NewsTaco

By Roque Planas, Huffington Post Latino Voices

They fought the law, and they won.

The Texas activist organization known as Librotraficante celebrated a victory last week over state lawmakers that wanted to put the squeeze on ethnic studies.

Conservative State Sen. Dan Patrick (R-Houston) raised a fury among Latino activists and professors with a proposal to exempt ethnic studies and other college classes from counting toward the fulfillment of state history requirements, but gained little support for the effort. With just two weeks to go before the Texas legislative session winds to a close, Senate Bill 1128 has yet to get voted out of the Senate High Education Committee.

“Logistically speaking, it would be very difficult for it to pass at this point,” Logan Spence, a spokesman for Patrick’s office, told The Huffington Post Monday.

Opponents had railed against the bill, likening it to a law in Arizona that was used to shut down a progressive Mexican American Studies class in Tucson.

“This is a warning to all far right legislators in any State of the Union, if you attack our History, our Culture, or our books, we will defy you,” Tony Diaz, one of the leaders behind the Librotraficante movement, said in a statement Thursday. “And we will win.”

Patrick filed SB 1128 in response to a report by the National Association of Scholars, a nonpartisan group that some Latino scholars describe as conservative, according to the San Antonio Express-News.

The NAS study, “Recasting History,” argued that U.S. history courses at the University of Texas at Austin and Texas A&M University have shifted their focus toward race, gender and class rather than more traditional scholarly interests, like intellectual and military history.

The University of Texas at Austin opposed that interpretation when the bill was filed. In January, the university put out a statement saying the study “raises some important questions, but it also paints a narrowly defined and largely inaccurate picture of the quality, depth and breadth of history teaching and research at The University of Texas at Austin.”

The UT-Austin statement points out that scholars paid little attention to race, class and gender until the 1960s. “Rather than ‘diminish attention to other areas’ as the NAS report suggests, these areas of study have broadened the view on historical events and personalities,” the statement says.

Facing criticism for the bill, Patrick wrote a message on his Facebook in March, saying:

The reason I filed this bill is…

READ FULL STORY HERE

This article was first published in Huffington Post Latino Voices.

[Photo by The Brit_2]

By Abby Sewell, Los Angeles Times

A group of parents and students have filed a federal lawsuit against the Compton school district alleging a pattern of abuse and racial profiling of Latinos by school police.

By John Benson, Voxxi

A brand-new Pew Research Center report reveals not only is the high school dropout rate at a record low but Hispanic high school graduates have surpassed non-Hispanic whites in the college enrollment rate.

“Over the last few years, particularly since the great recession, I’ve been following college-going in general, and Hispanics have made strides,” Pew Hispanic Center Senior Research Associate Rick Fry told VOXXI. “This is the first time we have published on this particular sort of college enrollment rate. In the past we simply said, ‘Okay, let’s take all the 18 to 24 years old out there and sort of ask, are they currently enrolled in college?’ That’s different.”

The new study, which was co-authored by Fry and Director Paul Taylor, focused around the class of 2012, which showed a record 69 percent of Hispanic high school graduates enrolled in college. That figure is two percentage points higher than the rate among their non-Hispanic white counterparts. As recently as the class of 2000, only 49 percent of Hispanic high school graduates immediately enrolled in college the following fall.

Furthermore, the increase is tied directly to 2011 high school dropout data with 14 percent of Hispanics, age 16 to 24, falling into the category. That figure was cut in half compared to 2000 when 28 percent of Hispanics were high school dropouts.

Overall, the data is eye opening.

“Obviously all of that is very encouraging to us,” League of United Latin American Citizens [LULAC] Director of Education Policy Luis A. Torres told VOXXI. “They note there is a strong cultural bias for education among the Latino community more than the average American. That is data we’ve seen for a long time, that 88 percent of students surveyed by ages 16 to 24 say they need college education in order to be successful in life.”

Torres added that another factor listed in the study is the labor market activity has accelerated college enrollment of Hispanics. Basically, the high unemployment rate has pointed Latino youth towards higher education.

Excelencia in Education Co-Founder and Vice President for Policy and Research Deborah Santiago told VOXXI, she agrees a soft job market has played a role in increasing college enrollment for Latinos but she also feels the pipeline is doing a better job of preparing today’s Hispanic youth.

“We still have a lot of progress to do in K-12, but Latinos are more likely to be college ready than they would have been in the past,” Santiago said.

Hispanic high school graduates – where are they going to?

While Hispanic educational leaders are championing the new data, the Pew study leads to more questions, such as what college are Latinos attending and are they graduating?

“What we’re showing is that more young Hispanics are going on to college the following fall, and while most observers would think that’s a good thing, there’s more to it,” Fry said “What is their college experience going to be and how many of them four to six years down the road will have bachelor’s degrees? We do know that Hispanic undergraduates lag in finishing bachelor’s degrees.”

Santiago said Latino undergraduates are 14 percent of undergraduates overall in college, and annually make up 10 percent of graduates. And while the Pew study shows 69 percent of the class of 2012 Hispanic high school graduates are going to college, the current overall graduation rate for Latinos is 47 percent.

