NewsTaco

By Texas State Representative Mary González,

As a Texas State Representative and educator, I have heard horror stories from parents on how anxious their children become just before test day– some to the point of sickness. Not because of the tests themselves, but the high stakes Texas has attached to the results. Because of those high stakes, 87% supported less standardized tests in a recent poll conducted by the Texas State Teacher Association.

These high stakes have an even greater effect on English Language Learners (ELLs). ELLs are more likely to have to repeat a grade, graduate late, or be placed on low-track remedial education programs. And in the 2005 National Assessment of Educational Progress, just 29 percent of ELLs scored at or above the basic level in reading, compared with 75 percent of non-ELLs.

Under the current system, standardized test scores of ELL students are held accountable no matter the student’s English proficiency or the amount of time they have spent in Texas public schools. The students’ test scores then affect their school’s accountability ratings. Both students and schools lose in this situation.

Several studies have shown that it takes 4 to 7 years for ELLs to become proficient in academic English. Although about 80% of ELLs are native speakers of Spanish, ELLs speak about 400 different home languages total.

This year, a significant portion of my legislative agenda was aimed at clarifying and improving testing protocol for recently immigrated students. One of those bills, House Bill 2004, would define a school year as sixty consecutive days. If a recently immigrated student spends more than sixty consecutive days in a Texas public school, that student would qualify for a one year exemption from state-mandated exams. If a recently immigrated student spends less than sixty consecutive days in Texas public schools, that school year would not towards their one year exemption.

Not only do these students bear the stress of moving between countries, but they must grasp a new language with limited transition time into a new school. To top it off, we push them into a high-stakes, standardized testing system that not only affects their learning and ability to achieve, but puts high pressure on parents, teachers, and administrators. It has even thrown entire school districts into disarray.

All six of the school districts I represent have a limited English proficiency enrollment of over twenty percent. In the 2011-2012 school year, the Texas Education Agency showed 54,000 immigrants with limited English proficiency enrolled in Texas public schools. Currently, 1 in 9 students in U.S. classrooms are of limited English proficiency. That number is projected to rise to 1 in 4 students by 2025.

Through HB 2004, we give schools a chance to integrate ELL students without the pressure of an immediate, high stakes standardized test. Defining a school year sets a clear standard for testing exemptions and will give more recently immigrated students time to learn English. It will also give us a foundation for future improvements.

HB 2004 has now been voted out of the House and the Senate, and is very close to reaching the Governor’s desk. This means we are one step closer to making education policies relevant to the day-to-day lives of English Language Learning and immigrant students, parents, and educators– not just along the border– but all across Texas.

[Photo by Editor B]

By T.S. Last, Albuquerque Journal

Heralded by some as a future president of the United States, San Antonio Mayor Julián Castro of Texas delivered an inspiring commencement address to graduates of Santa Fe Community College on Wednesday.

Editor’s note: NewsTaco Editor Victor Landa serves as chairman of the Diplomas Project communications committee.

By John Benson, Voxxi

Education leaders in San Antonio are setting the bar high regarding increasing Latino higher education attainment with a stated goal of a 9 percent increase or 66,000 college graduates by 2015.

The entire effort is called The Diplomas Project and is funded by a multiyear grant from the Lumina Foundation, which is a national financial supporter of post-secondary Latino students attainment efforts. The initiative is unique for its collective impact approach.

“This is a goal that we’ve identified and the way we want to get there is to work across sectors,” The Diplomas Project Director Maria Fernandez told VOXXI. “We realize that we can’t achieve this goal just by focusing on higher education or focusing on our K-12 system. It really requires the work of the business community, local government, community organizations and the educational field.”

The Diplomas Project brings together 16 organizations throughout San Antonio to identify some collective strategies that are going to support Latino student attainment and ultimately prepare them for the workforce in San Antonio. In its first year, the initiative is identifying student attainment barriers.

“We know that financial aid is huge, so what can we do in the advocacy of policy arena to make sure we’re eliminating barriers?” Fernandez said. “What can we do at the higher education institutions to make sure that the process is seamless and clear for students to be able to access the financial aid that they need?”

She added that The Diplomas Project is creating an alignment between efforts of school districts and community colleges. The idea is to make the transition seamless.

Last month The Diplomas Project convened the Destination College Week Higher Education Conference to lay the groundwork for increasing college attainment for the city’s Latino students. Out of that symposium, three concrete goals were established: To strengthen a shared understanding of Latino student attainment in San Antonio; discuss emerging issues, challenges and opportunities across systems; and develop shared goals and strategies to create a coherent plan to increase Hispanic student success.

