Re: Will state school board stand tough?

[langlois-rine@comcast.net]

Thanks, George.  As I recall, the by-line for Jill Stewart's regular column in the SF Chronicle is "Capitol Punishment".  

No further comment--
Marilyn

-------------- Original message -------------- 
From: George Sheridan <learn@jps.net> 

> In this column one of our opponents connects "tough" standards, Reid Lyon, 
> English-only, Open Court, and standardized testing. She's afraid they are 
> all at risk. (Actually, she doesn't say Lyon is at risk.) 
> 
> Will state school board stand tough? 
> Jill Stewart 
> Friday, March 3, 2006 
> SF Chronicle 
> Page B - 11 
> http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2006/03/03/EDG 
> U9GJEP11.DTL 
> 
> 
> AS TOUGH AS I've been on former Gov. Gray Davis, I've taken pains to single 
> out his remarkable efforts to fix the public schools and their disastrous 
> teaching methods, even in the face of intense opposition by labor unions 
> and his own California Democratic Party. 
> 
> With Davis gone, leading Democrats in Sacramento are shamefully gearing up 
> for another major assault to roll back public-school reform. And it's not 
> at all clear that Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is as focused as Davis was on 
> stopping them. 
> 
> Led by Assembly Education Committee Chairwoman Jackie Goldberg, an undying 
> apologist for the discredited fads that helped send California to near the 
> academic bottom among the 50 states, Sacramento's far left has mounted 
> another of its bizarre efforts to lower standards and dumb-down kids. 
> 
> Their favorite target is, again, Latino kids, who many far-left Democrats 
> just cannot seem to see as equals in the classroom. California's Latino 
> kids have proved they are equal to it, showing big academic gains in 
> reading, writing, math and English in statewide testing over the past five 
> years. 
> 
> The gains by children now immersed in English, thanks to Proposition 227 (a 
> measure virulently opposed by the far-left), are historic. It's a quiet 
> miracle that poor immigrant children show sustained gains on tough 
> statewide tests that can't be gamed. 
> 
> But now, on March 9, the old anti-reformers will pressure the California 
> Board of Education to adopt a plan that dumbs down Latino children. With 
> Schwarzenegger's education-policy people snoozing, the rollback has at 
> least a chance of approval from the Schwarzenegger-appointed state Board of 
> Education and its confused president, Glee Johnson. 
> 
> What an unmitigated tragedy, if the board caves. 
> 
> The dumbing down is being pushed by the usual suspects, including Goldberg 
> and state Sen. Martha Escutia, both Los Angeles Democrats, and people who 
> wrongly mourn the end of the "bilingual" disaster they helped invent, 
> including anti-Prop. 227 guru Shelly Spiegel-Coleman. 
> 
> Ever since they lost at the polls, this old "Spanish-first" crowd has been 
> trying to wrest control of California's big, well-funded English-reading 
> program away from the real reformers. 
> 
> Under a backroom plan pushed by Goldberg, California's excellent 2 1/2 
> hours-a-day reading program for kids who are learning English would be 
> diluted and probably ruined, with lower standards that are not 
> research-based and with too-easy content that fails to keep a child's 
> learning at grade level. 
> 
> The dumbing down "garbage," as one reformer described it to me, is 
> contained in a smaller side program where it does less harm to kids. Now, 
> it would be incorporated into the hard-fought, Davis-backed, successful 
> reading program. 
> 
> Think about what is going on here: When kids show major gains at Los 
> Angeles' Ninth Street School on Skid Row, or in schools that serve the poor 
> in San Francisco, that puts the lie to long-standing excuses by 
> anti-reformers like Jackie Goldberg that "poverty" was to blame for 
> persistent low achievement. 
> 
> Poverty is a corollary, not a cause, of low achievement. Poverty causes 
> children to be warehoused in bad schools with the worst teachers -- thanks 
> to labor-union contracts that let senior teachers pick the easiest schools 
> and stick green teachers in the toughest schools. 
> 
> Today, we finally understand that disadvantaged students can thrive at 
> school, regardless of whether society ever beats poverty. If only somebody 
> would just teach them. 
> 
> That's precisely what the schools are doing -- finally. They have miles to 
> go, but what a contrast, today, to the previous two decades, when 
> California embraced "whole language," the "self-esteem" movement, "fuzzy 
> math" and other interesting-sounding but horrifically failed fads. 
> 
> In the 1980s and '90s, teachers were desperate to stop downwardly spiraling 
> academic achievement. They grasped at the fads, and scores spiraled down 
> even more. 
> 
> Thankfully, along came gutsy experts -- like reading expert Alice Furry of 
> the Sacramento schools, reading and learning disabilities researcher Reid 
> Lyon of the National Institutes of Health, and mathematician Jim Milgram of 
> Stanford University. Jumping into the education wars, some of these experts 
> began to forcefully argue that kids were failing to learn math or English 
> because teachers' abilities to impart basic skills had been lost in a fog 
> of political correctness. 
> 
> And more than anyone else, disadvantaged children were the guinea pigs. 
> 
> The pressure now being brought upon the state Board of Education by 
> Goldberg & Co. is a continuation of the guilt-ridden psychodrama that has 
> been unfolding ever since. One core mission of the embarrassed far left is 
> to regain power from sensible pragmatics who created the (at last!) 
> successful reading program. 
> 
> I can't predict what will happen when these adults turn their politics 
> loose on Latino kids on March 9 -- but how ironic if the 
> Schwarzenegger-appointed board of education caves and Davis goes down in 
> history as the guy with the guts. 
> 
> Jill Stewart is a print, radio and television commentator on California 
> politics. Her Web site is www.jillstewart.net. 
> 
> 
> 
> George Sheridan 
> 
> --------------------------------------------------------- 
> If you want to help support the operation of Ca-Resisters, 
> visit http://interversity.org/donations.html and pitch in! 
> ----------------- 
> Thanks in advance! 
> -Eric Crump