FYI.
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Education Week
Published Online: September 30, 2008
Published in Print: October 1, 2008
Testing Expert Sees ‘Illusions of Progress’ Under NCLB
By Scott J. Cech
Washington
Harvard University researcher Daniel M. Koretz has some good news and some bad news for policymakers looking ahead to the reauthorization of the federal No Child Left Behind Act: The nation’s K-12 students are now attending Lake Wobegon schools.
Because of rampantly inflated standardized test scores, Mr. Koretz contended at a panel discussion here last week, all children seem to be above average, as in the fictional town made famous by the radio personality Garrison Keillor—or at least better academically than they actually are.
“We know that we are creating, in many cases, with our test-based accountability system, illusions of progress,” Mr. Koretz told a roomful of policymakers and educators at a Sept. 22 forum hosted by the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington think tank.
Mr. Koretz, a professor of education at Harvard’s graduate school of education who has written a new book, Measuring Up: What Educational Testing Really Tells Us, said that under the No Child Left Behind law, widespread teaching to the test, strategic reallocation of teaching talent, and other means of gaming the high-stakes testing system have conspired to produce scores on state standardized tests that are substantially better than students’ mastery of the material.
“If you tell people that performance on that tested sample is what matters, that’s what they worry about, so you can get inappropriate responses in the classroom and inflated test scores,” he said.
Mr. Koretz pointed to research in the 1990s on the state standardized test then used in Kentucky, which was designed to measure similar aspects of proficiency as the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the federally sponsored testing program often called “the nation’s report card.”
Scores on both tests should have moved more or less in lock step, he said. But instead, 4th grade reading scores rose sharply on the Kentucky Instructional Results Information System test, which resembled an NCLB-test prototype, from 1992 to 1994, while sliding slightly on NAEP over the same period.
“If you’re a parent in Kentucky, what you care about is whether your kids can read, not how well they can do on the state test,” Mr. Koretz said. “And the national assessment told us that, in fact, the gains in the state test were bogus.”
Shortage of Studies
In his book, Mr. Koretz says a similar situation occurred during the “Texas miracle” of the 1990s: Minority students posted large gains on the high-stakes Texas Assessment of Academic Skills, but much smaller ones on NAEP.
Mr. Koretz said the relative dearth to date of comparative studies on large-scale state assessments isn’t for lack of trying. He said he and other scholars have often been rebuffed after approaching officials about the possibility of studying their assessment systems.
“There have not been a lot of studies of this,” Mr. Koretz said, “for the simple reason that it’s politically rather hard to do, to come to a state chief and say, ‘I’d like the chance to see whether your test scores are inflated.’?”
Bella Rosenberg, an education consultant and a longtime special assistant to Albert Shanker, the late president of the American Federation of Teachers, echoed many of Mr. Koretz’s critiques.
“This is officially sanctioned malpractice—if we did this in health, in medical practice, we’d all be dead by now,” she said of the testing system under the NCLB law. “The fact is, we’re doing a great job of obscuring instead of illuminating achievement gaps.”
But fellow panelist Roberto Rodriguez, a senior education adviser to U.S. Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass., the chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee who helped shepherd the NCLB law through Congress in 2001, cautioned against “throwing the baby out with the bath water.”
While a more effective accountability system “needs to be a goal, I would argue, of the upcoming reauthorization of the [Elementary and Secondary Education Act],” he said, that “summative assessment is a critically important area of accountability.” The No Child Left Behind law is the current version of the ESEA, first enacted in 1965.
On the tug of war between advocates of the current system and detractors who prefer that tests better reflect the course content that students are supposed to be mastering, Mr. Rodriguez said, “I think we can have our cake and eat it too.”
Incentives for Instruction
But Mr. Koretz said some parts of the nearly 7-year-old NCLB law need to be fundamentally reworked.
“I think we ought to mandate, as part of No Child Left Behind, independent evaluations of state accountability programs,” he said. “There is nobody involved in this system who has an incentive to look for good instruction anymore—all the incentives are lined up in one direction: Increase scores on the summative tests at any costs.
“We need to create a system in which somebody … has incentives to make sure we’re not just gaming the system.”
Williamson M. Evers, the U.S. Department of Education’s assistant secretary for planning, evaluation, and policy development, who attended the panel discussion, suggested that any changes to the ESEA law should preserve its essence.
“Some are proposing changes in accountability that remove consequences; this would make it accountability in name only,” Mr. Evers said in an e-mail. “Results should be comparable statewide, or parents, taxpayers, and teachers themselves can’t tell how students are doing.”
Bruce Fuller, a professor of education and public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, praised the points Mr. Koretz makes about testing under NCLB in his book, and suggested steps to address the law’s flaws.
“Washington should first ensure that states use a common benchmark that defines proficient student achievement in reading, writing, and math,” Mr. Fuller, who is the director of the Policy Analysis for California Education research center based at Berkeley and Stanford University, said in an e-mail. “Second, neo-No Child policies should ensure that each state sets a valid way of tracking student growth over time, and provide states the resources to build necessary data systems.”
Vol. 28, Issue 06, Page 8
Thursday, October 16, 2008
A Somali influx unsettles Latino meatpackers (From International Herald Tribune)
Interesting developments in Nebraska.--Dr. Louie F. Rodriguez
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International Herald Tribune
A Somali influx unsettles Latino meatpackers
By Kirk Semple
Thursday, October 16, 2008
GRAND ISLAND, Nebraska: Like many workers at the meatpacking plant here, Raul Garcia, a Mexican-American, has watched with some discomfort as hundreds of Somali immigrants have moved to town in the past couple of years, many of them to fill jobs once held by Latino workers taken away in immigration raids.
Garcia has been particularly troubled by the Somalis' demand that they be allowed special breaks for prayers that are obligatory for devout Muslims. The breaks, he said, would inconvenience everyone else.
"The Latino is very humble," said Garcia, 73, who has worked at the plant, owned by JBS U.S.A. Inc., since 1994. "But they are arrogant," he said of the Somali workers. "They act like the United States owes them."
Garcia was among more than 1,000 Latino and other workers who protested a decision last month by the plant's management to cut their work day — and their pay — by 15 minutes to give scores of Somali workers time for evening prayers.
After several days of strikes and disruptions, the plant's management abandoned the plan.
But the dispute peeled back a layer of civility in this southern Nebraska city of 47,000, revealing slow-burning racial and ethnic tensions that have been an unexpected aftermath of the enforcement raids at workplaces by federal immigration authorities.
Grand Island is among a half dozen or so cities where discord has arisen with the arrival of Somali workers, many of whom were recruited by employers from elsewhere in the United States after immigration raids sharply reduced their Latino work forces.
The Somalis are by and large in this country legally as political refugees and therefore are not singled out by immigration authorities.
In some of these places, including Grand Island, this newest wave of immigrant workers has had the effect of unifying the other ethnic populations against the Somalis and has also diverted some of the longstanding hostility toward Latino immigrants among some native-born residents.
"Every wave of immigrants has had to struggle to get assimilated," said Margaret Hornady, the mayor of Grand Island and a longtime resident of Nebraska. "Right now, it's so volatile."
The federal immigration crackdown has hit meat- and poultry-packing plants particularly hard, with more than 2,000 immigrant workers in at least nine places detained since 2006 in major raids, most on immigration violations.
Struggling to fill the grueling low-wage jobs that attract few American workers, the plants have placed advertisements in immigrant newspapers and circulated fliers in immigrant neighborhoods.
Some companies, like Swift & Company, which owned the plant in Grand Island until being bought up by the Brazilian conglomerate JBS last year, have made a particular pitch for Somalis because of their legal status. Tens of thousands of Somali refugees fleeing civil war have settled in the United States since the 1990s, with the largest concentration in Minnesota.
But the companies are learning that in trying to solve one problem they have created another.
Early last month, about 220 Somali Muslims walked off the job at a JBS meatpacking plant in Greeley, Colorado, saying the company had prevented them from observing their prayer schedule. (More than 100 of the workers were later fired.)
Days later, a poultry company in Minnesota agreed to allow Muslim workers prayer breaks and the right to refuse handling pork products, settling a lawsuit filed by nine Somali workers.
In August, the management of a Tyson chicken plant in Shelbyville, Tennessee, designated a Muslim holy day as a paid holiday, acceding to a demand by Somali workers. The plant had originally agreed to substitute the Muslim holy day for Labor Day, but reinstated Labor Day after a barrage of criticism from non-Muslims.
In some workplaces, newly arrived Somali Muslims have not protested their working conditions. That has been the case at Agriprocessors, a meatpacking plant in Postville, Iowa. About 150 Somali Muslims have found jobs there, most of them recruited by a staffing company after the plant lost about half its work force in an immigration raid in May.
Jack Shandley, a senior vice president for JBS U.S.A., said in an e-mail message that "integrating persons of diverse backgrounds regularly presents new and different issues."
"Religious accommodation is only one workplace diversity issue that has been addressed," Shandley said.
Nationwide, employment discrimination complaints by Muslim workers have more than doubled in the past decade, to 607 in the 2007 fiscal year, from 285 in the 1998 fiscal year, according to the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which has sent representatives to Grand Island to interview Somali workers.
