun
http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/education/bal-te.textbooks20feb20,1,5990600,print.story?ctrack=2&cset=true

Note: This NYTimes editorial is a message to our young/younger leadership. We should all be concerrned about these directions that policy is taking at the national level. -Angela

By DAVID BROOKS

Published: February 19, 2005

here's going to be another Ross Perot, and this time he's going to be younger. There's going to be a millionaire rising out of the country somewhere and he (or she) is going to lead a movement of people who are worried about federal deficits, who are offended by the horrendous burden seniors are placing on the young and who are disgusted by a legislative process that sometimes suggests that the government has lost all capacity for self-control.
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He's going to be set off by some event like what is happening right now with the Medicare prescription drug benefit. He's going to look at an event like that one, and he's not only going to be worried about the country's economic future - he's also going to be morally offended. He's going to sense that something fundamentally decadent is going on.

And he's going to be right.

In the past months we have learned that the prescription drug benefit passed last year is not going to cost $400 billion over 10 years. The projections now, over a slightly different period, are that it's going to cost over $700 billion. And these cost estimates are coming before the program is even operating. They are only going to go up.

That means we're going to be spending the next few months bleeding over budget restraints that might produce savings in the millions, while the new prescription drug benefit will produce spending in the billions.

That means that as we spend the next year trying to get a grip on one entitlement, Social Security, we'll be launching a new one that is also unsustainable.

Over the next few months we will be watching a government that may be millions-wise, but trillions-foolish. We will be watching a government that sometimes seems to have lost all perspective - like a lunatic who tries to dry himself with a hand towel while standing in a torrential downpour.

And much of this new spending will go to people who have insurance to pay for their drugs.

In Congress, some are taking a look at these new cost projections and figuring that maybe it's time to readjust the program. In the House there are Republicans like Mike Pence and Jeff Flake (whose predictions of this program's actual cost have been entirely vindicated by events). In the Senate there are people like Judd Gregg and Lindsey Graham. These fiscal conservatives want to make the program sustainable.

Perhaps the benefits should be limited to those earning up to 200 percent of the level at the poverty line. Perhaps the costs should be capped at $400 billion through other benefit adjustments. These ideas are akin to what the candidate George Bush proposed in 2000.

But the White House is threatening to veto anything they do! President Bush, who hasn't vetoed a single thing during his presidency, now threatens to veto something - and it's something that might actually restrain the growth of government. He threatens to use his first veto against an idea he himself originally proposed!

Have we entered another world, where up is down and rationality is irrational?

Every family and business in America has to scale back when the cost of something skyrockets. Does this rule not apply to us as a nation?

We may as well be blunt about the driving force behind all this. The living and well organized are taking money from the weak and the unborn. Over the past decades we have seen a gigantic transfer of wealth from struggling young families and the next generation to members of the AARP. In 1990, 29 percent of federal spending went to seniors; by 2015 roughly half of all government spending will go to those over 65. This prescription drug measure is just part of that great redistribution.

But what can't last won't last. Before too long, some new sort of leader is going to arise, especially if we fail to reform Social Security this year. He's going to rail against a country that cannot control its appetites. He's going to rail against Republicans who promise to be virtuous - but not just yet. He's going to slam Democrats who loudly jeer at Republican deficits but whose own entitlement proposals would make the situation twice as bad. He's going to crusade against the interest groups who are so ferocious on behalf of their members that they sacrifice the future.

It won't be a green-eyeshade economic crusade this leader will be launching. It will be a moral crusade, and it'll be quite a show.

E-mail: dabrooks@nytimes.com

February, TEXAS MONTHLY

By Jan Jarboe Russell

Grand Opportunity Party

The Republicans and George W. Bush won a record share of the Hispanic vote in November—and that ought to scare the Democrats to death.

THE CRITICAL BATTLE FOR THE HISPANIC VOTE, and all it portends for Texas and for America in the years to come, has its roots in a meeting at the Capitol in the fall of 1998. Karl Rove, the political adviser to then-governor George W. Bush, summoned Lionel Sosa, the head of a San Antonio advertising agency that specialized in marketing to Hispanics, to talk about how Bush’s reelection campaign could generate a big Hispanic turnout. Rove was already thinking ahead to a presidential race in 2000, and he saw an opportunity to prove to Republicans outside Texas that Bush had the ability to win over a traditionally Democratic constituency. The meeting was scheduled for one hour. It lasted three. Bush had three goals. First, he wanted the highest percentage of the Hispanic vote of any Republican candidate in Texas history. Second, he wanted his message to be emotional and bilingual—“un nuevo día,” “a new day.” Last, he wanted the campaign to be a road map for Republicans, starting with himself, to effectively target Hispanic voters in the future.

Sosa had a wealth of political experience to draw on. Back in 1978, when Texas was still largely a one-party Democratic state, Republican John Tower hired him to create advertisements in English and Spanish for his reelection race for the U.S. Senate. Sosa’s ads played on the cultural conservatism of Hispanics: patriotism, work ethic, and strong family ties. Tower claimed to have won 37 percent of the Hispanic vote (because of the stakes, such estimates have been hotly disputed), which proved to be essential in a race decided by less than a percentage point. In subsequent years, Sosa advised Ronald Reagan and the elder George Bush, saying, in effect, that the secret to winning over Hispanic voters was that there was no secret. Hispanics wanted what other voters wanted—a good candidate with an authentic message. Sosa’s message was simple: No group of voters is as hungry for the American dream as Hispanic immigrants, and the Republican party is a better guardian of that dream than the Democratic. For Bush’s 1998 campaign, Sosa would focus on an explicit emotional connection. “I’m proud of the Hispanic blood that flows in my family,” Bush said in an ad that showed him with his nephew George P., the son of Florida governor Jeb Bush and his wife, Columba, who was born in Mexico. On election night, Bush got 49 percent of the Hispanic vote, the highest percentage any statewide Republican candidate had ever received.

In the 2004 presidential election Bush called upon Sosa again, and again the strategy proved successful. Depending on whose figures you believe, Bush’s percentage of the national Hispanic vote ranged from 36 to 44 percent, with the consensus being around 40 percent. (The explanation for the wide range, dueling spinmeisters say, is that some surveys oversampled suburban areas while others undersampled the suburbs in favor of barrio precincts.) But the precise number isn’t as important as the first digit; anything in the forties is huge for Republicans. Democrats have been counting on the ever-growing Hispanic population to make them competitive in Texas and around the country, but Republicans believe that Sosa’s cultural-conservatism, American-dream message can enable them to lock in a significant fraction of the Hispanic vote and solidify their majority status.

