National Journal's Rose Colored Reporting on Texas CREDO Study

by Jim Horn

When the mainstream Washington media finds news on low test scores among public schools, they love to accentuate the negative and to ignore the positive.  On the other hand, when new research about charter schools that can't be ignored comes to the corporate editorial offices, the spinners go to work to do just the opposite.  As in the latest coverage by National Journal of the recent CREDO study on Texas charter schools. The study's press release begins with this: 

"The results of CREDO's Texas report shows that on average, charter schools in Texas show less progress in both reading and mathematics compared to their district school peers."

Below are the study's main findings released July 22, 2015:

Now there is a star beside the second bullet point because this is the only possible good news in the CREDO report, and it is exactly the one that National Journal (NJ) embellishes to promote the kind of lockdown paternalist charters embraced by corporate and political elites.  NJ's headline reads, "Charter Schools Are Especially Good for ELL Students."

Not surprisingly, NJ's main source to spin their story to benefit segregated charter schools is Steve Mancini, the mouthpiece for KIPP, Inc.  Steve can always be counted on to offer an Orwellian response to any bad news about any of the chain gangs in the No Excuses charter system. Loss is victory, weakness is power, ignorance is knowledge, etc.

The problem with NJ's story about the "good news" for ELLs is that their turd polishing brings attention to another problem at Texas charters.  As Ed Fuller documented in 2014, high flying charter systems like KIPP and Harmony enroll a much smaller percentage of the ELLs, special needs, and low income students by 6th grade than do the public schools in the same districts. These findings are consistent with Miron's research from 2011:

A few Fuller charts below:

We may only imagine how bad Texas charters would look if they enrolled the enrolled the low test performers and problem students that they carefully screen and ditch along the way toward 8th grade.

The question then for the charter chain gang operators: Why are the KIPPs and Yes Preps saying "no" to enrolling more ELL students if, indeed, they are doing such a superior job in educating these children? 

Legal Rights of Linguistic Minorities

First submitted September 13, 2014 to Peoples College of Law

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"We therefore live in a period where the prevailing Zeitgeist is at least receptive to the notion that we do not have to be identical ethnically or linguistically." — Dr. Fernand de Varennes

In an era where right-wing millionaires use their obscene wealth to finance arch-reactionary legal firms like Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher to craft deceptive causes of action to destroy academic freedom, students' access to experienced instructors, and workers' rights in the shape of the horrific Vergara decision, it's somewhat hard to recall that occasionally the law is used to help, rather than harm, the remaining institutions of public education.

In the past, when civil rights were more vigorously defended than David F. Welch's "corporate rights," a public interest attorney represented one of our most marginalized groups: English Language Learners (ELL) in a landmark case — Lau v. Nichols. The case and its implications for the rights of linguistic minorities are discussed below ["infra" in legal parlance]. Today, we see ongoing attacks against both ELLs and any language program besides mainstream English. A perfect example is that of neoliberal reactionary Marshall Tuck, a candidate for California State Superintendent of Instruction. Tuck, a graduate of anti-public education activist billionaire Eli Broad's Broad Residency, is best known for shuttering all the heritage language academic programs, and most of the dual language immersion programs at the schools he ran.

This year marks the fortieth anniversary of the Supreme Court decision on rights of linguistic minorities. While the promise of Lau is still yet unrealized, the recognition of language rights in the midst of our "white supremacist capitalist patriarchy" is still something to take notice of. United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA) Bilingual Education Committee commissioned the following public service announcement flyer, the text of which is also reproduced here. The prose was written by UTLA's Director of Bilingual Education, Cheryl Ortega. Flyer design was by education activist Robert D. Skeels, who is also a first year law student at Peoples College of Law.

In 1974, the attorneys for Kenny Lau and 1800 Chinese speaking students sued the San Francisco School District on the grounds that these students were not receiving equal access to an education by virtue of their inability to comprehend English. The unanimous decision of the US Supreme Court - "Under state-imposed standards there is no equality of treatment merely by providing students with the same facilities, textbooks, teachers, and curriculum; for students who do not understand English are effectively foreclosed from any meaningful education. Basic English skills are at the very core of what these public schools teach. Imposition of a requirement that, before a child can effectively participate in the educational program, he must already have acquired those basic skills is to make a mockery of public education. We know that those who do not understand English are certain to find their classroom experiences wholly incomprehensible and in no way meaningful."

The attorney for Kenny Lau and 1800 Chinese students in San Francisco successfully argued that "Taking people who are the same and treating them differently is one type of discrimination but taking people who are different and treating them the same, is subtler, but, is equally discriminating."

Language Rights are Civil Rights protected by the 14th amendment to the US Constitution.

40th Anniversary of the Supreme Court Decision on Rights of Linguistic Minorities

Hungry? No Excuses. Don't know English? No Excuses

Next year will mark 30 years since the Reagan team came to Washington and began the roll back on civil and human rights gains of the previous two decades. When it became apparent, in fact, that the attempt to close the U. S. Department of Education would fail, the Reagan team shifted its focus to, instead, utilizing the Department's resources to move the education and social agenda away from equity issues and toward a definition of excellence based on test scores, which, of course, is a system of rewards based on family income and wealth. And thus began a generation of classist and racist school testing reforms masked as a meritocracy, a false meritocracy that makes poverty invisible while grinding the poor under the heels of the well-heeled.