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 forbids employers to discriminate based on religion and says that employers must "reasonably accommodate" religious practices. But the act offers some exceptions, including instances when adjustments would cause "undue hardship" on the company's business interests.
The new tensions here extend well beyond the walls of the plant. Scratch beneath Grand Island's surface and there is resentment, discomfort and mistrust everywhere, some residents say — between the white community and the various immigrant communities; between the older immigrant communities, like the Latinos, and the newer ones, namely the Somalis and the Sudanese, another refugee community that has grown here in recent years; and between the Somalis, who are largely Muslim, and the Sudanese, who are largely Christian.
In dozens of interviews here, white, Latino and other residents seemed mostly bewildered, if not downright suspicious, of the Somalis, very few of whom speak English.
"I kind of admire all the effort they make to follow that religion, but sometimes you have to adapt to the workplace," said Fidencio Sandoval, a plant worker born in Mexico who has become an American citizen. "A new culture comes in with their demands and says, 'This is what we want.' This is kind of new for me."
Hornady, the mayor, suggested somewhat apologetically that she had been having difficulty adjusting to the presence of Somalis. She said she found the sight of Somali women, many of whom wear Muslim headdresses, or hijabs, "startling."
"I'm sorry, but after 9/11, it gives some of us a turn," she said.
Not only do the hijabs suggest female subjugation, Hornady said, but the sight of Muslims in town made her think of Osama bin Laden and the attacks on the United States.
"I know that that's horrible and that's prejudice," she said. "I'm working very hard on it."
She added, "Aren't a lot of thoughtful Americans struggling with this?"
For their part, the Somalis say they feel aggrieved and not particularly welcome.
"A lot of people look at you weird — they judge you," said Abdisamad Jama, 22, a Somali who moved to Grand Island two years ago to work as an interpreter at the plant and now freelances. "Or sometimes they will say, 'Go back to your country.' "
Founded in the mid-19th century by German immigrants, Grand Island gradually became more diverse in the mid- and late-20th century with the arrival of Latino workers, mainly Mexicans.
The Latinos came at first to work in the agricultural fields; later arrivals found employment in the meatpacking plant. Refugees from Laos and, in the past few years, Sudan followed, and many of them also found work in the plant, which is now the city's largest employer, with about 2,700 workers.
In December 2006, in an event that would deeply affect the city and alter its uneasy balance of ethnicities, immigration authorities raided the plant and took away more than 200 illegal Latino workers. Another 200 or so workers quit soon afterward.
The raid was one of six sweeps by U.S. agents at plants owned by Swift, gutting the company of about 1,200 workers in one day and forcing the plants to slow their operations.
Many of the Somalis who eventually arrived to fill those jobs were practicing Muslims and their faith obliges them to pray at five fixed times every day. In Grand Island, the workers would grab prayer time whenever they could, during scheduled rest periods or on restroom breaks. But during the holy month of Ramadan, Muslims fast in daylight hours and break their fast in a ritualistic ceremony at sundown. A more formal accommodation of their needs was necessary, the Somali workers said.
Last year, the Somalis here demanded time off for the Ramadan ceremony. The company refused, saying it could not afford to let so many workers step away from the production line at one time. Dozens of Somalis quit, though they eventually returned to work.
The situation repeated itself last month. Dennis Sydow, the plant's vice president and general manager, said a delegation of Somali workers approached him on Sept. 10 about allowing them to take their dinner break at 7:30 p.m., near sundown, rather than at the normal time of 8 to 8:30.
Sydow rejected the request, saying the production line would slow to a crawl and the Somalis' co-workers would unfairly have to take up the slack.
The Somalis said their co-workers did not offer a lot of support. "Latinos were sometimes saying, 'Don't pray, don't pray,' " said Abdifatah Warsame, 21.
After the Somalis went out on strike on Sept. 15, the plant's management and the union brokered a deal the next day that would have shifted the dinner break to 7:45 p.m., close enough to sundown to satisfy the Somalis. Because of the plant's complex scheduling rules, the new dinner break would have also required an earlier end to the shift, potentially cutting the work day by 15 minutes.
Word of the accord spread quickly throughout the non-Somali work force, though the reports were infected with false rumors of pay raises for the Somalis and more severe cuts in the work day for everyone.
In a counterprotest on Sept. 17, more than 1,000 Latino and Sudanese workers lined up alongside white workers in opposition to the concessions to the Somalis.
"We had complaints from the whites, Hispanics and Sudanese," said Abdalla Omar, 26, one of the Somali strikers.
The union and the plant management backed down, reverting to the original dinner schedule. More than 70 Somalis, including Omar and Warsame, stormed out of the plant and did not return; they either quit or were fired.
Since then, Ramadan has ended and work has returned to normal at the plant, but most everyone — management, the union and the employees — says the root causes of the disturbances have not been fully addressed. A sizeable Somali contingent remains employed at the factory — Somali leaders say the number is about 100; the union puts the figure at more than 300, making similar disruptions possible next year.
"Right now, this is a real kindling box," said Daniel Hoppes, president of the local chapter of the union, the United Food and Commercial Workers.
Xawa Ahmed, 48, a Somali, moved to Grand Island from Minnesota last month to help organize the Somali community. A big part of her work, Ahmed said, will be to help demystify the Somalis who remain.
"We're trying to make people understand why we do these things, why we practice this religion, why we live in America," she said. "There's a lot of misunderstanding."
--------------------------------------------------------
International Herald Tribune
A Somali influx unsettles Latino meatpackers
By Kirk Semple
Thursday, October 16, 2008
GRAND ISLAND, Nebraska: Like many workers at the meatpacking plant here, Raul Garcia, a Mexican-American, has watched with some discomfort as hundreds of Somali immigrants have moved to town in the past couple of years, many of them to fill jobs once held by Latino workers taken away in immigration raids.
Garcia has been particularly troubled by the Somalis' demand that they be allowed special breaks for prayers that are obligatory for devout Muslims. The breaks, he said, would inconvenience everyone else.
"The Latino is very humble," said Garcia, 73, who has worked at the plant, owned by JBS U.S.A. Inc., since 1994. "But they are arrogant," he said of the Somali workers. "They act like the United States owes them."
Garcia was among more than 1,000 Latino and other workers who protested a decision last month by the plant's management to cut their work day — and their pay — by 15 minutes to give scores of Somali workers time for evening prayers.
After several days of strikes and disruptions, the plant's management abandoned the plan.
But the dispute peeled back a layer of civility in this southern Nebraska city of 47,000, revealing slow-burning racial and ethnic tensions that have been an unexpected aftermath of the enforcement raids at workplaces by federal immigration authorities.
Grand Island is among a half dozen or so cities where discord has arisen with the arrival of Somali workers, many of whom were recruited by employers from elsewhere in the United States after immigration raids sharply reduced their Latino work forces.
The Somalis are by and large in this country legally as political refugees and therefore are not singled out by immigration authorities.
In some of these places, including Grand Island, this newest wave of immigrant workers has had the effect of unifying the other ethnic populations against the Somalis and has also diverted some of the longstanding hostility toward Latino immigrants among some native-born residents.
"Every wave of immigrants has had to struggle to get assimilated," said Margaret Hornady, the mayor of Grand Island and a longtime resident of Nebraska. "Right now, it's so volatile."
The federal immigration crackdown has hit meat- and poultry-packing plants particularly hard, with more than 2,000 immigrant workers in at least nine places detained since 2006 in major raids, most on immigration violations.
Struggling to fill the grueling low-wage jobs that attract few American workers, the plants have placed advertisements in immigrant newspapers and circulated fliers in immigrant neighborhoods.
Some companies, like Swift & Company, which owned the plant in Grand Island until being bought up by the Brazilian conglomerate JBS last year, have made a particular pitch for Somalis because of their legal status. Tens of thousands of Somali refugees fleeing civil war have settled in the United States since the 1990s, with the largest concentration in Minnesota.
But the companies are learning that in trying to solve one problem they have created another.
Early last month, about 220 Somali Muslims walked off the job at a JBS meatpacking plant in Greeley, Colorado, saying the company had prevented them from observing their prayer schedule. (More than 100 of the workers were later fired.)
Days later, a poultry company in Minnesota agreed to allow Muslim workers prayer breaks and the right to refuse handling pork products, settling a lawsuit filed by nine Somali workers.
In August, the management of a Tyson chicken plant in Shelbyville, Tennessee, designated a Muslim holy day as a paid holiday, acceding to a demand by Somali workers. The plant had originally agreed to substitute the Muslim holy day for Labor Day, but reinstated Labor Day after a barrage of criticism from non-Muslims.
In some workplaces, newly arrived Somali Muslims have not protested their working conditions. That has been the case at Agriprocessors, a meatpacking plant in Postville, Iowa. About 150 Somali Muslims have found jobs there, most of them recruited by a staffing company after the plant lost about half its work force in an immigration raid in May.
Jack Shandley, a senior vice president for JBS U.S.A., said in an e-mail message that "integrating persons of diverse backgrounds regularly presents new and different issues."