One bit of good news for the Republicans is the increasing diversity of the Hispanic vote. It was much easier for Democrats to roll up big majorities when almost all Hispanics lived in poor inner-city neighborhoods like the West Side of San Antonio or Houston’s East End. But in recent years many second- and third-generation Hispanic voters have moved to the suburbs and small towns. They don’t always have Hispanic names, and they may not feel the same sense of ethnic identification as barrio voters. A growing number are Protestant, not Catholic. The more diverse Hispanics become—in where they live, in where they worship, in what they do for a living, and in how many generations they are removed from their Mexican origins—the more independent their voting habits are likely to be. On November 2 Bush won at least 50 percent of the vote in several South Texas counties, including Cameron (Brownsville and Harlingen), and averaged 41 percent in the counties along the U.S.-Mexico border.


How did the GOP broaden its appeal to Hispanics? Conventional wisdom credits the cultural conservatism noted by Sosa and its influence on Hispanic support of the war in Iraq and antipathy to abortion and gay marriage. The challenge for Democrats is to counter the appeal of the Sosa message to contemporary Hispanic voters. In some ways, the Democrats are still stuck with the messages of the fifties and sixties, when Texas was strongly tainted by segregation and Mexican Americans were frequently its victims. Even around San Antonio “No dogs or Mexicans allowed” signs could be found at restaurants, and Mexican Americans could not use public swimming pools or water fountains. The Hispanic community on the city’s West Side needed a champion, and Democrat Henry B. Gonzalez, a first-generation Mexican American with strong emotional ties to Mexico, emerged to fill that need. In 1957 Gonzalez, then a member of the Texas Senate, conducted a 22-hour filibuster against segregation legislation. Throughout a 37-year career in the U.S. Congress, Henry B.—as he was known by everyone—preached the message of civil rights for Mexican Americans.

Then, in the late seventies, another son of the West Side, Henry Cisneros, emerged as a different kind of champion. Henry C. was a second-generation Mexican American. He learned the political lessons of the first generation from, among others, his late uncle Ruben Mungia, who owned a print shop on the West Side and served as Henry B.’s campaign manager in his first race for the Texas Legislature. On Sunday afternoons Mungia would load his nieces and nephews in the back of his truck, and they’d spend the afternoon politicking at union picnics and campaign rallies. Henry C. was the embodiment of the first generation’s dream: He had college degrees from Texas A&M, Harvard, and George Washington University. When he was elected to the San Antonio city council, in 1975, he focused not on civil rights but on a new issue—better jobs for San Antonio. The appeal reached not only Hispanics, who wanted their children to prosper, but also Anglos, who wanted their city to experience the good times that Houston and Dallas had enjoyed. His message—that a rising tide lifts all boats—was powerful enough that, in 1981, he was elected mayor, a nonpartisan office, with the help of more than 40 percent of the Anglo vote. Democrats pressed him to run for governor or U.S. senator, but as we know, he spurned what many saw as his destiny, leaving Texas in 1993 to serve as Bill Clinton’s Secretary of Housing and Urban Development. When he was charged by the FBI because it found that, during a background check, he had understated payments he’d made to his mistress, his political prospects and influence evaporated.

By then, Henry C.’s message was getting competition from Sosa’s mantra that Republicans were better guardians of the American dream. Sosa’s partner, Frank Guerra, quit his job as an executive producer for San Antonio’s KENS-TV in 1992 to run the congressional campaign of Henry Bonilla, also an executive producer at the station. Bonilla became the first Hispanic Republican from Texas to be elected to Congress. Bonilla reflects the change in San Antonio’s Hispanic community. He was born in a public-housing project but now lives on the suburban North Side. “Times have changed,” Guerra told me. “Hispanics are in the mainstream now. They don’t need the Democratic party to be their champion. They are making it on their own. The victim message no longer works.”

Bonilla has announced that he will seek the Republican nomination for the U.S. Senate if Kay Bailey Hutchison runs against Governor Rick Perry, raising the possibility that the history of Hispanic politics in Texas would evolve from Henry B. to Henry C. to a very different Henry B. Bonilla is trying to position himself as Cisneros once did—as an archetypal figure with a statewide future. The question is whether he can win a Republican primary race, since the party is dominated by Anglo voters and candidates. Tony Garza, currently Bush’s ambassador to Mexico, couldn’t do it; he finished fourth in the 1994 attorney general’s race.

The difference in the Republican and Democratic messages could be seen on the Web sites of the two 2004 presidential candidates. Cisneros, who is now back in San Antonio as founder and chairman of the affordable-housing developer American CityVista, delivered John Kerry’s main message to Hispanics, narrating the Massachusetts senator’s biography. The site also had a long list of detailed comparisons of Kerry and Bush on major issues such as health care and education. The approach of using Cisneros as a broker seemed especially outdated. Bush, meanwhile, narrated his own Web site biography, and a slogan on a banner promised that he would fight for Hispanics cuerpo y alma—body and soul.

For Democrats, the 2004 Bush vote suggests that the days of the party’s being able to count on straight-ticket Hispanic voters are over. Republicans are going to contest the Democrats’ traditional dominance of the Hispanic vote and build a Hispanic farm system of statewide officeholders, as Bush did and as Perry has continued to do with appointees like railroad commissioner Victor Carrillo and Supreme Court justice David Medina. In 2002 Perry easily won reelection, with an estimated 35 percent of the Hispanic vote, against Tony Sanchez, a billionaire banker—the same percentage that Greg Abbott received in the attorney general’s race and five percentage points more than John Cornyn polled in his Senate race against Ron Kirk. “For now, if Republicans can get a third of the Hispanic vote in statewide races, they win,” says Mike Baselice, a Republican pollster in Austin. “Republican candidates will continue to win statewide races in Texas for at least a decade.” The day will come, sometime around 2030, when the Democratic dream of a Texas that is majority Hispanic will be a reality, but if the Democrats don’t change their stand-by-your-party message, they may not be able to change the direction of Texas politics.

Copyright © 1973-2005 Texas Monthly, Inc. An Emmis Communications company. All rights reserved.