The good news is, she said, an upcoming Excelencia in Education study shows that college graduation figure is also on the rise.

“We need to focus a little bit more of our energy on retention and completion as well,” Santiago said. “That means, what are institutions doing to retain them once they enroll? Are they providing academic support services, things that we know work like first year experience and learning communities? Those are ways to retain students to completion.”

Are these findings misleading?

The graduation figure among Hispanics also may be misleading, stressed Torres, who added Latinos are less likely to be enrolled in four-year universities, less likely to be enrolled in selective four-year universities and less likely to be enrolled full-time.

“It may take a student longer to complete a bachelor’s degree if they have a staggered sort of enrollment term that starts at a community college, maybe includes a year off and ends up enrolling at a four-year institution,” Torres said. “That’s a longer enrollment term, which makes college completion rates for Hispanics as a whole much lower because usually those are calculated in four-year increments.”

Considering the momentum experienced around Hispanic college enrollment, Torres said the time is now to reshape public policies. Specifically in his crosshairs is financial aid. He said Hispanics are more likely to apply for financial aid but are the group least likely to receive any.

“From this study we know Hispanics are less likely to enroll in a four-year university, yet our financial aid system is designed for a traditional student at a four-year university that is likely full-time,” Torres said. “So our financial aid system is designed to reward that type of traditional student and Hispanics aren’t that. Many are post-traditional students, go to community college, work 30 to 35 hours, are enrolled part-time and may take longer to finish a bachelor’s degree.”

So while Latinos may go to college, they are less likely than their non-Hispanic white counterparts to be enrolled full-time. In October 2011, only 78 percent of Hispanic 18- to 24-year-old college students were enrolled full-time compared to 85 percent of non-Hispanic whites.

Another area where Santiago said the Pew study could lead to changes is in the number of Latinos receiving associate’s degrees.

While 20 percent of Hispanic adults have an associate’s degree, the figure is doubled for non-Hispanic whites.

“We have every opportunity to close that gap and build on these enrollment numbers,” Santiago said. “These are real opportunities for people to make an investment and support the population. We see pockets of that happening all over the country.”

Overall, Fry feels his Pew study is possibly the tip of the iceberg that the Latino community has been waiting for and working towards. However, he points out the future remains uncertain.

“The findings are an optimistic, encouraging educational indicator,” Fry said. “It’s good that we’re finding that Hispanic high school dropout rates are narrowing and diminishing because in today’s job market the opportunities, if you don’t at least have a high school education, are very limited. So the notion that immediately following commencement or high school graduation that they’re going through the steps to get themselves on college campuses, that’s generally a positive sign, but you have to remember those are steps in a wider process.”

Figures at a glance

• 69 percent of Hispanic high school graduates in the class of 2012 enrolled in college that fall, which is higher than 67 percent of non-Hispanic white counterparts. As recently as the class of 2000, only 49 percent of Hispanic high school graduates immediately enrolled in college the following fall. The class of 2012 finds 67 percent of non-Hispanic whites, 63 percent of non-Hispanic blacks and 84 percent of non-Hispanic Asians enrolled in college in October.

• 14 percent of Hispanics aged 16 to 24 were high school dropouts in 2011 compared to 28 percent in 2000. During that same time frame, non-Hispanic white high school dropouts declined from 7 percent to 5 percent.

• Hispanic college students are less likely than their non-Hispanic white counterparts to enroll in a four-year college (that’s 56 percent versus 72 percent).

• When young Latinos go to college, they are less likely than their non-Hispanic white counterparts to be enrolled full-time. In October 2011, only 78 percent of Hispanic 18- to 24-year-old college students were enrolled full-time. By comparison, 85 percent of similar non-Hispanic whites were enrolled full-time.

By Félix Pérez, Education Votes

Gaby Pacheco is a tireless advocate for DREAMers. She’s testified before the U.S. Senate, was profiled by Time magazine, walked 1,500 miles from Miami to Washington, D.C., and has been interviewed on more news programs and by more newspaper reporters than she can remember.

But when all is said and done, she gives credit to educators for whatever she’s been able to accomplish.

“I’m here because of you,” Pacheco told educators from across the nation gathered in Washington this Saturday.

“I’m here because I had great and amazing educators and school personnel, counselors and coaches who loved me and cared for me and educated me. I’m here because of great public schools.”

Pacheco, like the 60,000 DREAMers who graduate from U.S. high schools every year, had no say in the matter when she was brought to the United Sates by her parents as a young child. Her life and her aspirations are uniquely American. Pacheco earned a degree in special education and fulfilled her teaching internship at Florida’s Miami Senior High School.

Arizona math teacher Dennis Van Roekel, president of the National Education Association, said educators are “on the side of the angels” when it comes to immigration reform. “Compassion compels us to act.”

Van Roekel continued:

We call them DREAMers because they’re aspiring young Americans who dream the American Dream. They are valedictorians, honor students, idealistic, hard-working. They are our students and former students, and given a chance they will be our future.

Educators and DREAMers nationwide contributed to history when the first comprehensive immigration reform legislation in more than 25 years was introduced in the Senate three weeks ago.