"Religious accommodation is only one workplace diversity issue that has been addressed," Shandley said.
Nationwide, employment discrimination complaints by Muslim workers have more than doubled in the past decade, to 607 in the 2007 fiscal year, from 285 in the 1998 fiscal year, according to the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which has sent representatives to Grand Island to interview Somali workers.
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 forbids employers to discriminate based on religion and says that employers must "reasonably accommodate" religious practices. But the act offers some exceptions, including instances when adjustments would cause "undue hardship" on the company's business interests.
The new tensions here extend well beyond the walls of the plant. Scratch beneath Grand Island's surface and there is resentment, discomfort and mistrust everywhere, some residents say — between the white community and the various immigrant communities; between the older immigrant communities, like the Latinos, and the newer ones, namely the Somalis and the Sudanese, another refugee community that has grown here in recent years; and between the Somalis, who are largely Muslim, and the Sudanese, who are largely Christian.
In dozens of interviews here, white, Latino and other residents seemed mostly bewildered, if not downright suspicious, of the Somalis, very few of whom speak English.
"I kind of admire all the effort they make to follow that religion, but sometimes you have to adapt to the workplace," said Fidencio Sandoval, a plant worker born in Mexico who has become an American citizen. "A new culture comes in with their demands and says, 'This is what we want.' This is kind of new for me."
Hornady, the mayor, suggested somewhat apologetically that she had been having difficulty adjusting to the presence of Somalis. She said she found the sight of Somali women, many of whom wear Muslim headdresses, or hijabs, "startling."
"I'm sorry, but after 9/11, it gives some of us a turn," she said.
Not only do the hijabs suggest female subjugation, Hornady said, but the sight of Muslims in town made her think of Osama bin Laden and the attacks on the United States.
"I know that that's horrible and that's prejudice," she said. "I'm working very hard on it."
She added, "Aren't a lot of thoughtful Americans struggling with this?"
For their part, the Somalis say they feel aggrieved and not particularly welcome.
"A lot of people look at you weird — they judge you," said Abdisamad Jama, 22, a Somali who moved to Grand Island two years ago to work as an interpreter at the plant and now freelances. "Or sometimes they will say, 'Go back to your country.' "
Founded in the mid-19th century by German immigrants, Grand Island gradually became more diverse in the mid- and late-20th century with the arrival of Latino workers, mainly Mexicans.
The Latinos came at first to work in the agricultural fields; later arrivals found employment in the meatpacking plant. Refugees from Laos and, in the past few years, Sudan followed, and many of them also found work in the plant, which is now the city's largest employer, with about 2,700 workers.
In December 2006, in an event that would deeply affect the city and alter its uneasy balance of ethnicities, immigration authorities raided the plant and took away more than 200 illegal Latino workers. Another 200 or so workers quit soon afterward.
The raid was one of six sweeps by U.S. agents at plants owned by Swift, gutting the company of about 1,200 workers in one day and forcing the plants to slow their operations.
Many of the Somalis who eventually arrived to fill those jobs were practicing Muslims and their faith obliges them to pray at five fixed times every day. In Grand Island, the workers would grab prayer time whenever they could, during scheduled rest periods or on restroom breaks. But during the holy month of Ramadan, Muslims fast in daylight hours and break their fast in a ritualistic ceremony at sundown. A more formal accommodation of their needs was necessary, the Somali workers said.
Last year, the Somalis here demanded time off for the Ramadan ceremony. The company refused, saying it could not afford to let so many workers step away from the production line at one time. Dozens of Somalis quit, though they eventually returned to work.
The situation repeated itself last month. Dennis Sydow, the plant's vice president and general manager, said a delegation of Somali workers approached him on Sept. 10 about allowing them to take their dinner break at 7:30 p.m., near sundown, rather than at the normal time of 8 to 8:30.
Sydow rejected the request, saying the production line would slow to a crawl and the Somalis' co-workers would unfairly have to take up the slack.
The Somalis said their co-workers did not offer a lot of support. "Latinos were sometimes saying, 'Don't pray, don't pray,' " said Abdifatah Warsame, 21.
After the Somalis went out on strike on Sept. 15, the plant's management and the union brokered a deal the next day that would have shifted the dinner break to 7:45 p.m., close enough to sundown to satisfy the Somalis. Because of the plant's complex scheduling rules, the new dinner break would have also required an earlier end to the shift, potentially cutting the work day by 15 minutes.
Word of the accord spread quickly throughout the non-Somali work force, though the reports were infected with false rumors of pay raises for the Somalis and more severe cuts in the work day for everyone.
In a counterprotest on Sept. 17, more than 1,000 Latino and Sudanese workers lined up alongside white workers in opposition to the concessions to the Somalis.
"We had complaints from the whites, Hispanics and Sudanese," said Abdalla Omar, 26, one of the Somali strikers.
The union and the plant management backed down, reverting to the original dinner schedule. More than 70 Somalis, including Omar and Warsame, stormed out of the plant and did not return; they either quit or were fired.
Since then, Ramadan has ended and work has returned to normal at the plant, but most everyone — management, the union and the employees — says the root causes of the disturbances have not been fully addressed. A sizeable Somali contingent remains employed at the factory — Somali leaders say the number is about 100; the union puts the figure at more than 300, making similar disruptions possible next year.
"Right now, this is a real kindling box," said Daniel Hoppes, president of the local chapter of the union, the United Food and Commercial Workers.
Xawa Ahmed, 48, a Somali, moved to Grand Island from Minnesota last month to help organize the Somali community. A big part of her work, Ahmed said, will be to help demystify the Somalis who remain.
"We're trying to make people understand why we do these things, why we practice this religion, why we live in America," she said. "There's a lot of misunderstanding."
Wednesday, October 1, 2008
Why don't we ever hear about the Asian-American vote? (from Slate.com)
Indeed a segment of the population that must pay attention to. -Dr. Louie F. Rodriguez
----------------------------------------------------------------
Chinese Democracy
Why don't we ever hear about the Asian-American vote?
By Christopher Beam
Posted Wednesday, Oct. 1, 2008, at 4:57 PM ET
Read the rest of the Swingers series.
Asian-American voters
Presidential campaigns can feel like an informal census. As the candidates traverse the country, they pander to Latino voters, African-American voters, working-class white voters, older voters, younger voters, elite-college-graduate voters … everyone gets to feel important.
Except Asian-American voters. Somehow, amid all the demographic navel-gazing, the country's third-largest, fastest-growing minority—now 15.2 million people, or 5 percent of the population—gets overlooked.
Not this week. Or, more accurately, not for several hours on Tuesday. That's when a nonprofit group called Leadership Education for Asian Pacifics held a news conference excitingly titled "Political Role of Asian Americans Examined" while the Obama campaign scheduled interviews about its outreach efforts to Asian-American and Pacific Islander voters. The message from both events: Asian voters can make a difference. Attention must be paid.
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More about that later. But first, a question: Why, with all our obsessing over demographics, do we hear so little about the Asian-American vote?
The most obvious reason is size. Asian-Americans make up only 5 percent of the U.S. population. (Note: "Asian-American" here, and at the press conference Tuesday, is defined in the broadest possible sense, to include Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese, Taiwanese, Japanese, Thai, Filipino, Indian, Pakistani, and Indonesian, among others.) Fifteen million people is a lot, but not compared with other ethnic groups. African-Americans now number 38.4 million, according to the 2006 census; Latinos boast 44.4 million. Plus, Asian-Americans have the lowest proportion of eligible voters compared with the populations (about 52 percent) of any racial group. And of those, very few (about 50 percent in 2006) actually register to vote. So we're talking about 7 million eligible voters and about 3 million actual voters.
But wait—it gets worse! The five states with the largest Asian populations are, in order, California, New York, Texas, Hawaii, and New Jersey. Not exactly the swingiest places around. There are two big exceptions: Nevada and Virginia. Both states have rapidly growing Asian-American populations—they constitute 6 percent of eligible voters in Virginia, possibly enough to swing a competitive presidential race.
Another difficulty is the Asian-American community's heterogeneity. Koreans and Chinese and Vietnamese aren't necessarily more or less fractured than Mexicans and Puerto Ricans and Cubans. But, unlike Latinos, they speak different languages. Campaigns can easily cut Spanish-language ads to run nationwide; it's tougher to run ads in Vietnamese, Chinese, Japanese, etc. (Only about 60 percent of Asian-Americans speak English.) Then you'd need to target ethnic media, which is costly and, on the national level, of marginal benefit.
Then there is the difficulty of targeting Asian-American issues. This is a problem in ethnic politics generally—opinions on immigration, for example, are more diverse among blacks than among the interest groups that lobby on their behalf—but it is especially acute among Asian-Americans. Yes, there are general bread-and-butter issues like health care and education for which platitudes about access and opportunity are useful. There are also hyperspecific concerns that are not ideal campaign talking points: Chinese care a lot about U.S.-China relations. Taiwanese care about China-Taiwan. Vietnamese favor anti-Communist policies. And Filipinos often vote based on whoever supports benefits for Filipino veterans of World War II. Plus, segments of the Asian-American community often disagree—as Taiwanese-Americans and Chinese-Americans do on Taiwan, for example, or Pakistanis and Indians on Kashmir.