February 14, 2005

It is my pleasure to announce February 23, 2005 as TEXAS Grants Day at the Texas Capitol. Please help us ensure that TEXAS Grants continues to provide hope and opportunity for future students by helping us make TEXAS Grants Day a success.

As you know, the TEXAS Grants program has helped thousands of students better afford the rising cost of a college education. In its first five years, 205,000 TEXAS Grants have been awarded and the program has grown from $100 million to $320 million per biennium. Unfortunately, there are efforts in the legislature to slash funding for this program, which could eliminate TEXAS Grants for up to 33,000 students -- maybe you or your child or a student you know.

Help protect TEXAS Grants and ensure the program continues to provide hope and opportunity for future students. Come to Austin for TEXAS Grants Day and contact your legislator, and especially the members of the Appropriations Committee, the Speaker of the House, and the Lt. Governor and the Governor. Ask them if they are going to fully fund the program.

If you are interested in helping make TEXAS Grants Day a success, please contact Chris Smith in my office at (512)463-0113, or via e-mail at christopher.smith@senate.state.tx.us

Sincerely,



Rodney Ellis

To whom it may concern-

As an Upward Bound alumna, it disheartens me to learn
that President Bush has proposed to cut Upward Bound, Talent Search, and
Gear Up in his proposed FY 06 budget. (Like others) as I determine what personal
sacrafices I am able to make in order to support the continuation of such
programs, I've determined that the 1st step I can take is to organize an
online petition where TRiO/Gear Up supporters can express their desire
for Congress to continue favorable funding of Upward Bound, Talent
Search, & Gear Up.

With that, I ask you to take a few minutes to sign this petition located at web site address http://www.ipetitions.com/campaigns/save_trio/

Your assistance, time, and cooperation with this is truly
appreciated!

Veronica Hernandez
1993 ASU Upward Bound Alumna
1992 UC Berkeley UBMS Participant

"TRiO Programs: Making a difference!"

Improving Education With True Accountability
Davy McClay
Sunday, February 13, 2005
Page C - 5
SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE

Since our governor's State of the State address, talk of merit pay for
teachers has resurfaced. We've been there and done that.

Let's see what happened with the merit pay system we had from 2000-2002,
before the funds vanished. Frankly, there were problems: We got paid more
for giving students less! As soon as it was known what was needed for
"success," we teachers were issued powerful de facto mandates -- which are
still in effect -- to feed students a rigorous diet of the targeted
material, to the exclusion of virtually all other curricula. Naturally, our
test scores experienced a sudden dramatic inflation for a couple of years.
What else would you expect? However, the ensuing flattening of test scores,
and then decreases in 2004, raise doubts about the efficacy of a curriculum
based on test preparation.

I recognize that, like McDonald's, we've expanded our menu. In 2001,
writing was added to elementary grades' multiple-choice tests. But
teachers, so busy preparing students for testing, no longer have time to
work with students on creating original literature. And yes, due to
expanded tests, we now teach some science at some grade levels. And social
studies? It's not tested. So guess how much social studies most kids learn?
(Somewhere between slim and none!).

Just as fast-food entrees are bland accommodations to the masses, so is our
test-preparation curriculum. We're not producing gourmet thinkers; we're
churning out one-size-fits-all test-takers. And the "one size" is
pathetically anemic.

Pseudo-accountability brought us here. Genuine accountability can lift us
out of this fast-food mentality and into true education. How? By holding us
accountable for things we control. True accountability must be aligned with
responsibility. So, here are the three responsibilities of teachers:

-- Classroom delivery skills, including firsthand/hands-on deep knowledge
for students in all content areas. Hold us accountable for our delivery. If
we can't perform, don't sign our checks. Likewise, if we're doing well we'd
love some tangible appreciation. But please do it with significant
within-our-ranks input.

Also, gauging how well students "receive" our deliveries and translate them
into test scores is limited. How much of those test scores are attributable
to moodiness, hunger or, especially, home influence? Nobody really knows.
Statisticians can only render "probability," based on their mix of
variables. So don't hold us accountable for student receptivity until you
can determine an unbiased, exact measure of the extent of our impact.

The next two responsibilities aren't easy to objectify. But they're
critical components of true answerability and true education. The governor,
indeed everybody, must also actively promote these ideals:

-- Following the mandates of my heart: Our most powerful teaching skill is
what and who we are deep inside. That takes place without saying a word. We
must each find the real truth within ourselves, accompanied by daily self-
reminders and refocusing, and with unselfish love and concern for the well-
being of each student. This mandate also includes being creative and
teaching to the needs of individual students, even when our beloved
curriculum silently yells, "No. Don't you dare!"

-- Helping parents hold themselves accountable: There's a cultural gap
between the values that drive education and urban families. All
socio-economic classes share identical beliefs and attitudes about
education. But less-than- affluent families often haven't been through "the
system" and thus tend to lack experiential knowledge for translating those
beliefs into actions. They must know what behaviors are required. We must
teach those critical behaviors and provide parents with cultural capital to
buy into the system. I use a first-day-of-school meeting with parents, at
least one home visit per year, monthly evening trips to public library, and
a few extra phone calls when they aren't needed. Teachers should be family
and parents should be teachers.

So I ask the governor to enthrone substance -- true accountability -- over
show. We need our governor to pave the way for us teachers to magnify all
these responsibilities, over and above scrambling to satisfy some new
program that will be replaced in a few years.

Davy McClay (davy@trueeducation.net) is a National Board certified teacher
at Sylvan Park Elementary School in Van Nuys and an instructor at Michael
D. Eisner College of Education, CSU Northridge.
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2005/02/13/EDGSMAPBO81.DTL

Lawmakers from MALC give House Bill 2 an F
The Mexican American Legislative Caucus held a news conference yesterday criticizing the current version of House Bill 2 saying that it fails kids, fails teachers, and fails the test of leadership. Lawmakers stated that it does not provide enough money to guarantee every Texas child an exemplary public education. It also widens the equity gap between a handful of haves in 24 school districts, and every other child in Texas. It is a roadmap to disaster.
http://www.malc.org/pdfs/HB2-021605.pdf
 

********************************************
TO: Coalition for Public Schools Organizations
FROM: Carolyn Boyle

Another huge, expensive, private school voucher bill has been filed in the Texas House of Representatives, H.B. 1263. Co-authors of the bill are Representatives Linda Harper-Brown (R-Irving), Jodi Laubenberg (R-Parker), and Carl Isett (R-Lubbock). You may read the text at: http://www.capitol.state.tx.us/cgi-bin/tlo/textframe.cmd?LEG=79&SESS=R&CHAMBER=H&BILLTYPE=B&BILLSUFFIX=01263&VERSION=1&TYPE=B

I'll have more details in the coming days, but here are the highlights:

-- It is an urban voucher pilot program in counties with a population of 800,000 or more. That would include the counties of Harris (Houston), Dallas, Tarrant (Fort Worth), Bexar (San Antonio), and Travis (Austin).

