McAllen AFT News - January, 2008

MAKING A DIFFERENCE

WHAT’S AHEAD

On Saturday, January 5th we missed several parties when my husband worked on our son’s car and things did not go as they should—a whiff of battery acid is not the best thing to happen to you.   Well to make a long story short, that evening I watched all the political candidates for president talk about their reasons for wanting that high office.  

As one of my friends said, I wish I could put the best of each individual into one person. 

We have a great challenge to pick the candidate we think will represent us the best.  Whoever does get nominated by either Democrats, Green Party, Independents,  Libertarians, Republicans, etc. will face challenges we have not even thought of.  If you look at the face of George Bush, 43rd President, you can tell that he has been to ___ and back.

As the political season progresses, we will share with you information to make a good decision.  It has been our philosophy since 1989 in the McAllen AFT that we try to keep you informed.  We work hard to keep a positive focus when things are very difficult.

The Rio Grande Valley has a history of supporting our men and women in the arm services.  Please let us know if you have a loved one in the armed services we can support.

Just a few months ago, I attend a viewing for a young McAllen soldier killed in Iraq.  I sat in the back of the chapel and wished with all my heart that the family would soon be able to get through their grief.

My brother was an Army veteran of Vietnam and paid the price for the rest of his life.   The spraying of Agent Orange, and his contamination ruined his health.  As all of you know, WAR IS ___.

CELEBRATE MARTIN LUTHER KING DAY

January 21, 2008—Martin Luther King Day.  King was a preacher who spoke in biblical cadences ideally suited to leading a stride toward freedom that found its inspiration in the Old Testament story of the Israelites and the New Testament gospel of Jesus Christ. Being a minister not only put King in touch with the spirit of the black masses but also gave him a base within the black church, then and now the strongest and most independent of black institutions.

UPDATE ON NCLB

UNHAPPY ANNIVERSARY OF NCLB ACT

January 8, 2008 begins the seventh year of implementing the No Child Left Behind Act, that batch of under-funded federal mandates summed up in one news report this evening as a plan to "test students" and "punish schools" in the name of accountability. The manifold flaws of this 2002 federal law have led to increasing grass-roots pressure to rewrite the law and even to scrap it entirely and start over.  In this Hotline, we focus on one key flaw that illustrates how NCLB fails even on its own terms.  

The Winter 2007-2008 issue of American Educator, AFT's quarterly professional journal, marks this unhappy anniversary of NCLB with two trenchant articles showing how the law distorts the picture of student achievement by allowing "cut scores" on standardized tests to vary widely from state to state and from grade level to grade level within states.  NCLB requires 100 percent of children to become proficient in reading and math by 2014, but the law leaves it to each state to set the cut scores that define what "proficient" means. In "Conjuring Cut Scores," Chester E. Finn Jr. and Michael J. Petrilli explain why it makes no sense to base accountability and high-stakes consequences on such shaky foundations.  Their article is adapted from the foreword to The Proficiency Illusion, a new report published by the Fordham Institute and the Northwest Evaluation Association (NWA).

A second article summarizes this report and the serious problems it has uncovered with uneven cut scores, revealing just how widely states' definitions of "proficient" diverge.  "The Proficiency Illusion," by John Cronin, Michael Dahlin, Deborah Adkins, and G. Gage Kingsbury, should be required reading for every member of Congress who will be voting on whether to continue, tweak, or completely overhaul the No Child Left Behind Act. 

The authors demonstrate convincingly that tests within states are not consistently rigorous from subject to subject and grade to grade, so that test results don't actually tell us if students are stronger in reading or math, or if middle schools are performing better or worse than elementary schools.  A clear example comes from Minnesota's standardized tests, where the seeming decline in reading proficiency from elementary school to middle school is entirely attributable to distinctly higher "cut scores" required in middle school.  In this as in many other instances, the authors contend, "the difference in reported performance is really a function of differences in the difficulty of the cut scores and not actual differences in student performance."

Their conclusion: "Poorly calibrated standards create misleading perceptions about the performance of schools and children.  They can lead parents, educators, and others to conclude that younger pupils are safely on track to meet state standards when that is not the case.

They can also lead policymakers to conclude that programs serving older students have failed because proficiency rates are lower for these students, when in reality, those students may be performing no worse than their younger peers.  And conclusions of this sort can encourage unfortunate misallocations of resources.

Younger students who might need help now if they are to reach more difficult standards in the upper grades do not get those resources because they have passed the state tests, while schools serving older students may make drastic changes in their instructional programs in an effort to fix deficiencies that may not actually exist."

We encourage you to examine the evidence yourself in the Winter issue of American Educator, posted online at the AFT Web site at http://www.aft.org/pubs-reports/american_educator/index.htm

AFL/CIO SCHOLARSHIP

DON’T FORGET—WORTH $1,000

RENEWABLE AS LONG AS YOU ATTEND UNIVERSITY/COLLEGE—HAVE TO VOLUNTEER FOR MCALLEN AFT EACH YEAR

MUST BE SIGNED BY MCALLEN AFT PRESIDENT RUTH SKOW