Finally, as if demographics and geography and message weren't challenging enough, there is partisanship. Or, more precisely, lack thereof. African-American voters break heavily toward Democrats; Latino voters (with the exception of Cubans) are also largely Democratic. Asian-Americans, meanwhile, can't make up their minds. About a third of them are Republican, a third Democratic, and a third unaffiliated. This last group consists largely of immigrants—more than half of Asian-American were born overseas—who often won't develop party loyalty for another generation.
An argument can be made—and is—that excessive partisanship is exactly the problem with a lot of ethnic politics. It goes something like this: Democrats take black voters for granted, Republicans don't even try to win them over, and the result is that they have less influence than they would if they had less party loyalty.
But an argument can also be made that partisanship enhances influence. On the national level, the most powerful groups—unions, African-Americans, evangelicals—are often the most partisan. A pandering politician wants to maximize the efficiency of his pandering. So if the strategy is to mobilize the base, it makes more sense to court a loyal group. (Plus, it gets you more media coverage. The one time the national media noticed Asian-Americans this election cycle was when Hillary Clinton won 75 percent of their votes in California.)
So what are Asian-Americans planning to do about their underwhelming influence? One idea is something called the 80-20 Initiative, a political action committee dedicated to persuading 80 percent of Asian-Americans to vote for one side. Since 2000, the group has endorsed a candidate and asked Asians to support him or her. (They endorsed Gore in 2000 and Kerry in 2004. In the 2008 primaries, it was Hillary; in the general, it's Obama.) The goal of the group, the brainchild of former Delaware Lt. Gov. S.B. Woo, is eventually to turn the Asian-American vote into a bloc vote that can swing both ways, Republican or Democrat.
It's a quixotic enterprise. On the one hand, it's an artificial way to replicate the normally organic process of party identification—and so far, it hasn't quite worked. "You can't get to 80-20 by making a targeted approach in a single election cycle," says Taeku Lee, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley. "You build a constituency over time." At the same time, the Asian-American vote already is increasingly Democratic. By the time 80-20 could persuade four-fifths of the group to vote one way, they might already be there. 80-20 does take credit for Hillary Clinton's winning the California Asian-American vote by 3-1. But swinging party primaries isn't the goal here.
Another solution is strengthening the ground game. In Virginia, the Obama camp has hired Asian-American field directors and recruited Asian-American volunteers. It's also distributing foreign-language campaign literature to local communities in Fairfax County—in Vietnamese, for example, in Falls Church and in Korean in Centreville. "We definitely have the potential to be the swing vote," says Betsy Kim of the Obama campaign. There's evidence, too: In 2006, Jim Webb won 76 percent of the state's Asian-American voters and eked out a victory over George Allen. Many believe those voters—with an assist by Allen's "macaca" moment—made the difference. McCain also has done some outreach, but the enthusiasm seems to lie with the Democrats. One columnist even called Obama "the first Asian-American president."
One area where politicians do make concessions is representation. Asian-Americans make up 5 percent of the population, but only about 1 percent of elected officials. So they want candidates to include more Asian-Americans in their administrations. President Bush earned points by appointing Elaine Chao secretary of labor. On a questionnaire, Hillary Clinton promised to select Asian-American judges; Obama balked at quotas but committed to appointing qualified Asian-Americans.
Experts offer up all sorts of other solutions to the relative invisibility of Asian-Americans in politics. Terry Ao, director of the Asian American Justice Center, argues that congressional districts must be redrawn to consolidate the Asian-American vote. She also says the U.S. census understates their population—since Asian-Americans value their privacy and immigrants are often afraid to provide information—and needs tweaking. Voter registration is another solution. Once Asian-Americans register, says Lee, they vote in high numbers. Some activists also encourage pollsters to include "Asian-American" as a demographic, instead of lumping it in with "Other." And of course, electing more Asian-American leaders would raise their profile considerably. The best-known Asian-American politicians now are probably Hawaii Sens. Daniel Inouye and Daniel Akaka, both Democrats, and Chao and Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, both Republicans.
Since 1980, the Asian-American population has tripled. By 2030, it's expected to nearly double again. Meanwhile, Asian-Americans are flooding battleground states like Nevada, Minnesota, and Virginia faster than other immigrant groups. So maybe 80-20 shouldn't be telling Asian-Americans how to vote. Maybe it should be telling them where to move.
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Chinese Democracy
Why don't we ever hear about the Asian-American vote?
By Christopher Beam
Posted Wednesday, Oct. 1, 2008, at 4:57 PM ET
Read the rest of the Swingers series.
Asian-American voters
Presidential campaigns can feel like an informal census. As the candidates traverse the country, they pander to Latino voters, African-American voters, working-class white voters, older voters, younger voters, elite-college-graduate voters … everyone gets to feel important.
Except Asian-American voters. Somehow, amid all the demographic navel-gazing, the country's third-largest, fastest-growing minority—now 15.2 million people, or 5 percent of the population—gets overlooked.
Not this week. Or, more accurately, not for several hours on Tuesday. That's when a nonprofit group called Leadership Education for Asian Pacifics held a news conference excitingly titled "Political Role of Asian Americans Examined" while the Obama campaign scheduled interviews about its outreach efforts to Asian-American and Pacific Islander voters. The message from both events: Asian voters can make a difference. Attention must be paid.
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More about that later. But first, a question: Why, with all our obsessing over demographics, do we hear so little about the Asian-American vote?
The most obvious reason is size. Asian-Americans make up only 5 percent of the U.S. population. (Note: "Asian-American" here, and at the press conference Tuesday, is defined in the broadest possible sense, to include Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese, Taiwanese, Japanese, Thai, Filipino, Indian, Pakistani, and Indonesian, among others.) Fifteen million people is a lot, but not compared with other ethnic groups. African-Americans now number 38.4 million, according to the 2006 census; Latinos boast 44.4 million. Plus, Asian-Americans have the lowest proportion of eligible voters compared with the populations (about 52 percent) of any racial group. And of those, very few (about 50 percent in 2006) actually register to vote. So we're talking about 7 million eligible voters and about 3 million actual voters.
But wait—it gets worse! The five states with the largest Asian populations are, in order, California, New York, Texas, Hawaii, and New Jersey. Not exactly the swingiest places around. There are two big exceptions: Nevada and Virginia. Both states have rapidly growing Asian-American populations—they constitute 6 percent of eligible voters in Virginia, possibly enough to swing a competitive presidential race.
Another difficulty is the Asian-American community's heterogeneity. Koreans and Chinese and Vietnamese aren't necessarily more or less fractured than Mexicans and Puerto Ricans and Cubans. But, unlike Latinos, they speak different languages. Campaigns can easily cut Spanish-language ads to run nationwide; it's tougher to run ads in Vietnamese, Chinese, Japanese, etc. (Only about 60 percent of Asian-Americans speak English.) Then you'd need to target ethnic media, which is costly and, on the national level, of marginal benefit.
Then there is the difficulty of targeting Asian-American issues. This is a problem in ethnic politics generally—opinions on immigration, for example, are more diverse among blacks than among the interest groups that lobby on their behalf—but it is especially acute among Asian-Americans. Yes, there are general bread-and-butter issues like health care and education for which platitudes about access and opportunity are useful. There are also hyperspecific concerns that are not ideal campaign talking points: Chinese care a lot about U.S.-China relations. Taiwanese care about China-Taiwan. Vietnamese favor anti-Communist policies. And Filipinos often vote based on whoever supports benefits for Filipino veterans of World War II. Plus, segments of the Asian-American community often disagree—as Taiwanese-Americans and Chinese-Americans do on Taiwan, for example, or Pakistanis and Indians on Kashmir.
Finally, as if demographics and geography and message weren't challenging enough, there is partisanship. Or, more precisely, lack thereof. African-American voters break heavily toward Democrats; Latino voters (with the exception of Cubans) are also largely Democratic. Asian-Americans, meanwhile, can't make up their minds. About a third of them are Republican, a third Democratic, and a third unaffiliated. This last group consists largely of immigrants—more than half of Asian-American were born overseas—who often won't develop party loyalty for another generation.
An argument can be made—and is—that excessive partisanship is exactly the problem with a lot of ethnic politics. It goes something like this: Democrats take black voters for granted, Republicans don't even try to win them over, and the result is that they have less influence than they would if they had less party loyalty.
But an argument can also be made that partisanship enhances influence. On the national level, the most powerful groups—unions, African-Americans, evangelicals—are often the most partisan. A pandering politician wants to maximize the efficiency of his pandering. So if the strategy is to mobilize the base, it makes more sense to court a loyal group. (Plus, it gets you more media coverage. The one time the national media noticed Asian-Americans this election cycle was when Hillary Clinton won 75 percent of their votes in California.)