-- A school district would be required to participate in the voucher pilot program if: (a) the district is the largest district in the county in which a majority of the students are educationally disadvantaged OR (b) at least 90 percent of the students in the district were educationally disadvantaged during the preceding school year.
(NOTE: I'll have a list of affected districts as soon as possible. The second criteria would bring in smaller districts. For example, in Bexar County it is likely that the districts mandated to distribute vouchers would include San Antonio ISD, Edgewood ISD, Harlandale ISD, and South San Antonio ISD. Under the bill, charter school districts in the five counties also would be required to distribute vouchers if 90 percent of the students are disadvantaged. This might make it possible for some charter schools to convert to become unregulated private schools funded with vouchers.)

-- Following are the children eligible for a voucher: A student who has dropped out of school OR a student who attended a public school for the majority of the preceding semester or is starting school for the first time; AND meets one or more of the following criteria:
a. Meets the definition in Texas Education Code 29.081 of "at risk of dropping out of school," which is wide-ranging, including: did not pass any section of the TAKS test, did not pass a readiness test in PreK-3rd grade, failed two subjects during a semester, is pregnant or a parent, has been placed in an alternative education program, has been expelled, is on parole or probation, is homeless, etc.
b. Is in kindergarten through grade 12 and is eligible to participate in a district's special education program
c. Is a student of limited English proficiency
d. Resides in a household whose income did not exceed 200% of the qualifying income for a reduced-price lunch
e. Is the victim or is the sibling of a victim of certain acts of violence.

-- The voucher amount would be the lesser of 90 percent of the statewide average annual cost per student for the preceding school year (amount to come) or the private school's average actual annual cost per student. If the child is a special education or bilingual education student, the voucher would be the amount of funding to which the school district would be entitled.

Texas taxpayers cannot afford this huge, expensive, irresponsible private school voucher program that would take money away from public schools in urban areas and statewide! Please write a snail-mail letter to your state representative and state senator in opposition to H.B. 1263, H.B. 12, or any other bill or floor amendment that would use public dollars to pay tuition at private and religious academies.

-- Texas legislators need to solve school finance problems, not create new problems!
-- Texas legislators need to provide more funding for neighborhood public schools, not take money away to give to private schools!
-- Lawmakers who are fiscal conservatives should not create a new "school stamp" entitlement program in urban areas.
-- Schools in rural and suburban areas cannot afford to lose funding to subsidize private academies in big cities.

State legislators must hear from public school supporters NOW!! Please write a letter to your state representative and senator.

Addresses are:
State Representatives and Speaker of the House Tom Craddick: P.O. Box 2910, Austin, Texas 78768-2910
State Senators and Lieutenant Governor David Dewhurst: P.O. Box 12068-Capitol Station, Austin, Texas 78711

If you do not know who represents you at the Texas Capitol, go to http://www.capitol.state.tx.us/fyi/fyi.htm

Thank you for making it a priority to send a letter to your state leaders! And if you have a chance to see a legislator in your home community or in Austin, be sure to tell him or her that private school vouchers are a bad idea!!

***********************************************************
Coalition for Public Schools, 1005 Congress Avenue, Suite 550, Austin, Texas 78701-2491, (512) 474-9765, Fax: (512) 474-2507, Carolyn Boyle, Coordinator
email: cboyleaust@aol.com www.coalition4publicschools.org

The Coalition for Public Schools is comprised of 40 education, child advocacy, community, and religious organizations representing more than 3,000,000 members in Texas. Founded in 1995, CPS opposes expenditure of public funds to support private and religious schools through mechanisms such as tuition vouchers, franchise tax credits, and property tax credits. The Coalition believes public tax dollars should be spent only to improve neighborhood public schools, which serve more than 94 percent of all Texas children.

Coalition for Public Schools groups are: American Association of University Women, American Civil Liberties Union of Texas, American Jewish Committee, American Jewish Congress, Americans for Religious Liberty, Americans United for Separation of Church & State, Anti-Defamation League, Association of Texas Professional Educators, Delta Kappa Gamma Texas, Jewish Federation of San Antonio Community Relations Council, League of United Latin American Citizens, League of Women Voters of Texas, Let Freedom Ring, National Council of Jewish Women, Parents for Public Schools of Houston, People for the American Way, Texas Advocacy Inc., Texas AFL-CIO, Texas Association for Bilingual Education, Texas Association of Community Schools, Texas Association of Mid-Size Schools, Texas Association of School Administrators, Texas Association of School Boards, Texas Association of School Personnel Administrators, Texas Association of Secondary School Principals, Texas Baptist Christian Life Commission, Texas Classroom Teachers Association, Texas Council of Administrators of Special Education, Texas Counseling Association, Texas Educational Support Staff Association, Texas Elementary Principals and Supervisors Association, Texas Federation of Teachers, Texas Freedom Network, Texas Impact, Texas Parents and Teachers Association, Texas Retired Teachers Association, Texas Rural Education Association, Texas School Public Relations Association, Texas State Teachers Association, The Arc of Texas.

79TH LEGISLATURE
Hispanic Caucus Flunks House Education Plan
Members say education bill is unfair and spends too little.

By Jason Embry
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Thursday, February 17, 2005

Texas House leaders' plan to reform the state's education system is unfair and inadequate, members of the Mexican American Legislative Caucus said Wednesday.

About 35 members of the House, almost all of them Democrats, gathered to denounce the bill in the loudest statement of opposition since Republicans filed it two weeks ago.

"What we're really doing is in essence rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic and really not making any substantive changes or substantive improvements in our education system," said Rep. Pete Gallego, D-Alpine, the caucus chairman.