The “Gang of Eight” bill confers special status on DREAMers and prioritizes family unification. Titled the Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernization Act, the bill:

• Provides a five-year path to citizenship for DREAMers who arrived in the United Sates before the age of 16 and have completed high school or earned a GED.
• Retains the ineligible status of DREAMers, until they are citizens, from all forms of federal financial aid and means-tested public benefits, such as the Children’s Health Insurance Program, Temporary Assistance for Needy families and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.
• Emphasizes family unification and increased training, personnel and resources for immigration courts.
• Stipulates that individuals in the United States prior to December 31, 2011, will have a 13-year pathway to citizenship provided they pass a background check, show a grasp of basic English, and pay any assessed tax liability, fees and a $500 fine.

This Thursday the Senate Judiciary Committee begins a weeks-long process of debating and amending the bipartisan Gang of Eight bill. A bill has yet to be introduced in the House.

Van Roekel and Pacheco commended the Gang of Eight for bringing the bill forward. The critical step now, said Van Roekel, is that “the politicians have to hear from their constituents” repeatedly as the legislative process unfolds into the summer.

Related Articles:

Los Angeles Times: ‘A student with promise, a teacher who had to help’

Colleges, universities join immigration reform movement for DREAMer students

This article was first published in NEA Today.

Félix Perez is Senior Poltiical Writer at NEA.

[Photo by DREAMCoalition]

PRESS RELEASE

High School Drop-out Rate at Record Low

A record seven-in-ten (69%) Hispanic high school graduates in the class of 2012 enrolled in college that fall, two percentage points higher than the rate (67%) among their white counterparts, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of new data from the Census Bureau. As recently as the class of 2000, only 49% of Hispanic high school graduates immediately enrolled in college the following fall.

 This milestone is the result of a long-term increase in Hispanic college-going that accelerated with the onset of the recession in 2008. The rate among white high school graduates, by contrast, has declined slightly since 2008.

 The positive trends in Hispanic educational indicators also extend to high school. The most recent available data show that in 2011 only 14% of Hispanic 16- to 24-year-olds were high school dropouts, half the level in 2000 (28%). Starting from a much lower base, the high school dropout rate among whites also declined during that period (from 7% in 2000 to 5% in 2011), but did not fall by as much.

 Despite the narrowing of some of these long-standing educational attainment gaps, Hispanics continue to lag whites in a number of key higher education measures. Young Hispanic college students are less likely than their white counterparts to enroll in a four-year college (56% versus 72%), they are less likely to attend a selective college, less likely to be enrolled in college full time, and less likely to complete a bachelor’s degree.

 The report, “Hispanic High School Graduates Pass Whites in Rate of College Enrollment,” authored by Richard Fry, senior research associate in Pew Hispanic Center, and Paul Taylor, executive vice president of Pew Research Center, is available at the Pew Hispanic Center’s website,www.pewhispanic.org.

 Pew Research Center is a nonpartisan source of data and analysis. It does not take advocacy positions. Its Hispanic Center, founded in 2001, seeks to improve understanding of the U.S. Hispanic population and to chronicle Latinos’ growing impact on the nation.

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[Photoby hharryus]

Instructor Jacqueline La Torre (left) , students (left to right), Monica Rodas, Heidi Maqueos, Dahlia Perez, Magaly Ordonez and Tiffany Sosa.

By Esmeralda Fabián, La Opinion/New America Media

NAM Ed. Note: In 2011, California’s legislature passed AB 790, a statewide initiative aimed at addressing the growing number of high school graduates unprepared or under-prepared for either college or a career. Studies document that up to 70 percent of high school seniors fall into one of these two categories. The initiative targeted 20 school districts and nearly a third, or some 600,000 high school students across California. Schools implementing the Linked Learning Pilot Program – one of a number of school reform efforts in the state – integrate academic rigor with a demanding technical curriculum geared toward a professional field. In its first two years, the program has met with promising success. This is the second of three stories by New America Media’s ethnic media partners on how Linked Learning is being applied in some of the state’s most underserved communities.

LOS ANGELES – High school student Heidi Maqueos never thought much about the street vendors scattered about her neighborhood in East Los Angeles. That all changed, though, when she and several classmates produced a documentary about them as part of a class project.

The experience, she says, opened her eyes to the forces shaping her community.

“The problem of street vendors comes from having no immigration papers, [finding work in] the bad economy and being poor,” says Maqueos, a senior at the Los Angeles School of Global Studies.

The school is part of a statewide initiative known as the Linked Learning Pilot Program – established in 2011 under AB 790 and involving 63 districts and roughly 600,00 high school students across California. Advocates say Linked Learning programs not only address the needs of the state’s rapidly changing economy, but also help boost student performance.

“We had to research the pros and cons of doing business in the street, and the health, public health, law or potential economic impact of legalizing their businesses,” Maqueos explained.

She and four classmates produced the documentary, “A Forbidden Life: Plight of the Street Vendor,” for their Digital Media and Design class. Students in the class, says teacher Jacqueline La Torre, “learn technical skills in making visual media by getting involved in issues that affect their community and their environment.”