And the longer the educational genocide continues against the poor, the angrier we become at the poor, so much so that we saw the President exhorting the poor last summer at the 100th Conference of the NAACP in a way that sounded more like George Wallace than Martin Luther King:

“No one has written your destiny for you,” he said, directing his remarks to “all the other Barack Obamas out there” who might one day grow up to be president. “Your destiny is in your hands, and don’t you forget that. That’s what we have to teach all of our children! No excuses! No excuses!”

Mr. Obama did not acknowledge, of course, that his own destiny that was handed over to him included a Harvard legacy seat as a result of his father's Harvard alum status, or that he grew up in relative prosperity in a safe neighborhood with food and doctors and leafy suburban schools and a mother whose privileges included her whiteness.

(Click chart to enlarge: from WaPo). And so it was that the President seemed no less surprised than the rest of us that his U. S. Department of Agriculture released a report on Monday that showed 1 in 5 children in America hungry--and these numbers are from late 2008, before the effects of the Wall Street heist set in:

In 2008, the report found, nearly 17 million children -- more than one in five across the United States -- were living in households in which food at times ran short, up from slightly more than 12 million youngsters the year before. And the number of children who sometimes were outright hungry rose from nearly 700,000 to almost 1.1 million.

Among people of all ages, nearly 15 percent last year did not consistently have adequate food, compared with about 11 percent in 2007, the greatest deterioration in access to food during a single year in the history of the report.

Here are a few other relevant notations from Kristof's NYTimes column on Nov. 4:

. . . .The United States ranks 31st in life expectancy (tied with Kuwait and Chile), according to the latest World Health Organization figures. We rank 37th in infant mortality (partly because of many premature births) and 34th in maternal mortality. A child in the United States is two-and-a-half times as likely to die by age 5 as in Singapore or Sweden, and an American woman is 11 times as likely to die in childbirth as a woman in Ireland.

. . . . Yet another study, cited in a recent report by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Urban Institute, looked at how well 19 developed countries succeeded in avoiding “preventable deaths,” such as those where a disease could be cured or forestalled. What Senator Shelby called “the best health care system” ranked in last place.

The figures are even worse for members of minority groups. An African-American in New Orleans has a shorter life expectancy than the average person in Vietnam or Honduras.

And yet the Reagan education agenda of defining opportunity based on wealth continues unabated. In fact, the First Lady this week offered her own mixed message to poor immigrant children in Colorado:

Speaking to a student who had asked whether it's fair to use test scores to measure schools when some students don't speak English well, Mrs. Obama said the tests are "part of the system" and can't be avoided.

"You can fight the tests, or you can work with them and turn them into an advantage," she said.

So, then, Mrs. Obama, there is nothing we can do as a society about the testocracy we have created, but there is something that children can do to turn these abusive and unethical sorting instruments into "an advantage."

Please do say more about that, because I do not know and I do not know anyone who knows what you are talking about. What we do know, if we were to believe the stupidity to which you subscribe, is that all the poor, black, brown, immigrant, and disabled children in America will be proficient in reading and math by 2014, which is a full year ahead of your husband's pledge to eliminate hunger in America by 2015. Perhaps we should set that proficiency target back by a year so the two will coincide, and then we can have one big celebration together.

Educating Immigrants in Anticultural Schools

A clip from an in-depth news article from the NYTimes:

. . . . Hylton High, where a reporter for The New York Times spent much of the past year, is a vivid laboratory. Like thousands of other schools across the country, it has responded to the surge of immigrants by channeling them into a school within a school. It is, in effect, a contemporary form of segregation that provides students learning English intensive support to meet rising academic standards — and it also helps keep the peace.

In a nation where most students learning English lag behind other groups by almost every measure, Hylton’s program stands out for its students’ high test scores and graduation rates. However, at this ordinary American high school, in an ordinary American suburb at a time of extraordinary upheaval, those achievements come with considerable costs.

The calm in the hallways belies resentments simmering among students who barely know one another. They readily label one another “stupid” or “racist.” The tensions have at times erupted into walkouts and cafeteria fights, including one in which immigrant students tore an American flag off the wall and black students responded by shouting, “Go back to your own country!”

Hylton’s faculty has been torn over how to educate its immigrant population. Some say the students are unfairly coddled and should be forced more quickly into the mainstream. And even those who support segregating students admit to soul-searching over whether the program serves the school’s needs at the expense of immigrant students, who are relentlessly drilled and tutored on material that appears on state tests but get rare exposure to the kinds of courses, demands or experiences that might better prepare them to move up in American society.

“This is hard for us,” said Carolyn Custard, Hylton’s principal. “I’m not completely convinced we’re right. I don’t want them to be separated, but at the same time, I want them to succeed.”

Education officials classify some 5.1 million students in the United States — 1 in 10 of all those enrolled in public schools — as English language learners, a 60 percent increase from 1995 to 2005.

Researchers give many causes for the gaps between them and other groups. Perhaps most paradoxical, they say, is that a nation that prides itself on being a melting pot has yet to reach agreement on the best way to teach immigrant students.

In recent years, students learning English have flooded into small towns and suburban school districts that have little experience with international diversity. Meanwhile, teachers and administrators have come under increasing pressure to meet the requirements of the federal No Child Left Behind Act, which links every school’s financing and its teachers’ jobs to student performance on standardized tests.

The challenges have only intensified with a souring economy and deepening anger over illegal immigration, provoking many Americans to question whether those living here unlawfully should be educated at all.. . .