Evo Morales

BOLIVIA – Something is going on in Bolivia and it is not the nationalisation claimed by the government and reported in the foreign press. Nor is it the power clash with rightwing autonomists in the east of the country. The real development is the pressure being brought to bear on President Evo Morales from the supporters that brought him to power but are positioned to the left of him.

Disenchanted with the speed of change promised by Morales one year ago, some of the president’s more radical supporters declared a (still-born) “revolutionary” government in Cochabamba during the recent uprising; they rose up in Camiri, in the Chaco region, on 2 February to demand “real nationalisation” of the gas industry, rather than the ostensible nationalisation announced by Morales last May; and then, on 6 February, 10,000 to 15,000 cooperative miners took to the streets of La Paz to protest against a new tax on the mining industry the government was planning to introduce.

by the El Reportero wire services

Álvaro Uribe

COLOMBIA – Politicians both from the opposition and the ruling coalition have called for a new legislative election following the arrest of six congressmen last week for their links to the Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia (AUC). The last legislative election was held less than a year ago, in March 2006. Parties loyal to President Alvaro Uribe gained a comfortable majority in congress, with the result that Uribe was expected to exert even greater control over congress than he did in his first term. However, congress’s reputation has since been dragged through the mire. The supreme court and the public prosecutor have initiated criminal proceedings against a number of legislators over their links to paramilitaries in what has become known as the parapolitical scandal. The overwhelming majority ­of those who have been implicated belonged to the pro-Uribe parties.

by Marvin J. Ramírez

Two unseparable friends: L-R: Marvin Berroterán and Dennis Mendoza were savagely beaten in front of Berroterán’s house on South Van Ness Ave. and 24th St. house by gang members for no reason.

For approximately five years, Dennis Mendoza and Marvin Berroterán were like two inseparable brothers, both from Nicaragua, about the same age, and about the same weight size. The two best-friends hang around with other friends and shared occasional cocktails in local joints in the Mission, usually near 24th Street and South Van Ness Avenue.

The Day of the Dead Parade last November was not different, the El Reportero’s camera spotted them together watching the parade pass by just a few meters from Berroterán’s mother, where he lives with his elderly mother.

On Feb. 17, they were also together, sitting on the stairs of Berroteran’s house entrance at about 7:20 p.m., when a small group of youngsters approached them with a challenging, “what are you looking at me,” and Mendoza responding, “I am not looking at you.” The youths, according to friends close to the family, responded by spitting at Mendoza and Berroterán.

Subsequently, the group were joined by others who descended from a car, increasing their number to about 15 – armed with bats and a broken bottles, started assaulting them savagely with their weapons, leaving both, and an identified woman, critically injured on the ground.

The two men now lay on the same floor and a few beds apart from each other in the Intensive Care Unit at the San Francisco General Hospital, where both fight for their lives. The woman, who was also injured, remains hospitalized under extreme police watch, as she might be a key witness for the identification of the aggressors.

According to hospital sources, Mendoza, who worked 30 years as an engineering technician for AT&T before retiring recently, have a good chance of recuperating from the injuries suffered in the right side of the head by the eye, as well as neck injuries. Although he is considered to be in comatose status, he opens his eyes occasionally but hasn’t talked. A source told El Reportero he had contracted a lung infection.

The injuries to Berroterán, meanwhile, left him almost with little chance of survival, although a doctor at the hospital expressed remote optimism. He’s also been in comma after the assailants broke his skull with bat beating, which left him with part of his brain hanging out. His broken bone flap, which lines the inner skull and covers the brain, was removed. He is connected to an artificial respirator and fed intravenously, same as Mendoza.

At press time, El Reportero learned from non-official sources that the police- which is not talking much about the case with the media to protect the investigation – might already have knowledge of the identity of some of the suspects.

by James Crawford­

A grassroots rebellion against the No Child Left Behind Act is sprouting all over the country. It’s long overdue. What’s surprising is that the most active opposition is growing in s conservative state. And it’s being waged on behalf of immigrant children.

State and local officials in Virginia are defying a federal order to test these students in a language they don’t fully understand. U.S. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings insists that, after just one year in United States schools, children learning English must take the same standardized tests as native-English speakers — regardless of the language barrier.

Margaret Spellings

About 70,000 students in Virginia are now classified as English language learners. Many would be set up to fail if the feds get their way.

School boards throughout the state are voting to resist the mandate, which they consider unreasonable and harmful to children. Fairfax County, for example, is among several districts that have resolved to use assessments for English learners only when they are “fair, valid, reliable and appropriate.”

By doing so, Virginia schools risk losing millions in federal funding. The state’s Republican-controlled legislature, anticipating that outcome, is making plans to sue Secretary Spellings.

This is not about evading “accountability.” Virginia already requires schools to assess students’ progress in learning English. For several years they have been using such tests — which serve s valid educational purpose — to determine whether students sre making adequate yearly progress” under the requirements of NO Chile Left Behind.

But Spellings says that’s no longer good enough. All students must be tested for “grade level proficiency,” she argues, or they will be left behind.

Never mind that assessment experts say English- language achievement tests are “neither valid nor reliable” for English learners. In other words, we can’t count on such tests to generate meaningful information about student progress—a reality that even the U.S. Department of Education does not dispute.

“English language learners are far more likely to fail standardized tests than native English-speakers’” says Queens College professor Kate Menken. But “this does not indicate that the students or those who educate them are failing”— only that the tests are not designed to measure what these children have learned.

Drawing on her research in New York City’Menken warnsthat using invalid tests to make educational decisions often “results in classroom teaching strategies that are inappropriate for English language learners9

Schools feel increasing pressure to teach to the test and to eliminate effective programs like bilingual education.

Yet this is precisely what the Bush Administration is demanding. “High stakes” are attached to grade-level assessments, and No Child Left Behind requires that all students be tested.

Where scores are low, schools must be labeled failures and subjected to sanctions. Educators can ultimately lose their jobs.

What better way to give English learners an early taste of failure? To stigmatize them as a burden to their schools? And to discourage instruction in their native language because students must “perform” in English or else?

The federal mandate is a bit like requiring hospitals to use faulty thermometers to measure every patient’s temperature’ then relying on the results to rate doctors’ performance and make decisions about medical care.

Nonsensical rules are not unknown in the federal bureaucracy~ but the requirement to use invalid tests is in a class by itself. What’s really going on here?

In a word: politics. No Child Left Behind was the centerpiece of “compassionate conservatism~” the strategy that put George Bush in the White House. With the law up for extension in Congress this year, the Administration is trying to bolster its rationale.

Schools will never do a good job for Hispanics, the logic goes, unless they are forced to do so. High-stakes testing~ backed up by the threat of harsh penalties~ provides a handy crowbar.

So what if the system is irrational, unfair, and unlikely to improve instruction? By making public education look bad, it will pave the way for privatization – the Right Wingers’ ultimate goal.

Blaming the schools also diverts attention from the real causes of underachievement. These are much tougher and more expensive to address: poverty’ family illiteracy. inadequate healthcare’ inequities in school spending, and a shortage of teachers trained to meet the needs of Left Behind groups’ including English learners.

When the nation finally gets serious about providing excellent schools for all children’ this is where we will invest our resources—not in additional tests of dubious value. Meanwhile, let’s hope the Virginia rebellion continues to spread. Hispanic Link.

(James Crawford is president of the Institute for Language and Education Policy.)