One of those skills, La Torre adds, is communication. Many of the students she works with initially struggle to engage with people outside their immediate circles, she says, noting that through the course of the program she has seen some “impressive strides.”

Reversing Trends

One-third of California high school students drop out before graduating, according to ConnectEd, one of several education reform groups that helped craft the pilot program. For those who do graduate, nearly one-third are unprepared for college or a career.

For California’s economy, those are disturbing figures. A 2012 report put out by the group California Competes notes that by 2025, the state’s workforce will suffer a shortage of about 2.3 million qualified workers who lack either a college or vocational degree.

Supporters of Linked Learning and similar models say their approach to education can help reverse these trends. Particularly for traditionally underserved populations, including African American and Latino students, the model has shown to be effective in boosting graduation rates.

Rosa Maria Hernandez is the Los Angeles Unified School District’s (LAUSD) Linked Learning program director. She says the benefits for students and the state are clear. “We know that today’s students need to be ready with the skills that employers are demanding,” she says, “whether they plan to go to college or choose a vocational career.”

Hernandez’ office oversees Linked Learning programs in 11 high schools across the district. Only two, Global Studies and Los Angeles High School of the Arts, are Linked Learning certified, meaning the entire curriculum is modeled on the Linked Learning approach. That approach consists of four key components: academic, technical, work-based – internships and work shadows – and finally a support structure that includes counseling and supplemental instruction.

“There are no requirements for students [or] schools that want to participate,” Hernandez says, apart from an administration that is “ready and willing to implement the program.”

At Global Studies, where over 90 percent of the school’s 350 students are Latino, attendance rates have surged to over 95 percent since it implemented the Linked Learning program two years ago. It has also seen gains in its Academic Performance Index (API) score, a measure of the school’s annual progress.

“Absolutely, [Linked Learning] has contributed to a higher graduation rate,” says Principal Christian Quintero. “When [the school] started 7 years ago we had a graduation rate of 38 percent and an API of 520. Over the years, we have increased our graduation rate to over 89 percent and the API to 653 in 2011.”

As for the 50 percent of graduates who do not go on to college, Quintero says the majority are “career ready” by the time they leave school.

Engaging Students and the Community

Hernandez says her office is looking to add another 10 Linked Learning programs in schools across the district over the next two years. That effort received a boost when the LAUSD board announced a resolution in late April calling for the expansion of Linked Learning programs.

The resolution also stressed the importance of gaining wider support from local employers and community-based organizations. One of those, the social justice nonprofit East Los Angeles Community Corporation (ELACC), worked with Maqueos and her classmates on their film project.

“I was surprised to see their commitment,” says Janet Favela, a community organizer with ELACC. “[They] worked on Saturdays, [and showed a] strong interest in the cause of social justice. I was really impressed with the presentation of their final project.”

That presentation was the result of long hours spent compiling and editing raw material. Monica Rhodes was another of the students working on the film. She admits it wasn’t easy. “There were times when we worked up to 12 hours at a stretch editing the interviews,” she recalls.

Like her classmates, she says the experience gave her a broader understanding of her own capabilities and how they can be applied beyond the classroom.

“Times have changed,” notes Hernandez. “Today, a good student isn’t someone who learns by sitting down and not saying anything, but is someone who is involved in their own learning.”

This article was first published in New America Media.

Esmeralda Fabian is a Los Angeles-based education reporter with La Opinion newspaper. This story was produced by New America Media and made possible through a grant from the California Education Policy Fund.

[Photo courtesy New America Media]

From left: Ray Salazar, David Steele, Linda Darling-Hammond, Dale Mezzacappa

By Ray Salazar, NewsTaco

Few areas of education policy and practice are evolving as rapidly as teacher evaluation. Moving beyond a Lake Wobegon world where all teachers are perfunctorily rated above average is seen as a linchpin in the strategy to improve student learning by enhancing teacher effectiveness. But what are the best ways to draw an accurate picture of a teacher’s performance?

To explore this question, on Friday, the Education Writers Association National Seminar (EWA) at Stanford University included a panel titled K-12 Teacher Evaluation: Seeking Common Ground with a professor, a school district administrator, and a teacher.  The moderator was Dale Mezzacappa from the Philadelphia Public School Notebook.  The panel included these speakers:

Linda Darling-Hammond, Standford Graduate School of Education

David Steele, Hillsborough County Florida School District, and

me, Ray Salazar, The White Rhino Blog–which tied for 2nd place in the Best Blog category of EWA’s national reporting contest.

This is the statement I prepared:

Thank you to the Education Writers Association for inviting my teacher voice to be part of this panel.

Our profession has changed. In 1995, when I began my teaching career, I did not have an email address. The Internet was barely finding its way into our schools.

Today, even on Chicago’s Southwest side where almost 100% of my school’s population is low-income, almost every student has a cell phone with Internet access.

A bigger change is that teacher evaluation has gone from being private (between teachers and principals) to being public (between the teacher and anybody and everybody).

After today, I hope more journalists include teachers’ voices in their reporting. Too often, teachers’ voices are not the ones quoted online or in print. We can help to create common ground by articulating the truths and misunderstandings about our profession.