Backers of the bill say it would increase overall education spending by more than $3 billion over two years, which would be in addition to the estimated $1.2 billion needed just to cover enrollment growth. But caucus members say that they've run their own numbers and that the bill would not provide enough money even to make up for the cuts that lawmakers made two years ago, which included reductions in spending on teacher health insurance, technology and textbooks.

"It's disingenuous to say we're going to get more money when, in fact, we're just going to go back to zero," said Rep. Eddie Rodriguez, D-Austin.

The Public Education Committee has heard testimony on the bill for the better part of two weeks. House Speaker Tom Craddick, who hopes to have a bill to the floor of the House by early March, defended the amount of money it puts into education.

"I don't know that the school districts are ever going to think that there's enough money in there," he said. "But the state's got to look at what they can afford to do and what takes care of us at the courthouse."

The Mexican American caucus attacked the bill for not including an across-the-board pay increase for teachers and for spending too little money to help economically disadvantaged students. Gallego said the group does not have its own proposal for how much new money should go into education because members first want to determine how much the schools need.

The group also pounced on a Republican proposal to put a 35 percent cap on how much of its local property tax money a school district with high property values must send to the state. About two dozen districts would be likely to see significant funding increases because they would be able to keep more of their money with the cap in place.

The group pointed to the Highland Park district, a wealthy Dallas-area enclave that stands to see its state and local funds increase by as much as 52 percent under the House proposal. The Austin, Houston and San Antonio districts would each see increases of less than 5 percent.

Most of the other districts affected by the 35 percent cap, though, have fewer than 500 students but have high property values because they include oil fields, power plants or other features that drive up values. In 13 of these 23 property-wealthy districts, more than half of the students were considered economically disadvantaged last year, according to Texas Education Agency data.

Bill supporters have defended the cap by saying it would affect roughly $30 million in a statewide education system that costs $33 billion annually. They also say districts that have been sending as much as 70 percent of their local money to other parts of the state deserve to keep more.

The 40 members of the Mexican American caucus — or the 63 Democrats in the 150-member House, for that matter — do not have the votes to stop the bill. One Republican who is a member of the caucus, Rep. Pat Haggerty of El Paso, spoke out against the House plan Wednesday.

Democrats also hope to corral support from rural Republicans who do not think the system will give their schools enough new money.

Craddick said supporters of the bill have met with all but about five members of the Legislature.

"Overall, I'd say the bill is very acceptable to most members of the House from both parties," he said.

http://www.statesman.com/news/content/shared/tx/legislature/stories/02/17schools.html
 

February 17, 2005

Do You Know What Your Kids Are Watching on
"Educational" TV at School?

By Dr. TERESA WHITEHURST

"A parent who's too busy or doesn't realize the
importance of tuning in to his or her child often
expresses surprise when the child gets into trouble or
drops out of school. The child knows, but can't
explain, that those "bad kids" he or she hangs out
with are alike a lifeline. This is the secret pullall
the unpleasantness and risk in the world is worth the
feeling of being seen and heard by someone."

from Jesus on Parenting: 10 Essential Principles that
Will Transform Your Family

I learned something new yesterday. Channel One News,
the "educational" TV show that my daughter Isa and
millions of other American kids watch every morning at
school, is busy recruiting our teenagers into the
military.

"Mom, they're really aiming at the black kids, and the
Hispanic kids too. I'm so sick of seeing those
military ads everyday. "The Power of One", and all
that lots of my friends are falling for it!"

This is especially upsetting to Isa because several of
her black friends, 18, 19 and 20 years old, have been
shipped to Iraq. Some were promised they wouldn't have
to be in combat, but would be doing "mechanical work",
"communications", or "wiring".

It seems doubtful that, when push comes to shove, kids
who've been promised such jobs will be allowed to
avoid combat. One of her friends has already been shot
"in an embarrassing place"; he's being treated
overseas instead of the US so that he can be sent
quickly back into combat in Iraq. Mr. Bush's military
needs warm bodies, able or not.

I stopped the car and asked, "Wait a minute. What do
you mean when you say you're "seeing those military
ads every day"?"

"We have to watch this short thing every morning in
homeroom called "Channel One News"," Isa explained
with a weary tone. "It's educational, supposedly. You
know, the day's news, so we'll be up on current
events. But in between the stories, there are more and
more ads for the Army and the Marines."

I thought about "No Child Left Behind" and the
malignant purpose behind that sweet-sounding act that
Mr. Bush and his men (and at least one journalist paid
$250,000 by the White House) have continuously
promoted to trusting parents across the US. After
catching my breath I asked,

"Are you saying you're being recruited through the TV
you watch during homeroom?" She nodded. I asked again,
"What do your teachers think about this? What about
Mr. Hitchens (not his real name), who told you
privately that he's antiwar? Doesn't he say anything
against it?"



Persuaded Away from College, Towards the Military

"No, I think the teachers and the kids are so used to
it at my school that they don't even notice anymore. I
mean, the other day I was walking to Sociology class
and heard the ROTC instructor telling the kids, "Okay,
this is how you hold your M-16". The whole culture of
the school is military these days, so nobody notices
anything unusual about this. And I think the few
teachers who aren't prowar or proBush are afraid to
get in trouble if they say anything that doesn't sound
pro-military."

As noted in my recent articles on military recruitment
and the coming draft, for two years my daughter and I
have been fighting the aggressive and often sneaky
efforts of military recruiters to sign her up.
Certainly they don't want her for her physical
prowess-she weighs 98 pounds-so I can only assume they
want her for other reasons. Either they've seen her
high verbal scores, or they just want young
bodies-even a tiny one-to serve as cannon fodder.

With a military recruiter present every day in the
cafeteria, military "speakers" visiting classrooms,
and huge recruiting posters in the guidance office,
perhaps it's not surprising that teachers and even
guidance counselors have been influenced by the
constant hum of "enlist, enlist, enlist". Students at
Isa's school are told that, yes, they could consider
college, but that it's "very expensive" and "may not
guarantee you a job", while the military "will pay for
college" and "practically guarantees you'll have a
great career". Oh, and "a big cash bonus right now if
you sign up today!"