The impetus behind the The Diplomas Project’s goal is tied directly to helping the San Antonio community meet the SA2020 educational goals championed by Mayor Julian Castro. Basically, the idea is that 50 percent of San Antonio’s adult population will have two- or four-year degrees by the year 2020.

“A few years ago, Mayor Castro launched a community visioning process to identify what do we need to do as a city to make sure it’s a thriving place where people want to come and learn and live here,” Fernandez said. “One of the things that happened out of that process is that 11 areas of focus were created to make some concrete advances. One of those was in education. When we started looking at the data, we saw that there was a significant need to also address the attainment of Latino students.”

That’s when the Lumina Foundation stepped in with a grant to promote Latino college attainment in San Antonio and specifically the 9 percent goal by 2015, which is roughly the halfway point of Mayor Castro’s goal.

As for a guide towards the program, San Antonio Education Partnership is basing its approach on a 2011 Strive Model by John Kania & Mark Kramer that offers guidelines for diverse organizations coming together to solve isolated and complex social problems.

The five conditions of collective success include establishing a common agenda, sharing measurement systems, mutually reinforcing activities, maintaining continuous communication and designating backbone support organizations. Fernandez said the San Antonio Education Partnership is providing the backbone support—staffing, meeting space and convening the partners.

“Having a thriving workforce in the long-term is going to be dependent on having an educated workforce,” Fernandez said. “That’s not just going to be the responsibility of the educational system. It’s going to be a shared responsibility. So what we’re working on here in San Antonio is to bring business, government, non-profits, students, families and educational institutions together so that we create that seamless pipeline that supports student attainment.”

She added, “In our city, Latinos constitute a significant portion of our population, so in order for us to thrive as a city, we also need to make sure Latino students are succeeding.”

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 hharryus]

By Emily Smith, Opposing Views

New York City parents and activists filed a federal lawsuit with the Office of Civil Rights on Monday, claiming that the city’s high school admissions process discriminates against black and Hispanic students by storing them away in low performing schools and setting them up for failure. They demanded a federal investigation and an overhaul of the admissions system.

Deputy Chancellor Marc Sternberg said that Mayor Bloomberg’s administration inherited a system where zip code once determined a student’s quality of education. Since his first day in office, eliminating the achievement gap is a reform Bloomberg’s administration has championed. Admission to top performing schools is instead based on academic records, test scores, attendance, student preference and other factors.

Click HERE or on the picture to read the full story.

[Photo by SpottingWithTom]

By Kyla Calvert, Fronteras

Limited community college capacity could keep 2.5 million Californians out of the system over the next 10 years. The seat shortage is expected to fall hardest on Latino students, squeezing 840,000 out of the schools.

Since 2007, San Diego Community Colleges have cut more than 2,600 class sections, Grossmont-Cuyamaca Colleges lost 1,600 classes and Palomar College halved its summer offerings.

A new report commissioned by Corinthian Colleges, a for-profit company that runs private colleges, projects the lack of accessto community college programs could cost California Latinos $17.8 billion in potential earnings by 2022.

Click HERE or on the picture to read the full story.

[Photo by Gates Foundation]

By Hope Gillette, Saludify

As the world we live in continues to diversify and becomes increasingly connected, individuals who are bilingual or who speak multiple languages seem to have an obvious advantage. But while the ability to communicate with people from different cultures is a huge asset, bilingual children and adults experience some significant health benefits as well.

“From the perspective of brain development, [growing up bilingual] is very beneficial,” Azadeh Aalai, Ph.D., professor of psychology at Montgomery College in Maryland, and author of Understanding Aggression: Psychological Origins & Approaches to Aggressive Behavior, told Saludify. “Our brain has structural plasticity, meaning it changes and adapts based on what we are exposed to in the environment, so learning multiple languages actually serves as an enriching experience that optimizes the capacity of the brain.”

Research on bilingual children

The American Psychiatric Association indicates children who grow up bilingual have an enhanced ability to process sounds and therefore are more likely to pay attention in a learning situation.

The benefits, outlined in a study from Northwestern University, supported previous findings that demonstrated bilingual children showed reduced levels of anxiety, loneliness, and poor self-esteem, as well as a reduction of negative externalizing behaviors such as arguing, fighting, or acting impulsively. According to the experts, part of the reason for lower levels of social stress among bilingual children had to do with the ability to understand and accept the multiple cultures which came along with learning multiple languages.