In Chicago, we moved away from a 1980s checklist of extremes with strengths and weaknesses. Now, we use four clearly defined levels of performance for four domains:

1: Planning and Preparation

2: Classroom Environment

3: Instruction

4: Professional Responsibilities

This evaluation system finally articulates what some in our profession and some in teacher-preparation programs feared to define—what is a good teacher?

My students at Hancock High School know:

“Good teachers,” one student wrote, “believe even the student in the back of the class with his head down can succeed.”

“Good teachers challenge students to surpass what they already know–so they achieve academic success.”

“Good teachers react quickly when they notice a student is struggling.”

“Bad teachers,” on the other hand one wrote, “don’t know how to incorporate the outside world with in-class assignments.”

“Bad teachers think they are always right.”

One truth about teacher evaluation is that it must be designed to help teachers improve. An accurate picture of a teacher’s performance is gained by making the evaluation conversation a regular part of our day. We must watch ourselves and others teach. We must examine student work. We must have the courage to say to colleagues, “I’m having trouble with this.” We must also find the courage to say to colleagues, “You’re assignment is not higher-level thinking.” Once-a-year classroom visits won’t help.

A good administrator or teacher knows the reality of the classroom and can engage teachers of all performance levels in a conversation to improve their practice. A wise retired principal told me that anyone can be trained to use the new evaluation system. But not everyone can use it to help a teacher improve. The evaluator needs to be or have been a successful educator.

If we focus on improving our practice, schools will retain good teachers. Bad teachers, and there are some, will know why they are ineffective and they can make a choice: improve or leave the profession.

In the overload of paperwork and politics, however, we can only improve teacher practice if we remember that doing what’s best for students is not enough. The truth is–we must do what’s best for students and what’s manageable for teachers.

In March, when I heard the Chicago Public Schools Chief Communications Officer say in the Chicago Tribune, “You could have a teacher that is high-quality that could take 40 kids in a class and help them succeed.” I have to say, Becky Carroll—you have no idea what’s best for students and what’s manageable for teachers.

Giving students a voice in the teacher evaluations is beneficial and manageable for teachers. One of my students wrote, “A teacher can change the day the principal comes in. We’re the ones that see the real teacher every day and are affected by what he does.” We avoid unfair student evaluations by making student feedback a regular part of our instruction. We also need to ask targeted questions:

• Does the teacher respect students?
• Does the teacher give assignments that make you a better writer?

As we create safe environments where students feel comfortable with themselves, with each other, with people in power, good teachers do more than make students feel good about themselves. On report-card pick up day last month, I saw a tweet by a CPS teacher that read: “Ready to tell parents how amazing their kids are.”

I thought, “Really? You really think that parents don’t know this? That teacher should have said he was ready to tell parents what the student’s academic strengths and areas for development are and what they can do—together—to address these. That’s the tweet that should have gone out.

Incomplete education reporting also contributes to misunderstandings of what a good teacher does. In Chicago, the Academy for Urban School Leadership receives praise in the newspapers. This school-transformation organization uses Teach Like a Champion: 49 Techniques that Put Students on the Path to College by Doug Lemov to train teachers. After a semester of teaching in an AUSL teacher-training academy, I left because, although I believe in a disciplined school, I do not believe in socializing students to be passive participants.

My blog post titled, “This School Year, Don’t Teach Like a Champion” challenges Lemov’s inaccurate definition of championship teaching. When the AUSL coach defined success by having me pass out papers in under 20 seconds, because she stood in the back and timed me, I said no–this is an ill-founded profession priority.

So I ask the journalists in the room, distinguish among these three aspects when reporting about teaching:

1. Classroom management: how class is run and how the students and teachers interact

2. Social-emotional development: how the teacher builds students’ confidence and recognizes their emotional struggles

3. Instruction: how students learn to read, to write, to think critically.

Observe the instruction and ask yourself–is this preparing students for success, one day, in my world?

We also have to stop looking at teachers through a lens of extremes: good teacher / bad teacher. These superficial polarized conversations are fueled by a recent blog post by education historian Diane Ravitch. “Maybe,” she said, “the Common Core Standards will be great. Maybe they will be a disaster.” Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, also fueled superficial polarization this week. While I accept her rationale for a two-year moratorium on Common Core testing, I challenge her extremes. She said, “I predict these standards will result in one of two outcomes. They will either lead to a revolution in teaching and learning. Or they will end up in the overflowing dust bin of abandoned reforms.” These views are like the outdated teacher evaluation checklist of extremes CPS just abandoned. We need more thoughtful reactions to enrich the teacher evaluation conversation.

The other misconception is that teachers cannot fight against the limits of our students’ poverty, violence, or tragedy. One of the blog posts I submitted for the EWA reporting contest is an article about Dulce Padilla whose brother was killed by gun fire and whose sister was murdered five years later. Dulce told me that, after the incident, all she wanted was time to heal. A clinical psychologist advised me to help students heal by providing age-appropriate opportunities to share their experiences—when they are ready to share.