So what are Asian-Americans planning to do about their underwhelming influence? One idea is something called the 80-20 Initiative, a political action committee dedicated to persuading 80 percent of Asian-Americans to vote for one side. Since 2000, the group has endorsed a candidate and asked Asians to support him or her. (They endorsed Gore in 2000 and Kerry in 2004. In the 2008 primaries, it was Hillary; in the general, it's Obama.) The goal of the group, the brainchild of former Delaware Lt. Gov. S.B. Woo, is eventually to turn the Asian-American vote into a bloc vote that can swing both ways, Republican or Democrat.
It's a quixotic enterprise. On the one hand, it's an artificial way to replicate the normally organic process of party identification—and so far, it hasn't quite worked. "You can't get to 80-20 by making a targeted approach in a single election cycle," says Taeku Lee, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley. "You build a constituency over time." At the same time, the Asian-American vote already is increasingly Democratic. By the time 80-20 could persuade four-fifths of the group to vote one way, they might already be there. 80-20 does take credit for Hillary Clinton's winning the California Asian-American vote by 3-1. But swinging party primaries isn't the goal here.
Another solution is strengthening the ground game. In Virginia, the Obama camp has hired Asian-American field directors and recruited Asian-American volunteers. It's also distributing foreign-language campaign literature to local communities in Fairfax County—in Vietnamese, for example, in Falls Church and in Korean in Centreville. "We definitely have the potential to be the swing vote," says Betsy Kim of the Obama campaign. There's evidence, too: In 2006, Jim Webb won 76 percent of the state's Asian-American voters and eked out a victory over George Allen. Many believe those voters—with an assist by Allen's "macaca" moment—made the difference. McCain also has done some outreach, but the enthusiasm seems to lie with the Democrats. One columnist even called Obama "the first Asian-American president."
One area where politicians do make concessions is representation. Asian-Americans make up 5 percent of the population, but only about 1 percent of elected officials. So they want candidates to include more Asian-Americans in their administrations. President Bush earned points by appointing Elaine Chao secretary of labor. On a questionnaire, Hillary Clinton promised to select Asian-American judges; Obama balked at quotas but committed to appointing qualified Asian-Americans.
Experts offer up all sorts of other solutions to the relative invisibility of Asian-Americans in politics. Terry Ao, director of the Asian American Justice Center, argues that congressional districts must be redrawn to consolidate the Asian-American vote. She also says the U.S. census understates their population—since Asian-Americans value their privacy and immigrants are often afraid to provide information—and needs tweaking. Voter registration is another solution. Once Asian-Americans register, says Lee, they vote in high numbers. Some activists also encourage pollsters to include "Asian-American" as a demographic, instead of lumping it in with "Other." And of course, electing more Asian-American leaders would raise their profile considerably. The best-known Asian-American politicians now are probably Hawaii Sens. Daniel Inouye and Daniel Akaka, both Democrats, and Chao and Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, both Republicans.
Since 1980, the Asian-American population has tripled. By 2030, it's expected to nearly double again. Meanwhile, Asian-Americans are flooding battleground states like Nevada, Minnesota, and Virginia faster than other immigrant groups. So maybe 80-20 shouldn't be telling Asian-Americans how to vote. Maybe it should be telling them where to move.
Tuesday, September 30, 2008
High-quality High School Turns Former Gang Member Into Community Organizer (from La Voz in Colorado)
Just shows what opportunity can bring for our nation's young people. -Dr. Louie F. Rodriguez
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High-quality High School Turns Former Gang Member Into Community Organizer
LOS ANGELES, Sept. 29 /PRNewswire-HISPANIC PR WIRE/ -- Ely Flores remembers the day when, at six years old, he first saw gunshots fly in his neighborhood as rival gang members fired back and forth. Growing up in South Central Los Angeles, where gangs and drugs dominated, presented many obstacles to success.
"My father left the family when I was young," Flores says. "That left my mom very sad and pushed my older brother and me into gangs.
"Eventually, Flores was kicked out of his local high school because of gang involvement. He was committed to house arrest several times. With regard to education, Flores experienced a situation familiar to many Latinos. Fewer than six in 10 Latino students in the U.S. graduate from high schools on time with a traditional diploma, and more than two in five drop out, according to an Education Week study.
But after enrolling at LA CAUSA YouthBuild in East Los Angeles -- an alternative school supported in part by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation --Flores envisioned a new future for himself.
LA CAUSA is one of 29 schools belonging to YouthBuild USA's National Schools Initiative, which brings alternative high school models to low-income students who had previously been dropouts. The program helps these students earn a high school diploma and prepare for college or the workforce.
Teachers in YouthBuild schools show students -- many of whom have been incarcerated or otherwise fell through the cracks -- that they can succeed despite their troubled pasts. Students enjoy small class sizes and supportive learning environments as well as leadership development training and career counseling. Students gain construction skills through hands-on learning while taking high school courses. In some cases, they can also earn early college credits.
For many students, the YouthBuild model is transformative.
"These schools and programs are trying some very interesting new things and are on the cutting edge of education," said Lissette Rodriguez, YouthBuild's vice president for field services. "Most people agree that youths who have dropped out deserve a chance. But it is more challenging for them to believe that these young people can achieve at a high level and go on to graduate from college.
"YouthBuild leaders are already proving that students who were cast off in the past can succeed. In the 2006-07 school year, roughly two out of three YouthBuild students either earned a high school diploma or received their general equivalency degree (GED). Four in 10 students were accepted into a college program.
Ely Flores was an early YouthBuild success story, graduating from LA CAUSA in 2005 with his high school diploma and GED.
"Ely was always a leader. He was just using his leadership for the wrong things," said Alejandro Covarrubias, who founded LA CAUSA YouthBuild in 2002. "He needed to see a model for positive behavior.
"After some rocky periods and with the school's help, Flores left his gang. Now 21 he is a young father, college student, and student mentor for students. Flores developed a passion for community organizing through LA CAUSA and now leads workshops for young people on leadership, youth empowerment, and human rights.
Turnarounds like Flores' are not uncommon in the hundreds of schools nationally that use grants from the Gates Foundation to transform the traditional high school. While each grantee takes a slightly different route, the foundation is most interested in smaller schools with high expectations and high-quality teaching.
The Gates Foundation and its partners are acutely concerned with the historically poor high school graduation rates and college attendance rates for Latino students. Since 2000, the foundation has invested more than $1.9 billion in more than 1,800 schools across the country.
Flores says experiences like his prove that high schools with fresh approaches can change the course of students' lives.
Flores wanted to show his newborn son a new way of life. But for years he was torn, feeling like leaving his gang would be the ultimate act of disloyalty. "LA CAUSA finally taught me what was really going on [with the gang]," Flores said. "And instead of just running with my friends, I began to tell myself that I could help my homies out by empowering them. I just realized there was something bigger in my life."
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High-quality High School Turns Former Gang Member Into Community Organizer
LOS ANGELES, Sept. 29 /PRNewswire-HISPANIC PR WIRE/ -- Ely Flores remembers the day when, at six years old, he first saw gunshots fly in his neighborhood as rival gang members fired back and forth. Growing up in South Central Los Angeles, where gangs and drugs dominated, presented many obstacles to success.
"My father left the family when I was young," Flores says. "That left my mom very sad and pushed my older brother and me into gangs.
"Eventually, Flores was kicked out of his local high school because of gang involvement. He was committed to house arrest several times. With regard to education, Flores experienced a situation familiar to many Latinos. Fewer than six in 10 Latino students in the U.S. graduate from high schools on time with a traditional diploma, and more than two in five drop out, according to an Education Week study.
But after enrolling at LA CAUSA YouthBuild in East Los Angeles -- an alternative school supported in part by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation --Flores envisioned a new future for himself.
LA CAUSA is one of 29 schools belonging to YouthBuild USA's National Schools Initiative, which brings alternative high school models to low-income students who had previously been dropouts. The program helps these students earn a high school diploma and prepare for college or the workforce.
Teachers in YouthBuild schools show students -- many of whom have been incarcerated or otherwise fell through the cracks -- that they can succeed despite their troubled pasts. Students enjoy small class sizes and supportive learning environments as well as leadership development training and career counseling. Students gain construction skills through hands-on learning while taking high school courses. In some cases, they can also earn early college credits.
For many students, the YouthBuild model is transformative.
"These schools and programs are trying some very interesting new things and are on the cutting edge of education," said Lissette Rodriguez, YouthBuild's vice president for field services. "Most people agree that youths who have dropped out deserve a chance. But it is more challenging for them to believe that these young people can achieve at a high level and go on to graduate from college.
"YouthBuild leaders are already proving that students who were cast off in the past can succeed. In the 2006-07 school year, roughly two out of three YouthBuild students either earned a high school diploma or received their general equivalency degree (GED). Four in 10 students were accepted into a college program.
Ely Flores was an early YouthBuild success story, graduating from LA CAUSA in 2005 with his high school diploma and GED.
"Ely was always a leader. He was just using his leadership for the wrong things," said Alejandro Covarrubias, who founded LA CAUSA YouthBuild in 2002. "He needed to see a model for positive behavior.
"After some rocky periods and with the school's help, Flores left his gang. Now 21 he is a young father, college student, and student mentor for students. Flores developed a passion for community organizing through LA CAUSA and now leads workshops for young people on leadership, youth empowerment, and human rights.