Joining the military is presented as the one and only
path of honor, heroism, and service to one's country.
Many students, not surprisingly, want to be heroes or
get out of poverty, so they're signing up in droves.
College recruiting is a rarity at this school, and at
her previous school, as well. Ah, but military
recruiters are constantly lurking around, spending
quality time with fatherless boys, handing out
materials, giving "aptitude tests" (played down as
"just helping you figure out what you're really good
at"), handing out Marine bumper stickers, and
otherwise making their smartly-uniformed presence
known.

"It's just everywhere", Isa continued. "Here's an
example: In gym we don't exercise or play sports like
we used to do-now we "sound off", just like in the
military, while running and doing jumping jacks,
push-ups, and pull-ups. The freshmen are told to
shout, "one, two!", then the sophomores are supposed
to answer, "three, four!", and then the whole group of
us has to say "Sound off!" I mean it's ridiculous Mom!
How are you supposed to exercise while you're shouting
at the top of your lungs?"

As I started driving again, I took a moment to reflect
on this "military culture" that's replacing the
educational culture in America's public schools.
Surely Channel One News, which parents and educators
have criticized from the start as nothing more than a
way to let corporations advertise their products
directly to kids without their parents' knowledge,
wouldn't go so far as to market the military to
children as a (better, more heroic, more exciting)
alternative to college? Surely they wouldn't override
Mom and Dad by sneakily recruiting through
"educational" TV at school? Would they? Could they?

To be continued in, "Military Recruiting Commercials
on "Educational" TV in Public Schools: Day after Day,
Military Ads Target Children-Especially Hispanics and
Blacks-On Channel One News in Schools Across the
Nation"

Dr. Teresa Whitehurst is a clinical psychologist and
writer. Her most recent book describes the nonviolent
guidance of children,Jesus on Parenting: 10 Essential
Principles that Will Transform Your Family, Baker
Books, 9/2004.

You can contact her at DrTeresa@JesusontheFamily.org

Feb. 16, 2005, 3:26PM

HISD Can't Fix 3 Schools

Saavedra hopes his plan to give outsiders control turns the troubled campuses around
By JASON SPENCER
Copyright 2005 Houston Chronicle

Superintendent Abe Saavedra delivers the State of the Schools speech at the George R. Brown Convention Center on Tuesday. The Houston schools chief announced Tuesday he would consider giving outsiders control of the city's three lowest-performing high schools to accomplish what the school system hasn't been able to do on its own.

When the next school year begins in the fall, Yates, Kashmere and Sam Houston high schools will be operated by someone other than Houston Independent School District administrators, according to the plan introduced by Superintendent Abe Saavedra. He unveiled the proposal before 2,000 business and community leaders during the annual State of the Schools speech at the George R. Brown Convention Center.

Saavedra said he is open to offers from nonprofit and for-profit groups, and HISD employees. That could include universities, school reform companies such as New York City-based Edison Schools, or local nonprofits, such as the Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP) or Project GRAD (Graduation Really Achieves Dreams), both of which have a presence in HISD.

In his first such speech since taking over the 209,000-student district in December, Saavedra also promised:

•More pre-kindergarten classes for low-income children and tuition-based pre-kindergarten for those who can afford it.
•Less standardized testing.
•Zero tolerance for cheating on tests.
The three high schools marked for takeover have worn the state's "low-performing" label since 2001, despite leadership changes and other HISD-based reform initiatives.

"These redesigned schools must be fundamentally different from what exists today," Saavedra said. "The reform groups that take over these schools will have to correct the deficiencies, raise academic standards, redesign management practices, improve capacity among staff members or replace staff, and engage parents in the process."

Trustees back takeover
The admission that HISD is out of in-house ideas to turn the troubled schools around comes two years after it was named the top urban school district in America by the Los Angeles-based Broad Foundation.

School board trustees will vote Thursday on whether to let Saavedra seek offers from groups willing to take over the high schools that have a collective student body of about 5,000. Several trustees, including board President Dianne Johnson, said they like the idea.

"It's bold," she said. "We're not going to have students stuck in low-performing schools."

Other urban school districts have taken similarly drastic steps to overhaul chronically under-performing schools, though many have been school systems in financial and academic crisis.

The School District of Philadelphia has hired a handful of groups, including Kaplan, Drexel University and the Princeton Review, to manage 16 high schools beginning next school year. Private companies already run 54 of Philadelphia's elementary and middle schools.

Some parents have promised to oppose Saavedra's idea.

"It is an awful thing," said Arva Howard, the mother of a Yates freshman and the vice president of Parents for Public Schools. "It is an unfair thing and it's something we will fight."

Yates' problems, she said, are the result of a long history of mismanagement and a lack of adequate resources. Howard said parents have been pleased with first-year Principal George August and she questioned Saavedra's priorities in light of the recent opening of a school exclusively for over-school-age immigrants.

"It's interesting that immigrants can come in and get a fully equipped school, but the children of taxpaying citizens cannot," Howard said.

Mercedes Alejandro, president of Parents for Public Schools, said she may support bringing in an outside organization to run the schools, but questioned Saavedra's timing. It was only last week that the school board approved Saavedra's plan to reorganize the school district administration, a move that Alejandro had hoped would improve the weaker schools.

Still, most trustees agreed something drastic must be done to get Yates, Sam Houston and Kashmere on track.

"We have given everyone involved ample time to remedy the situation," said trustee Kevin Hoffman, who represents Kashmere. "We have to act now on behalf of the students."


Targeting feeder schools
Mike Feinberg, a Houston teacher who co-founded KIPP more than a decade ago, said the organization would only be interested in an arrangement that would give it control of all the elementary and middle schools that feed into the high schools.

"Four years is not enough time to bring kids from where they're performing to the highest levels," Feinberg said. "The problems with Yates, Sam Houston and Kashmere do not start in ninth grade."

KIPP, which operates 38 schools nationally and plans to open nine more this summer, opened its first high school, a charter school, in Houston last fall. KIPP schools specialize in raising performance of urban students by using long class days and weekend studies.

Feinberg's sentiments were echoed by Chris Barbic, head of the three successful YES College Preparatory Schools in Houston.

"The way you ensure high schools perform well is by having great middle schools," said Barbic, who added that he won't be submitting a proposal to HISD.

Saavedra said he's open to proposals that include control of the feeder schools.

Yates and Sam Houston already host Houston-based Project GRAD programs, as do the schools in their feeder patterns. The organization does not manage the schools but offers its own curriculum, requires schools to impose strict disciplinary policies and promises college-bound graduates $1,000 annual scholarships.