This ability to have a multicultural understanding—not just an understanding of multiple languages—is what sets bilingual children apart from someone who has learned a second language just to learn it.

“It is hard to quantify mental reward,” explained Aalai, “as this is a subjective concept which likely varies significantly from person to person; however, certainly the experience of exposure to multiple cultures in addition to multiple languages would likely be more enriching than learning multiple languages without exposure to multiple cultures as well.”

But social skills and the ability to accept others are not the only mental health benefits for bilingual children. In fact, growing up bilingual is beneficial well into an individual’s senior years.

Erlanger Turner, Ph.D., assistant professor in the Department of Psychiatry at Virginia Commonwealth University School of Medicine, explained to Saludify that bilingual people have been found to have enhanced “working memory,” which is a process responsible for manipulating current information so it can be used in active thought.

“Research has consistently shown that bilingual children typically have improved working memory (WM) and executive functioning abilities. These are important cognitive processes involved in learning, comprehension, and planning,” explained Turner. “Declines in WM are typical for many clinical conditions such as Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease and schizophrenia.”

Turner explained that in a recent study in Psychology and Aging by Luo, Craik, and Moreno, they found that bilingual individuals performed better on spatial working memory tasks than monolinguals.

“However, findings were reversed for verbal memory,” he said. “Given this research one might wonder if becoming bilingual might serve as a protective factor against cognitive decline as an older adult.”

Other studies have supported the theory that being bilingual helps prevent cognitive decline. According to a new study published in the January issue of the Journal of Neuroscience, seniors between the ages of 60 and 68 who had spoken two languages for the majority of their lives were faster at switching from one mental task to another compared to monolingual seniors.

“Being bilingual has certain cognitive benefits and boosts the performance of the brain, especially one of the most important areas known as the executive control system,” Ellen Bialystok, a psychologist at York University in Toronto, said at the time of the research.

Brain benefits of being bilingual

“To maintain the relative balance between two languages, the bilingual brain relies on executive functions, a regulatory system of general cognitive abilities that includes processes such as attention and inhibition,” statesThe DANA Foundation. “Because both of a bilingual person’s language systems are always active and competing, that person uses these control mechanisms every time she or he speaks or listens. This constant practice strengthens the control mechanisms and changes the associated brain regions.”

In addition to providing continual exercise for the brain, being bilingual causes physical changes to the brain, increasing grey matter in the left inferior parietal cortex. White matter, the part of the brain known better known as myelin, also has shown physical changes in bilingual children and adults, suggesting being bilingual not only changes how the brain sends signals but its physical attributes as well.

Health benefits of growing up bilingual

The health benefits of growing up bilingual extend beyond just improved cognitive function into the areas of wellbeing, as bilingual children who experience less social stress are less likely to become involved in dangerous health habits such as alcohol use, drug use, overeating, and risky behavior.

At the root of the benefits, however, is the brain, and the direct cognitive benefits of being bilingual include:

• Improved attention to detail
• Ability to focus on important details
• Early onset of conflict management skills
• Improved memory
• Improved executive control
• Protection against certain illnesses such as Alzheimer’s disease
• Lessening of symptoms associated with cognitive decline
• Improved social skills
• Reduced stress
• Reduced risk for depression

“The cognitive and neurological benefits of bilingualism extend from early childhood to old age as the brain more efficiently processes information and staves off cognitive decline,” explained The DANA Foundation. “What’s more, the attention and aging benefits discussed above aren’t exclusive to people who were raised bilingual; they are also seen in people who learn a second language later in life.”

Aalai told Saludify learning a second language as an adult keeps certain neurons in the brain stimulated, which makes an individual less susceptible to cognitive decline as he or she ages.

Is there a negative side of growing up bilingual?

“From the perspective of identity, what we find is that individuals who are bilingual are actually navigating multiple identities,” said Aalai. “What I mean by this is you may actually see individuals respond differently to personality measures or other psychological test based on what language the tests are in. Individual responses tend to conform to the values of the larger culture that language endorses.”

Aalai adds the finding is not necessarily considered negative, but it does offer a look at how language affects an individual’s world perception. She points out previous research has linked Americans’ ethnocentrism (the perception their culture is superior to others’) to being monolingual. Based on that finding, the ability to speak multiple languages may actually lessen reliance on stereotypes; another benefit.

This article was first published in Saludify.

Hope Gillette is an award winning author and novelist. She has been active in the veterinary industry for over 10 years, and her experience extends from exotic animal care to equine sports massage.

[Photo by hcplebranch]

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 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.]