Turnarounds like Flores' are not uncommon in the hundreds of schools nationally that use grants from the Gates Foundation to transform the traditional high school. While each grantee takes a slightly different route, the foundation is most interested in smaller schools with high expectations and high-quality teaching.
The Gates Foundation and its partners are acutely concerned with the historically poor high school graduation rates and college attendance rates for Latino students. Since 2000, the foundation has invested more than $1.9 billion in more than 1,800 schools across the country.
Flores says experiences like his prove that high schools with fresh approaches can change the course of students' lives.
Flores wanted to show his newborn son a new way of life. But for years he was torn, feeling like leaving his gang would be the ultimate act of disloyalty. "LA CAUSA finally taught me what was really going on [with the gang]," Flores said. "And instead of just running with my friends, I began to tell myself that I could help my homies out by empowering them. I just realized there was something bigger in my life."
Monday, September 22, 2008
With struggling economy, I.E. Latinos fear deportation (from San Bernardino Sun)
Story about home...-Dr. Louie F. Rodriguez
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With struggling economy, I.E. Latinos fear deportation
Stephen Wall, Staff Writer
Article Launched: 09/21/2008 06:56:36 PM PDT
SAN BERNARDINO - With U.S. financial markets tanking and the economy reeling, Latino activists fear a repeat of history.
During the Great Depression, one-third of the country's Mexican population was deported or pressured to return home. Many of them were American citizens.
The recession of the early 1950s forced nearly 3 million Mexicans to be sent home as a consequence of "Operation Wetback."
A similar economic and financial meltdown could precipitate another massive deportation and removal program, activists say.
"In times of recession and times of depression, there is an escalation and intensification of anti-immigration politics," said Armando Navarro, coordinator of the National Alliance for Human Rights. "Immigrants become the scapegoats."
The National Alliance has scheduled a meeting Tuesday at the Villasenor Library to discuss ways to counteract what it sees as a resurgence of nativism.
The meeting also will focus on the progress of local efforts in support of Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama. Several "Viva Obama" clubs recently formed to mobilize Latino voters to back Obama.
The Illinois senator is preferred by many Latinos who favor a path to citizenship for the country's estimated 12 million illegal immigrants.
Latino immigrant communities in several states have been hit hard by workplace raids and other enforcement measures that have created a climate of fear and anxiety.
In a well-publicized case, federal immigration agents in May arrested 389 workers during a raid at a meatpacking plant in Postville, Iowa.
Closer to home, federal agents this month served a search warrant and arrested 51 illegal immigrants at a Palm Springs bakery. Two supervisors also were charged with employing illegal immigrants.
A Pew Hispanic Center survey released last week showed that a growing number of Latinos in the United States are worried about being deported. Fifty-seven percent said they are concerned that they, a relative or close friend may be deported. That's a 4 percent increase over last year, according to the survey.
"They're getting real strict with the law," said Jorge Reyes, a Fontana resident who is vice president of political affairs for the Ontario Hispanic Chamber of Commerce. "They are going to the factories and the companies and going after the workers. This is getting really bad for us."
Mel Albiso, who heads a statewide nonprofit that helps Latino students, said there is a correlation between workplace raids and school attendance.
"The immigrant parents will keep their children home because they're fearful of their families being split apart," said Albiso, president of the Association of Mexican-American Educators. "You can't educate children the way you need to when they're scared about having a place to go home to. No group of people should have to live in fear."
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With struggling economy, I.E. Latinos fear deportation
Stephen Wall, Staff Writer
Article Launched: 09/21/2008 06:56:36 PM PDT
SAN BERNARDINO - With U.S. financial markets tanking and the economy reeling, Latino activists fear a repeat of history.
During the Great Depression, one-third of the country's Mexican population was deported or pressured to return home. Many of them were American citizens.
The recession of the early 1950s forced nearly 3 million Mexicans to be sent home as a consequence of "Operation Wetback."
A similar economic and financial meltdown could precipitate another massive deportation and removal program, activists say.
"In times of recession and times of depression, there is an escalation and intensification of anti-immigration politics," said Armando Navarro, coordinator of the National Alliance for Human Rights. "Immigrants become the scapegoats."
The National Alliance has scheduled a meeting Tuesday at the Villasenor Library to discuss ways to counteract what it sees as a resurgence of nativism.
The meeting also will focus on the progress of local efforts in support of Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama. Several "Viva Obama" clubs recently formed to mobilize Latino voters to back Obama.
The Illinois senator is preferred by many Latinos who favor a path to citizenship for the country's estimated 12 million illegal immigrants.
Latino immigrant communities in several states have been hit hard by workplace raids and other enforcement measures that have created a climate of fear and anxiety.
In a well-publicized case, federal immigration agents in May arrested 389 workers during a raid at a meatpacking plant in Postville, Iowa.
Closer to home, federal agents this month served a search warrant and arrested 51 illegal immigrants at a Palm Springs bakery. Two supervisors also were charged with employing illegal immigrants.
A Pew Hispanic Center survey released last week showed that a growing number of Latinos in the United States are worried about being deported. Fifty-seven percent said they are concerned that they, a relative or close friend may be deported. That's a 4 percent increase over last year, according to the survey.
"They're getting real strict with the law," said Jorge Reyes, a Fontana resident who is vice president of political affairs for the Ontario Hispanic Chamber of Commerce. "They are going to the factories and the companies and going after the workers. This is getting really bad for us."
Mel Albiso, who heads a statewide nonprofit that helps Latino students, said there is a correlation between workplace raids and school attendance.
"The immigrant parents will keep their children home because they're fearful of their families being split apart," said Albiso, president of the Association of Mexican-American Educators. "You can't educate children the way you need to when they're scared about having a place to go home to. No group of people should have to live in fear."
Sunday, September 21, 2008
Measure 58's goal of English-only classes already a reality (from The Oregonian)
Once the numbers of English Language Learners are at a level of "critical mass" in states with booming ELL populations, we should expect similar proposals to emerge, particularly in the South. Such proposals will probably be accompanied by ideas that are not based on research, driven by political purposes, and led by people who are the most removed from public education. -Dr. Louie F. Rodriguez
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Measure 58's goal of English-only classes already a reality
Posted by sroux September 20, 2008 21:27PM
Doug Beghtel / The Oregonian
Verenise Hernandez, a fourth-grader at Cornelius Elementary, practices reading in Spanish with help from teacher Marcia Camacho. Forest Grove educators say teaching Spanish-speaking students to read and write well in Spanish is the best way to help them become strong readers and writers of English.
Voters are being asked to decide how Oregon schools should teach nearly 70,000 students learning English as their second language.
Measure 58, one of five measures on the November ballot authored by Bill Sizemore, would prohibit schools from teaching English learners in their native language after one year in elementary school or two years in high school.
Sizemore wants to plunge them into all-English classrooms as soon as possible because, he says, schools intentionally delay getting students fluent in English.
His proposal, and the strong opposition it is generating among educators, spotlight how little most people know about the way the children spend their days in Oregon classrooms.
Roughly 85 percent are taught exclusively in English, without any teaching in their native Spanish, Russian, Somali or Vietnamese, an analysis by The Oregonian shows.
They rely on their teachers' gestures, pictures, diagrams and carefully enunciated English words to learn their new language and math, history, science and literature at the same time.
Oregon's English language learners
80% are in sheltered instruction, in which students learning English go to regular class with English-speaking classmates but the teacher uses extra visual clues, vocabulary lessons, etc.
8% are in short-term instruction in the first language, along with instruction in English, until the student gains basic literacy in the first language plus gains English skills. This is usually done in primary grades.
5% are in dual-language immersion programs, in which English-speaking students learn Spanish, Japanese or Mandarin, while native speakers of those languages learn English.
4% are in long-term instruction in native language and English so they become and stay bilingual. (This happens almost only in Woodburn and Canby.)
3% are in separate ESL classes taught exclusively in English.
Source: Oregon Department of Education
The rest of Oregon's English learners are taught part of the day in their native language, in either Spanish, Russian or Chinese.
Most are in classes exclusively for students learning English. But some, such as those in immersion magnet programs in Portland, are in classes designed to help both native English speakers and those learning English become bilingual.
The idea behind teaching English learners partly in their own language is twofold: Students learn to read and write faster when taught in their first language, and those literacy skills then transfer to English. During the years students are still shaky in English, they can learn meaty academic content in their native tongue.
A coalition that includes every major education group in the state is working to defeat Measure 58.
Schools agree that getting nonnative speakers proficient in English is the paramount goal for those students, says Diana Fernandez, director of English as a second language instruction for Portland Public Schools, where about 90 percent of English learners are taught only in English. She acknowledges that some students still languish with only intermediate English skills.
But the approach to teaching English should be based on research and on individual needs of students -- whether they can read and write in any language, for example, or whether they have a learning disability, says Wei-Wei Lou, director of English as a second language instruction in Beaverton schools.
Although it seems counterintuitive, teaching students to read and write in their first language, then transitioning them to English, leads to students who are the strongest at reading and writing English, says Perla Rodriguez, principal of Cornelius Elementary.