When Dulce chose to write about her sister’s death for a personal essay assignment, I did not tell her how sorry I felt for her. That’s not my place as a writing teacher. Instead, I made sure Dulce used a semicolon correctly, unified her paragraphs, and defined her rhetorical purpose. If you read the article on my blog, you can read parts of her essay.

Some educators argue that our low-income, troubled students cannot learn the skills for the ACT because they have too much on their minds. To them and to everyone who believes this I say–good teachers help students heal and transcend their circumstances through academic work and social-emotional support.

Finally, while I believe the consequences of using standardized tests in teacher evaluation will cause more harm than good for students, I do believe that good teachers must incorporate the ACT College Readiness Standards or, now, transition to the Common Core Standards because if we ignore them, we perpetuate the classist, racist, sexist views many activists claim to be fighting against. Good teachers use these standards to help students enter a real-world conversation that matters to them.

To see Linda Darling-Hammond’s and David Steele’s slides, follow this link.

To hear a recording of the presentation click HERE.

In your view, what are the best ways to draw an accurate picture of a teacher’s performance?

[Photo by Samantha Hernandez]

By Yvonne Marquez and Lule Winkie, Dallas Morning News

Hispanics have passed whites as the largest ethnic group in Texas schools, making up almost 51 percent of public school enrollment.

The influx of Hispanic students, many from poor families, has brought about many changes in classrooms, with more expected as that population continues to grow.

Some schools already struggle with how to teach an increasing number of poor children who don’t speak English. Others are preparing for a day when their enrollment primarily is made up of low-income students, most of them Hispanic.

Click on the picture to read the full story.

[Photo By SCA Svenska Cellulosa Aktiebolaget]

By Anthony Cotton, Denver Post

Marking the end of a decade-long effort to provide in-state tuition rates to Colorado college students in the U.S. illegally, Gov. John Hickenlooper signed Senate Bill 33, also known as the ASSET bill, into law on Monday.

“Now you have to do the work,” Hickenlooper told the many students among the hundreds of people attending the event at Metropolitan State University of Denver’s Student Success Center.

Click on the picture to read the full story.

[Photo by Roy Lee B.]

By Shaya Tayefe Mohaje, Associated Press/Huffington Post Latino Voices

LOS ANGELES — About 20,000 students in California who need to learn English aren’t getting adequate language instruction, according to a lawsuit against the state and education workers filed Wednesday by the American Civil Liberties Union.

Under state and federal law, schools are required to teach non-English speakers the language, but by its own records, the state isn’t offering English instruction to nearly 20,000 students. The suit alleges that lack of instruction has meant some children had to be held back a grade or live with low proficiency scores because of a language barrier.

Click on the picture to read the full story.

[Photo by Editor B]

By Associated Press/The Republic

Mexico State University for not including it in the selection process involving a new campus president.

The criticism came in a letter disclosed Monday by the New Mexico League of United Latin American Citizens as candidates for the job begin community forums.

The group also faulted the university on the number of Latinos on its Board of Regents.

Click on the picture to read the full story.

[Photo courtesy headthegong.com]

By Susana G. Baumann, Voxxi

A projected 37.6 million or 80 percent of the 47 million new workers entering the labor force in the next four decades will be of Hispanic origin. However, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, unemployment rate for Hispanics (9.7 percent) is still higher than the national average for whites (6.8 percent) mostly due to disadvantages in schooling.

Is everything harder for young Latinos looking to build their future through a higher education?

A hot topic in the national arena, affordability of higher education  is even hotter for some groups like Dreamers and other Latino students, especially because interest rates on student loans are expected to skyrocket—doubling in next July.

College tuition has mushroomed as well. According to ScholarshipExperts.com, a free scholarship search service, the average tuition and fees charged by both private and public U.S. four-year colleges and universities combined has risen 7.1 percent annually since 1981.

So how do young Latinos, expected to become the U.S. qualified labor force of the 21st century, afford a higher education?

Job opportunities versus a higher education

“Our Hispanic population is very diverse all throughout the country, and levels of education, training and opportunities are diverse as well,” Dr. Ricardo Romo, President of The University of Texas (UT) at San Antonio told VOXXI. “In our region, for instance, the oil industry has generated over 60 billion in revenue and spent more than 20 billion in creating infrastructure and thousands of jobs but has also attracted young people who go to work in the oil fields right after high school.”

According to Dr. Romo, this is a good problem to have due to the economic impact that the oil industry has had on the South Texas economy. The increase of natural gas and oil production in the Eagle Ford Shale has created a vast economic footprint with revenues reaching $61 billion, more than double the output of 2011 at $25 billion, according to a study by the Center for Community and Business Research at the University of Texas at San Antonio Institute for Economic Development.

With a Hispanic population at almost 40 percent, young Tejanos and Latinos in South Texas are attracted to job opportunities that can pay considerable salaries such as almost $80K for a truck driver position in the oil fields. Can they be blamed?

“I compare the oil rush to the ‘Gold Rush,’ when workers came to the West to get rich but the reality was that most did not do well. These are just well-paid jobs but not a long-term opportunity,” Dr. Ricardo Romo affirmed.