Although some HISD trustees and administrators have recently raised questions about Project GRAD's effectiveness, the reform group is considering a takeover proposal, said executive director Roy Hughes.

Whoever gets the contract, it will likely be several years before any of the schools show significant progress, said Robert Wimpelberg, dean of the College of Education at the University of Houston.

"It takes at least six or seven years in a secondary school ... for demonstrable change that is institutionalized," he said. "This is a tall order, and starting with schools that are behind the eight ball is part of the challenge."

jason.spencer@chron.com

http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/topstory/3042049

79th LEGISLATURE
Some districts would see huge windfall

by Jason Embry
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Wednesday, February 16, 2005

The new debate over school finance in the Legislature keeps coming back to an old question.

The issue of how to make sure schools across Texas have similar amounts of money to educate each child has carried the debate over school finance in and out of the courtroom for the better part of four decades. Leaders of the Texas House say the major education bill they're pushing this year would make an already equitable system even more so, in large part by reducing schools' reliance on local property taxes for revenue.

"We've never considered this degree of equity in the history of the state," said Rep. Kent Grusendorf, R-Arlington, chairman of the Public Education Committee.

But critics of that plan point out that about two dozen of the 1,040 school districts in Texas stand to see their revenue shoot up, by more than 50 percent in some cases, because the House plan would limit the amount of local property tax money that a district must hand over for redistribution to other schools.

None of those districts is in the Austin area.

"You take a select group of schools and you super-fund them when you don't have enough money to meet the basic needs of some districts," said Wayne Pierce, executive director of the Equity Center, an advocacy group that represents schools with relatively low property values.

The plan calls for the maximum property tax rate for school maintenance and operation to be reduced from $1.50 per $100 in assessed property value to $1. The state would make up for that money by increasing other taxes. School districts that have smaller tax bases relative to their enrollment would get more money from the state so that all schools have roughly the same revenue per student.

There would still be some revenue-sharing among districts to prevent property-wealthy districts from raising significantly more money than districts with smaller tax bases, though far less than there is now.

In addition, local voters could agree to let the district tack another 10 cents onto their tax rate over five years in the form of a "local enrichment tax."

Grusendorf said the House plan would guarantee that 90 percent of students are in districts that can raise about the same amount of revenue per student with the enrichment tax, up from 79 percent under the current system.

"The Supreme Court has clearly said so long as you equalize the basic program that you can have local enrichment," Grusendorf said. "In my mind there's no question that this passes the constitutional test."

Pierce, however, said the figure fell to 79 percent because lawmakers directed some education money away from the formula in 2003, instead sending it directly to districts.

The House plan would put a 35 percent limit on the amount of local property tax money that a property-wealthy district must send back to the state. Right now, for example, Rep. Dan Branch, R-Dallas, said that one of the school districts he represents, Highland Park, sends about 70 percent of its property tax money outside the district.

"Caesar should never take more than about a third off of an individual's plate, a family's plate or a school district's plate," Branch said.

But the two dozen districts that would have to pay out more than 35 percent if not for the new cap would see large increases in the money available to them. State and local revenues for maintenance and operation in Highland Park would increase from $5,883 per pupil to as much as $8,948, a 52 percent jump.

But many of the other two dozen districts are not in wealthy residential areas. Webb Consolidated, near Laredo, which sits on oil-and gas-rich property but has only about 300 students, would see its per-pupil spending jump from $14,178 to $18,793.

The per-student revenue in the Austin school district would increase from $6,325 per student to $6,515, a 3 percent increase.

Those figures do not account for the enrichment money that districts could raise.

Districts can have vastly different per-student amounts because the current system provides extra money for some types of students, such as those who speak little English or need special education. There is also money in the system to help small school districts.

Still, critics are alarmed by the 23 districts' potential ability to raise and spend so much. Pierce said it's important to remember that districts are part of a larger system.

"You could say all the money in our system is in the state system for public education, regardless of which way it is raised," he said.

Find this article at:
http://www.statesman.com/news/content/shared/tx/
legislature/stories/02/16equity.html
 

Published: February 16, 2005

Plan Would End 48 Programs; High School Effort Is Funded

By Erik W. Robelen
Washington EDUCATION WEEK

It’s really a matter of simple math.

President Bush wants to fashion several new education programs this year, including pricey items central to his oft-touted high school agenda. But he also is proposing for the first time since he entered the White House to cut the overall budget of the U.S. Department of Education.

So, if Mr. Bush is serious about reining in the agency’s spending, something’s got to give.

And he’s asking Congress to give up a lot—48 line items, to be exact. That’s how many of the department’s programs the president wants to put out of business to make room for his priorities. This is not the first time Mr. Bush has sought to abolish a raft of education programs; he’s tried repeatedly, but lawmakers from both parties have largely foiled those efforts.

Among the items on the chopping block this time are funds for education technology, vocational and technical education, arts education, and state grants under the Safe and Drug-Free Schools and Communities program.

Overall, the president’s fiscal 2006 budget request would reduce the Education Department’s discretionary budget by $530 million, or about 1 percent, to $56 billion. The last time the agency’s budget actually shrank was a decade ago, during President Clinton’s administration.

Some lawmakers, including key Republicans, have made clear they’re not interested in Mr. Bush’s idea of shifting $1.3 billion in vocational and technical education aid to his high school agenda.

“I would hate to see the high school program sort of built on the funding back of vocational education,” Rep. Michael N. Castle, the Delaware Republican who chairs the House Education Reform Subcommittee, said last week. “And I don’t think I’m alone in this.”

He predicted that federal lawmakers—as they have before—were likely to substantially rearrange the figures in Mr. Bush’s request before it finally reaches his desk. Indeed, Mr. Castle expressed skepticism last week that the cornerstone of President Bush’s second-term education agenda, expanding high school testing and accountability, would become law this year.
A ‘Disciplined Budget’

The Education Department was one of numerous federal agencies whose budgets were slated for cuts in the budget request that President Bush forwarded to Capitol Hill on Feb. 7. The White House has emphasized that the $2.5 trillion budget package comes in tight fiscal times, as the war in Iraq, homeland security issues, and the president’s stated intention to gradually decrease budget deficits make trade-offs necessary.