Research consistently finds that teaching students literacy in their own language makes them stronger readers of English, agrees Claude Goldenberg, a Stanford professor who directs the Center for Language Minority Education and Research.
A time limit, as would be set by Sizemore's measure, makes no sense, Beaverton's Lou says. "All children are very different. So if you say cap it at one year or cap it at two years, that's not appropriate."
Most-common approach
Unlike other states, such as California and Arizona, Oregon has never been a battleground over bilingual education, in part because the number of students not fluent in English was small.
That population has grown in the past decade, however, and now almost one of every eight students in Oregon is learning English as a second language.
Under federal law, all 68,000 English learners are guaranteed two things: They are entitled to special teaching in English to help them write, read and speak English, and they must be taught the same core academic content as native English speakers.
Oregon school districts have developed a host of different approaches to do that.
By far the most common is what's known as "sheltered instruction," which calls on teachers to use gestures, visual aids, repetition, simplified terms and other cues to teach math, social studies, writing and other subjects. There is no teaching in or translation to students' native language.
With 40 different languages sprinkled across hundreds of Oregon schools, it is impractical to teach each student in his or her native language.
Michael Lloyd / The OregonianWestview High teacher Brian Squire gives Abdi Somow, a refugee from Somalia, feedback on a writing assignment. Like most Oregon students learning English as their second language, Somow is taught exclusively in English with no teaching in or translation into his first language. Students who arrive in the United States as teenagers with little formal education in any language face a steep learning curve to master reading and writing English.
At Beaverton's Westview High, for example, Brian Squire's seventh-period class has 23 students who speak 11 different languages -- Cantonese, Somali, Hebrew, Russian, Mandarin, Japanese, German, Spanish, Taiwanese, Korean and Uzbek. Most of them are recent arrivals. The biggest group, Spanish speakers, make up one-third of the class.
The school cannot afford and could not find qualified teachers fluent in all those languages. So Westview groups students by their English level and gives them targeted help in English with biology, global studies and other subjects as well as English instruction.
Squires speaks slowly, gestures emphatically, rephrases and repeats his key messages and tries to tie new ideas in English to familiar ideas and details from students' home cultures.
"I can understand my teacher, just sometimes it's hard," says Alice Morgenva, who arrived from Uzbekistan six months ago after her family won a green card that allowed them to immigrate. "I know information, but to write in English, it's hard for me."
Dual-language instruction
School districts in Woodburn, Forest Grove and Salem-Keizer -- where at least 20 percent of the students speak Spanish as a first language -- together account for about 60 percent of all Oregon students who get taught in a language besides English for part of the day. How are students taught English in Oregon?
Exclusively in English: 85%
Part of the day in English, part of the day in their native language: 10%
In a dual-language immersion program, where some students learn their first language plus English, and native English speakers learn to become bilingual: 5%
Source: Oregon Department of Education
Other school districts, including Portland, Corvallis and Phoenix-Talent, offer popular immersion programs that allow native English speakers to gradually become bilingual in Spanish, Mandarin or Japanese -- and allow speakers of those languages to gradually learn English -- while they learn academic subjects in both languages. Woodburn has switched to that approach in primary grades and will move almost entirely to dual-language immersion one grade at a time.
In most Forest Grove elementary schools, students who speak Spanish at home are taught reading and writing in Spanish for 90 minutes a day, along with a 30-minute English language development class.
Once they have mastered reading and writing in their own language -- by fourth or fifth grade for those who start in kindergarten in Forest Grove -- they are put into an English reading and writing class.
Fourth-grader Alberto Acension came to Cornelius Elementary in second grade. Last week, he was taught in Spanish about techniques for strong, independent reading. "Leer a si mismo" ("to read on your own") read the chart he helped create. He read a biography of Cesar Chavez in Spanish.
Later that day, Alberto learned how to search for books in the school library, eagerly tracking the librarian's directions in English. He checked out a book about soccer, written in English.
"In my house, I already know how to speak Spanish," he says. "In my class, I speak English, too. It's fun."
Which language does he like to read in? "Both," he says.
Forest Grove students show strong results in English. More than half moved up a full level in English proficiency last year. By high school, 60 percent of Latino students read at grade level -- nearly the statewide average for all Oregon sophomores.
But Woodburn, which also teaches its students to read and write in their first language, posts poorer results. After five years getting help with English, only 13 percent of its students were proficient. Only about 40 percent of its Latino 10th-graders passed the state reading test.
That's why the district has switched its approach to be more like Forest Grove's, Superintendent Walt Bloomberg says. The district knows it must do better at getting students fully proficient in English.
Sizemore's reasoning
Sizemore says he got the idea for his ballot measure from a pair of teachers who told him their students were sidelined for years in classes for English learners when they could have done fine with regular all-English lessons.
Schools receive nearly $3,000 in additional money from the state for each student in English as a second language. Sizemore says many schools keep students in the program just to get the money.
"My message is that if you're going to come here, we want you to be successful, and you have to learn English, because it's the gateway to success," Sizemore says. "Instead, for the first two years here, we teach them to be proficient in Spanish or Laotian or whatever their language is. That's nonsense."
Educators say he is misinformed -- no Oregon students are taught in Laotian, for instance, and every English language learner is taught in English for part of every day.
Eduardo Lopez, a second-grader at Cornelius Elementary, is glad he gets to learn about animals and other second-grade subjects in two languages. It allows him to communicate with people who speak only Spanish, like his parents, and only English, like many of his schoolmates.
"That way you can understand and talk to them," he says.
-- Betsy Hammond; betsyhammond@news.oregonian.com
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Measure 58's goal of English-only classes already a reality
Posted by sroux September 20, 2008 21:27PM
Doug Beghtel / The Oregonian
Verenise Hernandez, a fourth-grader at Cornelius Elementary, practices reading in Spanish with help from teacher Marcia Camacho. Forest Grove educators say teaching Spanish-speaking students to read and write well in Spanish is the best way to help them become strong readers and writers of English.
Voters are being asked to decide how Oregon schools should teach nearly 70,000 students learning English as their second language.
Measure 58, one of five measures on the November ballot authored by Bill Sizemore, would prohibit schools from teaching English learners in their native language after one year in elementary school or two years in high school.
Sizemore wants to plunge them into all-English classrooms as soon as possible because, he says, schools intentionally delay getting students fluent in English.
His proposal, and the strong opposition it is generating among educators, spotlight how little most people know about the way the children spend their days in Oregon classrooms.
Roughly 85 percent are taught exclusively in English, without any teaching in their native Spanish, Russian, Somali or Vietnamese, an analysis by The Oregonian shows.
They rely on their teachers' gestures, pictures, diagrams and carefully enunciated English words to learn their new language and math, history, science and literature at the same time.
Oregon's English language learners
80% are in sheltered instruction, in which students learning English go to regular class with English-speaking classmates but the teacher uses extra visual clues, vocabulary lessons, etc.
8% are in short-term instruction in the first language, along with instruction in English, until the student gains basic literacy in the first language plus gains English skills. This is usually done in primary grades.
5% are in dual-language immersion programs, in which English-speaking students learn Spanish, Japanese or Mandarin, while native speakers of those languages learn English.
4% are in long-term instruction in native language and English so they become and stay bilingual. (This happens almost only in Woodburn and Canby.)
3% are in separate ESL classes taught exclusively in English.
Source: Oregon Department of Education
The rest of Oregon's English learners are taught part of the day in their native language, in either Spanish, Russian or Chinese.
Most are in classes exclusively for students learning English. But some, such as those in immersion magnet programs in Portland, are in classes designed to help both native English speakers and those learning English become bilingual.
The idea behind teaching English learners partly in their own language is twofold: Students learn to read and write faster when taught in their first language, and those literacy skills then transfer to English. During the years students are still shaky in English, they can learn meaty academic content in their native tongue.
A coalition that includes every major education group in the state is working to defeat Measure 58.
Schools agree that getting nonnative speakers proficient in English is the paramount goal for those students, says Diana Fernandez, director of English as a second language instruction for Portland Public Schools, where about 90 percent of English learners are taught only in English. She acknowledges that some students still languish with only intermediate English skills.
But the approach to teaching English should be based on research and on individual needs of students -- whether they can read and write in any language, for example, or whether they have a learning disability, says Wei-Wei Lou, director of English as a second language instruction in Beaverton schools.
Although it seems counterintuitive, teaching students to read and write in their first language, then transitioning them to English, leads to students who are the strongest at reading and writing English, says Perla Rodriguez, principal of Cornelius Elementary.
Research consistently finds that teaching students literacy in their own language makes them stronger readers of English, agrees Claude Goldenberg, a Stanford professor who directs the Center for Language Minority Education and Research.
A time limit, as would be set by Sizemore's measure, makes no sense, Beaverton's Lou says. "All children are very different. So if you say cap it at one year or cap it at two years, that's not appropriate."
Most-common approach
Unlike other states, such as California and Arizona, Oregon has never been a battleground over bilingual education, in part because the number of students not fluent in English was small.
That population has grown in the past decade, however, and now almost one of every eight students in Oregon is learning English as a second language.
