­by James Crawford

President Obama’s new “Blueprint” for school reform features lots of familiar promises: providing “every child in America a world class education” … placing “a great teacher in every classroom” … “closing achievement gaps” … graduating “college- and career-ready students” … “fostering a race to the top.”

We’ve heard it all before. Remember “No Child Left Behind”? That misguided experiment has failed to meet any of its lofty goals. Worse, it has created a tyranny of testing in our public schools that requires key decisions to be made solely on the basis of student scores. Among other perverse effects, it has dumbed-down the curriculum, eliminated subjects like music and art, demoralized educators, frustrated parents and short-changed students – especially those most in need our help.

Recognizing the unpopularity of this law, candidate Obama denounced the “data-driven” madness of No Child Left Behind throughout his campaign.

He often used the applause line: “Teachers should not be forced to spend the academic year preparing students to fill in bubbles on standardized tests.”

So what does the President propose now in his Blueprint for elementary and secondary education?

More filling in bubbles.

On the brighter side, some of the harshest No Child Left Behind mandates would be eased, along with other improvements such as restoring federal grants for bilingual education programs. But what Obama gives with one hand, he takes back with the other.

His Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, has complained loudly about the low quality of standardized tests. Yet the Administration still intends to rely on those tests to punish, dismantle and privatize thousands of public schools each year whose scores fall in the bottom 5 percent. Equally troubling is its plan to extend the use of unreliable test data to evaluate, pay, and even fire teachers.

None of these radical ideas has been validated by research. To the contrary, there is considerable evidence that “high stakes” testing can do considerable harm to schools and to children.

To visualize the likely impact, let’s set aside the Blueprint’s flowery rhetoric and consider the Administration’s recent actions. Last month, in a public show of support, Obama and Duncan endorsed the dismissal of all staff at a so-called “failing” high school in Central Falls, RI. The students – 70 percent Latino, with a large percentage of English language learners – turned out to support their teachers and administrators. But the superintendent and local politicians refused to listen, threw out the union contract, and carried out the mass firings, without regard to whether individual teachers were successful or not.

Adding to the injustice, this decision was substantially based on the scores of students not yet proficient in English, the language of the test, despite the fact that nobody even pretends that such results are valid. The Blueprint includes ideas for improving assessments for English learners – a worthy goal. Yet, meanwhile, it would continue using invalid test data to make important decisions.

The ugly saga of Central Falls is just a preview of what’s in store for large numbers of urban schools if the Obama administration gets its way. No doubt many of these schools need help. But “turnaround” strategies, such as transforming them into charter schools, with a new staff and different kids, have proved disruptive and harmful in many cities – notably Chicago, where Arne Duncan ran schools before coming to Washington. And there’s no question that many students, especially children of color, have been left behind by these actions, proclaimed – ironically – in the name of civil rights.

Such draconian policies raise troubling questions. Perhaps the most obvious is: Who will want to teach English learners and other students who face academic challenges if educators will be blamed and punished, on the basis of faulty data, for failing to work overnight miracles?

As Leo Casey, a New York union leader put it recently: “If the price of working with America’s neediest students is a game of Russian roulette with one’s professional careers, many teachers will reasonably decide that the price is too high. And the losers will be the schools and the students who need accomplished teachers the most.”

por Jorge Mújica Murias
México del Nort

By this time, the reader surely already knows of the renewed impetus of the movement for immigration reform. On March 21, we marched in Washington D.C., some 200 thousand of us, at the exact time when Congress was voting on the so-called Health Care reform. The march was not bad at all, the first time we were able to organize a national march in the capital and we are more than a few thousands.

Like in all these events, not everything went well either. At some point it was suspected that the sponsors were not the groups that work on immigration reform but Univisión, which enjoyed the “privilege” (or would it be the exclusivity?) of presenting one by one his radio “personalities”, announcers and merolicos at a national level, and there wasa frankly jocular moment in which a speaker proposed Illinois Congressman Luís Gutiérrez for president. The argument was that “Obama has not done anything; if Luís Gutiérrez were in the White House; he would have already done something”. It is a tremendous joke, because Obama has not done anything but he has been only one year in office, and Luís has been 17 years in Congress without doing anything.

But the most important moment might have been the video message of Barack Obama. When everybody thought he was eating up his nails following the health Care Reform vote, Barack had the time to record a short video and address the marchers saying, as is typical in him, exactly what they wanted to hear: that he supports full immigration reform and that he supports the recent proposal presented by Senators Schumer and Graham.

And that’s one of the biggest Obama problems. To stay in the good side of everybody, he ends up saying things that do not make sense.

Let’s make a bit of history, so that he remembers … In 2006, in the Immigrant’s Spring, we marched against the criminalization of immigrants, against the famous HR4437, and in favor of a just immigration reform.

Though and Difficult

Many things have happened since that year, except a just immigration reform. It has rained, it has snowed, there have been earthquakes and hurricanes, and it seems that each event has changed the tone on the chances of such reform.

To begin with, it stopped being a “just immigration reform” to become a “comprehensive reform” (comprehensive meaning questions of national security included,) and that is the language currently used by the dozen or so organizations with hundreds of thousands or million-dollar budgets that work on the issue. The word “just” got lost between the speeches of Lou Dobbs and George Bush.

But Graham and Schumer, Republican and Democrat leaders in the Senate, recover the word “just” in the fourth point of their blueprint. And it is necessary to remember, however, that these gentlemen have not presented a law initiative that could be discussed in the Senate, but only “the bases of a project” of an intended immigration reform.

The first three points insist on what we already know as “comprehensive immigration,” and we don’t like them a bit: reinforcement of the border; a mandatory system of document verification for all workers in the United States, with biometric measures (let’s call it a National ID card for all workers,) and a “guest worker” (work-and-leave) program for future immigrants.

But the fourth point attracts attention. There is where they recover the lost word, stating that theirs will be a “Though but Just” process of legalization for undocumented immigrants.

Such legalization would begin with the requirement of “pleading guilty for violating the law,” in other words, it begins with the Sensenbrenner, the famous HR4437 that we so much fought against in 2006.

After declaring itself a criminal, one has “to pay his debt to society” by means of voluntary work. To continue the process, it is necessary to pay fines, demonstrate that taxes have been paid for all time living here even without having a Social Security number, and then it would be necessary to demonstrate “proficiency” in the English language, something many US born High School students lack.

­Once all that is done, the immigrant has gained the right of going “to the end of the line” for an eventual legalization. The “line”, like we all know, is nowhere to be found anywhere. Perhaps it refers to the 14 years of waiting when a Mexican father petitions his son, or the 24 years a son must wait when he petitions his Korean mother.

There are no further details of this project, because they still do not exist.

What we know is that it is frankly unacceptable. If this is what Obama supports, a reform where you can easily find the “Though” part but never the “Just”, we will have to return to the streets this coming May Day, chanting “Obama, please do not support us”… mexicodelnorte@yahoo.com.mx