The UT President believes higher education is the only guarantee to increase opportunities for good jobs, a fact proven year after year in higher education reports.

College affordability versus better educational outcomes

While community colleges and state universities seem to be the right choice for affordability, obtaining a better education and a network that will help young Latinos reach qualified jobs in C-suites and political representation requires a considerable amount of money.

Dr. Romo believes that when there is passion in getting an education, there are no obstacles or excuses. “Some people don’t get in debt, some people get jobs while in college,” he said.

But with college tuition at a range of over $40K or $50K yearly at the best universities around the country, juggling a job and demanding school assignments can be a daunting task.

“Let’s face it, from a realistic point of view, not everybody has to go to college. One of the main discussions in higher education circles around students opting between community colleges and long-term colleges,” Dr. Ricardo Romo concedes.

Of course there are ways that can be used to reduce college tuition but not every Latino student and their parents are aware of such opportunities.  So how can financial aid policies help ensure that more Hispanics have a chance to attend college and stay in college until they graduate?

What needs to be done

The UT President believes an important first step was President Obama’s Student Aid Financial Responsibility Act (SAFRA) in 2010, which takes private loans subsidies to boost the Pell Grant program.

“But we also need to start at an earlier stage,” he said. “Our challenge and our struggle as a society are to place education as a priority. We recently had $4 billion in cuts for the K-12 education budget in the state of Texas, which certainly does not help.”

Dr. Romo, who moderated the President’s panel at the 2013 American Association of Hispanics in Higher Education conference, shared some of the participants’ recommendations. “First, we need to do more to get younger generations to a pre-elementary education very early,” he said.

Studies show that students achieve at higher levels and better in the long-term when they start school at a very young age, with long-lasting effects in school competence; developed abilities, attitudes and values; and impact on the family. Moreover, they are more likely to be employed, less likely to be incarcerated and can make larger and better contributions to their communities and the economy.

Recommendations also included increasing partnerships at federal, state and local levels to help students and educators accomplish their goals with additional resources.  “It is especially important to include the business community and encourage their contribution to educational opportunities. After all, they will become these young students’ future employers,” Dr. Romo said.

Finally, communities need to come together, partner and help each other, not only the higher education communities but also the communities at large, increasing the number of Latinos in the pipelines trough programs such as Project MALES (Mentoring to Achieve Latino Educational Success).

“Since I became President of UT, and for 13 years, I was the only Hispanic to head a large research institution such as this one,” he said.

The fifth president of UT at San Antonio—named by the Texas Legislature as an emerging Tier One research university—Dr. Romo was born and raised in San Antonio, Texas. Dr. Ricardo Romo graduated from Fox Tech High School and attended the University of Texas at Austin on a track scholarship.

He holds a master’s degree in History from Loyola Marymount University (1970) and a Ph.D. in History from the University of California, Los Angeles (1975). He is the author of “East Los Angeles: History of a Barrio”, and has received numerous recognitions and awards for his dedication to excellence in education.

Nearly 31,000 students are enrolled at UT San Antonio, representing 68 percent growth in student registration since Dr. Romo took office. Under his leadership, the university has added a number of programs and facilities that has increased total research expenditures to $56.8 million and total expenditures to $79.4 million for fiscal year 2011, a six-fold increase during Romo’s tenure.

This article was first published in Voxxi.

Susana G Baumann is the Director of LCSWorldwide. A multicultural expert, a business blogger & a published author. Booklist Online calls her book “Hola, amigos! A Plan for Latino Outreach” a “centerpiece of the publisher’s Latinos and Libraries series.”

[Photo  by James Almond]

By John Benson, Voxxi

The recently released Obama’s budget proposal has educators within the Latino community cautiously optimistic.

One such person is California State University San Bernardino Education Professor and Latino Education and Advocacy Days (LEAD) Executive Director Enrique G. Murillo, Jr. PhD.

“From my stance as an educator professional and someone who deals with issues around Latino students, I have to praise it,” Murillo told VOXXI. “Of course, it’ll go through a process and things get changed but the blueprint is favorable to Latinos in higher education.”

According to Murillo, among the highlights of Obama’s budget proposal are the increase in Federal Pell Grants and work-study programs. He said the latter, a federally funded program assisting students with the costs of post-secondary education, are lacking in colleges across the country.

Latinos in College Director of Operations for Latinos Christine L Mendonça told VOXXI,“ President Obama’s 2014 budget proposal would benefit the Latino community tremendously, from increasing the number of students who have access to early childhood education to aligning high school education with the demands of a global marketplace to a focus on containing the cost of secondary education.”

The national non-profit Latinos in College is based in New York with a mission to increase the number of Latino students who attend and graduate from four-year universities.

“We are excited about the College Scorecard,” Mendonça said. “Though its not perfect, it is a tremendous first start in providing students and their families with key data to make informed decisions on what colleges and universities are potentially a best fit for their future.”

Other highlights of Obama’s budget proposal include a $1 billion competition with Race to the Top to increase the affordability of college, a community college-business alliance to promote education and workforce needs, and lower interest amounts for student loans.