Under federal law, all 68,000 English learners are guaranteed two things: They are entitled to special teaching in English to help them write, read and speak English, and they must be taught the same core academic content as native English speakers.
Oregon school districts have developed a host of different approaches to do that.
By far the most common is what's known as "sheltered instruction," which calls on teachers to use gestures, visual aids, repetition, simplified terms and other cues to teach math, social studies, writing and other subjects. There is no teaching in or translation to students' native language.
With 40 different languages sprinkled across hundreds of Oregon schools, it is impractical to teach each student in his or her native language.
Michael Lloyd / The OregonianWestview High teacher Brian Squire gives Abdi Somow, a refugee from Somalia, feedback on a writing assignment. Like most Oregon students learning English as their second language, Somow is taught exclusively in English with no teaching in or translation into his first language. Students who arrive in the United States as teenagers with little formal education in any language face a steep learning curve to master reading and writing English.
At Beaverton's Westview High, for example, Brian Squire's seventh-period class has 23 students who speak 11 different languages -- Cantonese, Somali, Hebrew, Russian, Mandarin, Japanese, German, Spanish, Taiwanese, Korean and Uzbek. Most of them are recent arrivals. The biggest group, Spanish speakers, make up one-third of the class.
The school cannot afford and could not find qualified teachers fluent in all those languages. So Westview groups students by their English level and gives them targeted help in English with biology, global studies and other subjects as well as English instruction.
Squires speaks slowly, gestures emphatically, rephrases and repeats his key messages and tries to tie new ideas in English to familiar ideas and details from students' home cultures.
"I can understand my teacher, just sometimes it's hard," says Alice Morgenva, who arrived from Uzbekistan six months ago after her family won a green card that allowed them to immigrate. "I know information, but to write in English, it's hard for me."
Dual-language instruction
School districts in Woodburn, Forest Grove and Salem-Keizer -- where at least 20 percent of the students speak Spanish as a first language -- together account for about 60 percent of all Oregon students who get taught in a language besides English for part of the day. How are students taught English in Oregon?
Exclusively in English: 85%
Part of the day in English, part of the day in their native language: 10%
In a dual-language immersion program, where some students learn their first language plus English, and native English speakers learn to become bilingual: 5%
Source: Oregon Department of Education
Other school districts, including Portland, Corvallis and Phoenix-Talent, offer popular immersion programs that allow native English speakers to gradually become bilingual in Spanish, Mandarin or Japanese -- and allow speakers of those languages to gradually learn English -- while they learn academic subjects in both languages. Woodburn has switched to that approach in primary grades and will move almost entirely to dual-language immersion one grade at a time.
In most Forest Grove elementary schools, students who speak Spanish at home are taught reading and writing in Spanish for 90 minutes a day, along with a 30-minute English language development class.
Once they have mastered reading and writing in their own language -- by fourth or fifth grade for those who start in kindergarten in Forest Grove -- they are put into an English reading and writing class.
Fourth-grader Alberto Acension came to Cornelius Elementary in second grade. Last week, he was taught in Spanish about techniques for strong, independent reading. "Leer a si mismo" ("to read on your own") read the chart he helped create. He read a biography of Cesar Chavez in Spanish.
Later that day, Alberto learned how to search for books in the school library, eagerly tracking the librarian's directions in English. He checked out a book about soccer, written in English.
"In my house, I already know how to speak Spanish," he says. "In my class, I speak English, too. It's fun."
Which language does he like to read in? "Both," he says.
Forest Grove students show strong results in English. More than half moved up a full level in English proficiency last year. By high school, 60 percent of Latino students read at grade level -- nearly the statewide average for all Oregon sophomores.
But Woodburn, which also teaches its students to read and write in their first language, posts poorer results. After five years getting help with English, only 13 percent of its students were proficient. Only about 40 percent of its Latino 10th-graders passed the state reading test.
That's why the district has switched its approach to be more like Forest Grove's, Superintendent Walt Bloomberg says. The district knows it must do better at getting students fully proficient in English.
Sizemore's reasoning
Sizemore says he got the idea for his ballot measure from a pair of teachers who told him their students were sidelined for years in classes for English learners when they could have done fine with regular all-English lessons.
Schools receive nearly $3,000 in additional money from the state for each student in English as a second language. Sizemore says many schools keep students in the program just to get the money.
"My message is that if you're going to come here, we want you to be successful, and you have to learn English, because it's the gateway to success," Sizemore says. "Instead, for the first two years here, we teach them to be proficient in Spanish or Laotian or whatever their language is. That's nonsense."
Educators say he is misinformed -- no Oregon students are taught in Laotian, for instance, and every English language learner is taught in English for part of every day.
Eduardo Lopez, a second-grader at Cornelius Elementary, is glad he gets to learn about animals and other second-grade subjects in two languages. It allows him to communicate with people who speak only Spanish, like his parents, and only English, like many of his schoolmates.
"That way you can understand and talk to them," he says.
-- Betsy Hammond; betsyhammond@news.oregonian.com
Study: Many 8th-graders can't handle algebra (from USA Today)
Study: Many 8th-graders can't handle algebra
By Greg Toppo, USA TODAY
Peering beneath the hood of a national push to have all students take algebra by eighth grade, a new study out today finds that many of the nation's lowest-performing middle-schoolers are in way over their heads. They take algebra and other advanced math courses before they've mastered basic skills such as multiplication, division and problem-solving with fractions.
For more than a decade, "algebra for everyone" has been a high-minded mantra for the idea that virtually all students should take algebra by eighth grade. Since the mid-1990s, schools nationwide have pushed more and more students into challenging middle-school math courses. Last year, 38% of eighth-graders were enrolled in advanced math (Algebra I, Algebra II or Geometry).
But when Brookings Institution researcher Tom Loveless looked at the skills of eighth-graders taking advanced math, he found something startling: Between 2000 and 2005, the percentage of very low-performing students in advanced math classes more than tripled.
Using data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, he found that among the lowest-scoring 10% of kids, nearly 29% were taking advanced math, despite having very low skills.
How low? On par with a typical second-grader's, Loveless says. They lack a solid foundation in multiplication, division, fractions, decimals, rounding or place value. Yet they were tackling fairly sophisticated math.
"It's hard to teach a real algebra class if you have kids who don't know arithmetic," he says.
University of Wisconsin-Madison researcher Adam Gamoran, who has advocated pushing more low-achieving high schoolers into algebra classes, says these students get more from algebra classes than from general math classes. "In their zeal to extend this reform ever more broadly, some mistakes have been made," he says, but he hopes the findings don't cause a backlash against challenging low achievers to do harder math.
Loveless, who directs Brookings' Brown Center on Education Policy, estimates about 120,000 kids are inappropriately enrolled in classes that are supposed to level the playing field and too often don't. "It's really counterfeit equity," he says, noting that the mismatch inordinately affects black, Hispanic and poor kids in urban schools.
Gamoran says algebra concepts "should be introduced earlier in students' mathematical studies — it's not like there should be no algebra and then, in eighth grade, all algebra."
Loveless agrees. But he says for kids who don't have adequate skills in eighth grade, schools should hold off on placing them in algebra until high school.
By Greg Toppo, USA TODAY
Peering beneath the hood of a national push to have all students take algebra by eighth grade, a new study out today finds that many of the nation's lowest-performing middle-schoolers are in way over their heads. They take algebra and other advanced math courses before they've mastered basic skills such as multiplication, division and problem-solving with fractions.
For more than a decade, "algebra for everyone" has been a high-minded mantra for the idea that virtually all students should take algebra by eighth grade. Since the mid-1990s, schools nationwide have pushed more and more students into challenging middle-school math courses. Last year, 38% of eighth-graders were enrolled in advanced math (Algebra I, Algebra II or Geometry).
But when Brookings Institution researcher Tom Loveless looked at the skills of eighth-graders taking advanced math, he found something startling: Between 2000 and 2005, the percentage of very low-performing students in advanced math classes more than tripled.
Using data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, he found that among the lowest-scoring 10% of kids, nearly 29% were taking advanced math, despite having very low skills.
How low? On par with a typical second-grader's, Loveless says. They lack a solid foundation in multiplication, division, fractions, decimals, rounding or place value. Yet they were tackling fairly sophisticated math.
"It's hard to teach a real algebra class if you have kids who don't know arithmetic," he says.
University of Wisconsin-Madison researcher Adam Gamoran, who has advocated pushing more low-achieving high schoolers into algebra classes, says these students get more from algebra classes than from general math classes. "In their zeal to extend this reform ever more broadly, some mistakes have been made," he says, but he hopes the findings don't cause a backlash against challenging low achievers to do harder math.
Loveless, who directs Brookings' Brown Center on Education Policy, estimates about 120,000 kids are inappropriately enrolled in classes that are supposed to level the playing field and too often don't. "It's really counterfeit equity," he says, noting that the mismatch inordinately affects black, Hispanic and poor kids in urban schools.
Gamoran says algebra concepts "should be introduced earlier in students' mathematical studies — it's not like there should be no algebra and then, in eighth grade, all algebra."
Loveless agrees. But he says for kids who don't have adequate skills in eighth grade, schools should hold off on placing them in algebra until high school.
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