“I would call it a disciplined budget,” Mr. Bush said during a Detroit speech a day after announcing his budget plan for fiscal 2006, which begins Oct. 1. “My budget reduces spending—reduces spending—on nonsecurity discretionary programs by 1 percent, the most disciplined proposal since Ronald Reagan was in office.”

The budget, Mr. Bush’s fifth, represents the first time he’s sought to cut the Education Department’s overall discretionary spending, which has grown steadily—and in some years rapidly—since the mid-1990s.

But the big hikes of a few years ago have tapered off. In fact, Congress, which typically had raised the final budget above Mr. Bush’s request, last year for the first time provided less than he asked for. The final discretionary number for the Education Department in fiscal 2005, $56.6 billion, was an increase of almost $1 billion over the previous year, or 1.6 percent.

This year, Mr. Bush has especially set his sights on high schools for added focus, and money.

He is asking Congress to provide $250 million to help states meet his plan to require expanded high school testing. He also wants to create a flexible $1.2 billion pot of money for intervening with high schoolers at risk of academic failure. Beyond that, he wants to boost by eightfold the budget for Striving Readers, a middle and high school reading program, to name a few of the biggest-ticket high school items.

Further, he’s called for a new, $500 million Teacher Incentive Fund to help pay incentives to teachers in high-need schools and high-need subjects, such as math and science. And, he’s seeking to carve out an extra $1 billion to increase the budgets for the Title I program for disadvantaged students—the centerpiece of the No Child Left Behind Act—and special education state grants.

“The budget focuses on key priorities of this department and of the president and on getting results,” Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings said in a Feb. 7 conference call with reporters.

She argued that many of the programs the president wants to shut down have been proved ineffective or are too small to make much of a difference.

“I will tell you that 15 of those are $5 million or less,” Ms. Spellings said of the programs targeted for extinction. “It’s hard to get a critical mass for a national program . . . with small amounts.”

But big or small, members of Congress rarely seem inclined to say farewell to programs.

At a Feb. 7 rally in Philadelphia, Rep. Chaka Fattah, a Pennsylvania Democrat on the House Education and the Workforce Committee, vowed to fight Mr. Bush’s plans to eliminate the $307 million GEAR UP program. An acronym for Gaining Early Awareness and Readiness for Undergraduate Programs, the program helps low-income elementary and secondary students prepare for college.

“We have seen it work in every state,” Mr. Fattah said. “President Bush . . . should be ashamed to submit this budget to the United States Congress.”
‘Stay and Fight’

In an interview last week, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts, the top Democrat on the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, expressed dismay with Mr. Bush’s request. He and other Democrats have long argued that with the ambitious demands of the No Child Left Behind Act to improve student achievement, the federal government must provide much more aid.

“The fact is, the education budget of the administration is just inadequate to meet the education needs of this nation,” Mr. Kennedy said. “This nation, with a $2.5 trillion budget, ought to be able to afford the kinds of investments in the No Child Left Behind Act, vocational education, and in higher education which are absolutely essential.”

Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., said he has decided to remain as the chairman of the Appropriations Committee’s subcommittee for labor, health and human services, and education this year to protect social spending from the president’s proposed cuts. He had been contemplating a shift to a new spending panel on intelligence matters.

“Strong advocacy for education, health care, and worker safety will be indispensable if they are to get their fair share of President Bush’s austere budget,” he wrote in a Feb. 8 op-ed piece in The Washington Post. “Fiscal 2006 looks like an especially tough year, so I’ve decided to stay and fight rather than switch.”

But some members of Congress were more welcoming of the president’s plan.

“I commend President Bush for proposing a fiscally responsible budget that will rein in federal spending and protect our top priorities, such as national defense, homeland security, and job creation,” Rep. Virginia Foxx, a freshman Republican from North Carolina who serves on the education committee, said on the House floor last week.

Although she suggested that lawmakers may differ with the president on some details, Ms. Foxx called the plan a “good first step in the right direction.”

“I am encouraged that he wants to hold federal programs to a firm test of accountability and eliminate programs that no longer serve their intended purpose or perform a vital function,” she said.

Rep. Castle said in an interview that while he opposes some of the president’s proposed cuts, he foresees little, if any, growth in the education budget total beyond Mr. Bush’s request.

“This White House is serious about the numbers,” he said, “so I think if you want to come back and say, ‘Hey look, we’ve got to fund this on education,’ we’ve got to be ready to show what we’re not going to fund this year, unlike a lot of other years.”

One of the most controversial targets in the plan is vocational and technical education.

Mr. Bush wants to redirect the $1.3 billion currently spent on those activities to his new High School Intervention program. The Education Department notes in its detailed budget proposal that the vocational state grants, which account for most of that money, have been rated “ineffective” by the White House Office of Management and Budget for having “produced little or no evidence of improved outcomes for students despite decades of federal investment.”

And yet, many department programs not targeted for elimination haven’t exactly received a thumbs-up. The OMB analysis rated many programs as “results not demonstrated.” For instance, the OMB said of the nearly $11 billion special education state grants that “there is no evidence that this program improves outcomes.”

The new high school program, the Education Department says, would support targeted interventions that raise the achievement of high schoolers, especially those at risk of not meeting state standards. States could still choose to fund vocational programs with that money, though vocational education advocates argue that support for their programs would likely get squeezed out.

Hanging the high school plans on cuts elsewhere may be risky.

Last year, the president tried to cut the vocational and technical education grants by some $300 million, but Congress refused to go along. Vocational programs have some influential friends, from Rep. Castle to Sen. Michael B. Enzi, R-Wyo., the chairman of the Senate education committee, and Rep. John E. Peterson, R-Pa., who serves on the House appropriations panel.

“This is one of my top issues, and I find it very disappointing that we have to go through the . . . battle again,” Rep. Peterson said in an interview last week.

“We’re trying to send everybody down this academic trail,” he said, arguing that many jobs require technical training.

“We beat it back last year,” Mr. Peterson said of the president’s previous effort to trim vocational aid. “I don’t think they’re going to win that battle.”
PHOTO: Customers wait to pick up copies of the proposed fiscal 2006 federal budget last week at the Government Printing Office in Washington. For the first time in his tenure, President Bush is seeking a cut in Department of Education spending.
—Mark Wilson/Getty Images

Vol. 24, Issue 23, Pages 1,35-36
http://www.edweek.org/