“The student loan interest rate is interesting,” Murillo said. “I have no idea how it would work being tied to a market based system but overall the most favorable thing is in order to make funds available for low-income students you want to have low-interest rates, the lowest possible.”

All of the above fit squarely into the LEAD mission statement of bringing a broad-based awareness to the educational crisis in Latino education and to enhance the intellectual, cultural and personal development of our community’s educators, administrators, leaders, parents and students.

The group includes researchers, teaching professionals and educators, academics, scholars, administrators, independent writers and artists, policy and program specialists, students, parents, families, civic leaders, activists and advocates.

“Within Latino education, we envision education on two levels,” Murillo said. “One of them is education is a right, it’s not a privilege. And the other is education is an investment, so any proposal that kind of meets that criteria is favorable.”

Specifically on Murillo’s mind is enhancing the educational pipeline, which he said begins before elementary schools.

“In some communities, as high as 70 percent of Latino families don’t have access to quality pre-K,” Murillo said. “My understanding is this budget includes more funds for pre-K partnerships and for early learning programs. So that’s an example there that even though that’s not in higher education, doing and investing early on eventually when the students get older they feed into the pipeline. And the pipeline increases so that means there are more kids that will be eligible later on. More kids will graduate from high school and will be eligible for college.”

Murillo added, “You invest and put more money into the program that we know works and you might not see the results right away but over time you’re going to see that investments are strategic. These are things like early learning and preschool programs. These are programs that work for Latino students.”

For League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), the battle regarding early-childhood development has been going strong for months. Not only does the organization await the potential sequestration cuts to vital programs like Head Start, WIC, GEARUP and TRIO, but now the upcoming budget battle remains its focus.

LULAC Director of Education Policy Luis Torres writes in an op-ed piece that it’s estimated more than 30 percent of current national Head Start participants are Latino Americans.

“For these reasons, LULAC is calling on the Latino community to engage with its representatives in an all-out effort to protect the funding for this critical program,” Luis said.

This article was first published in Voxxi.

John Benson is employed as a fulltime freelance writer writing for local/national outlets. When he’s not covering news, music or entertainment, he can be found coaching his boys (basketball, football and baseball) or spending time with his wife, Maria.

[Photo by luminafoundation]

By Lily Eskelsen, Lily’s Blackboard

Wednesday I will stand on the West Lawn of our nation’s capitol with thousands of others and demand that a dream come true.

Congress isn’t Disneyland and I am not wishing on a star for Tinker Bell to wave a magic wand. It’s not that kind of dream.

Real dreams aren’t about magic. They’re about work and sacrifice and never giving up. Martin Luther King, Jr. had a dream that his children would live in a world that judged them by the content of their character and not the color of their skin; That there would be a place for them in the country that they loved that simply offered them the same equal opportunity, as anybody else, to live their lives as far as their talents and hard work and luck would take them.

It is not by accident that the immigration movement is defined by the word “dream”. Decades of a hopeless immigration system that defies logic and which has left entire communities frightened, confused, with mothers separated from children and families often the victims of unscrupulous people who cheat vulnerable people into paying their life’s savings to navigate the quagmire of an undecipherable bureaucracy only to find they have lost every dime and no promised papers to show for it.

It’s broken. It’s time to fix it.

The impact of this broken system on our students can be seen in their eyes. Andwe are teachers. We look into those eyes.

Monserrat Garibay is an NEA member and a preschool teacher from Austin, Texas. When she was a child, she came to the United States with her parents but without her documentation. She was what we call a Dreamer – people who dream of becoming a citizen the United States, but because of decisions that were made for them as a child, are ineligible. Monserrat returned to Mexico, studied hard and was able to finally return and become a citizen. Many Dreamers do not have that option. Monserrat understands the fear and the hope.

One of her preschoolers, a four year old boy full of laughter and stories and hugs, tells her about his day and his family and what he wants to be when he grows up. He’s a marvel of Show-N-Tell. But he also tells her about his fears. He tells his teacher about being afraid that his parents will be caught up in an immigration raid where they work.

He knows that sometimes when kids come home, the parents have been taken away and they come home to an empty house. He told her that his little brother is lucky that he was born here. He said, “My little brother is a gringo, so at least there’s one in my family they can’t take away.”

High school Spanish teacher Scott Ellingson says his students can’t wait any longer for comprehensive immigration reform.

There is something broken when a four-year-old little boy is afraid of being separated from his mom and dad and baby brother. Educators will be on the West Lawn of our nation’s capitol because America is all about powerful dreams and relentless dreamers. And because we love our students and will fight for their futures. We have a dream, yes. But real dreams carry a responsibility to fight for those dreams to become reality.

If you can come to the Rally on the Capitol lawn on April 10th, come and show your support. If you can’t come, show your support by signing our petitionsupporting commonsense immigration reform or participating in an echo event in your community.

Wishing won’t make it happen. You will.

Ya es hora. It’s time.

This article was first published in Lily’s Blackboard.

Lily Eskelsen, an elementary teacher from Utah, is Vice President of the National Education Association. She is one of the highest-ranking labor leaders in the country and one of its most influential Hispanic educators.

[Photo by Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights]

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