F.A.C.E. to FACE
F.A.C.E. BULLETIN
7/12/06
ALERT
Thousands of New Scholarships Available for Low-Income K-12 Students
(More scholarships available! See bottom of Newsletter!)
Start Spreading The News, Tell a Friend Today!
EDUCATION, Blame game topic: failing schools, Miami Herald. These are the kind of facts that should elucidate the fact that the Step Up For Students Scholarship Program is a way to help the kids trapped in these educational environments and repudiate the objection that the Scholarship Program “hurts the public schools”.
Black failure in school – who's to blame? World Net Daily commentary by Dr. Walter E. Williams, Professor of Economics at George Mason University.
Op-Ed by Frank Bolaños, Miami Herald, ’Vamos A Cuba’, Show sensitivity toward Cuban Americans, too.
Miami Herald article, Villalobos loses chamber backing. The Florida Chamber of Commerce revoked its endorsement of state Sen. Alex Villalobos and decided to back Bolaños, his opponent.
NEA Delegates Say "Never Mind", a listening post monitoring education and teachers' unions. You ought to get a kick out of this one…
Thank you for Stepping Up For Students,
Michael A. Benjamin
Executive Director, F.A.C.E.
Florida Alliance for Choices in Education
8,000 New Scholarships Available for Low-Income K-12 Students
Florida P.R.I.D.E. and Children First Florida, Florida Corporate Tax Credit scholarship funding organizations, will award approximately 8,000 new scholarships for the 2006-2007 school year to Kindergarten through 12th grade students who qualify for the Federal Free and Reduced Lunch Program. Applicants must be currently enrolled in a public school, unless they are entering kindergarten or first grade. Those who qualify may receive up to a $3,750 scholarship for tuition at an eligible private school of their choice or a scholarship for up to $500 for travel expenses to an out-of-district public school. The scholarships provide a fresh start for students who are not succeeding in their current school setting.
This year, $70 million in scholarships will be awarded to qualifying Florida students until funding is exhausted so applicants are encouraged to apply as soon as possible. Income limits for scholarship recipients are determined by household size. For example, a family of four can earn no more than $37,000 to qualify. To apply, log on to www.floridapride.org or call (813) 258-2700 for Florida Pride and www.scholarshipfunding.org or call (904) 247-6033 or (407) 702-2607 for a Children First Florida application.
The Florida Corporate Income Tax Credit scholarship program provides K-12 scholarships that currently allow over 14,000 low-income Florida students to attend an eligible private school or out-of-district public school. One hundred percent of corporate contributions go directly to funding scholarships – not a single penny can be used for administrative costs.
Children First Florida - Serving Orlando, Central Florida, Jacksonville and PanhandleHYPERLINK "http://www.childrenfirstcf.org/" \t "_blank"
P.O. Box 49099
Jacksonville Beach, Florida 32240
(904) 247-6033 or (407) 702-2607
cforster@scholarshipfunding.org
Florida P.R.I.D.E. - Serving Tampa Bay, South Florida and Marion County
P.O. Box 1670
Tampa, Florida 33606
(800) 782-9140
info@floridapride.org
School Year 06 - 07 Income Eligibility Guidelines
Persons in Household
Annual Household Income
2
$24,420
3
$30,710
4
$37,000
5
$43,290
6
$49,580
7
$55,870
8
$62,160
9
$68,450
10
$74,740
11
$81,030
12
$87,320
13
$93,610
For each additional person, add
$6,290
Effective from June 1, 2006 to June 30, 2007
Posted on Mon, Jul. 03, 2006
EDUCATION
Blame game topic: failing schools
Threats from Florida's education commissioner to crack down on low-performing schools could lead to a showdown with Miami-Dade's superintendent.
BY MATTHEW I. PINZUR
mpinzur@MiamiHerald.comLike the OK Corral, the Death Star and the Lake Placid ice rink, Miami-Dade's lowest-performing high schools are becoming the sites of an epic showdown.
Florida Education Commissioner John Winn told The Miami Herald on Friday that Miami-Dade Public Schools Superintendent Rudy Crew's reform efforts at Edison, Central, Jackson and Northwestern senior highs have been too small and too slow.
He said state observers would begin making regular visits to the campuses this fall, giving monthly reports to the state Board of Education and Winn himself.
If profound change does not come quickly, Winn said, he could try to withhold millions of dollars in state education funding -- an unprecedented move that Winn said could be necessary to prod the district into fundamental change.
''It needs to look like the Marines have landed at Edison, Central and Northwestern,'' Winn said.
Those schools have been a focal point of Crew's administration since he arrived in 2004. They are all part of the School Improvement Zone, which provides for a longer school day and extended year. This fall, Edison and Central will be among the first to place all students in small, career-themed academies under the district's Secondary School Reform plan.
But progress has been slow. None of the four schools has ever received higher than a D grade from the state, and Edison is one of two in Florida to earn five consecutive F's. Only 7 percent of Edison students scored on grade level during last year's standardized reading test -- Central had 11 percent; Jackson had 12 and Northwestern 15.
Crew said Winn was disparaging and threatening the district despite having offered little advice or vision for improvement.
''I'm not going to get into a verbal war with the commissioner over what change really looks like -- he's not on this ground,'' Crew said. In some ways, a face-off between the two men was inevitable.
Crew is an eloquent but tough-spoken former principal from New York City, a commanding presence and the gravitational center of any room.
He finds the government's love affair with standardized testing to be too narrow-minded for true education reform. And he rarely backs away from a fight -- as New York City's schools chief, he won expanded powers from the state legislature but lost his job when he refused to create the voucher program desired by then-Mayor Rudolph Giuliani.
In South Florida, he has warred publicly with influential state Rep. Ralph Arza and wants to launch a broader campaign to increase state education funding to South Florida districts.
Winn is a consummate education-policy wonk, a former elementary and middle school teacher who helped develop nearly every aspect of Gov. Jeb Bush's A+ Education Plan.
Never a politician, he rose through the Department of Education to become chief of staff to the last commissioner, Jim Horne. He has a soft-spoken, down-home manner and is prone to trip over his sentences but has always shown himself as a zealous believer in the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test and its growing role in public schools -- it now determines high school graduation, third-grade advancement, school grades and teacher pay.
''This is a fundamental disagreement on what does it take to improve the lives of children that are in schools that need to be improved,'' Crew said.
He said he would not fight the increased state monitoring in the four schools, but he said he had little reason to believe it would help.
But Winn said the district does need more control. He said many of the plans Crew submitted last summer for Edison and Central were implemented badly, if at all.
''You get a plan that kind of looks good, but it's not executed,'' he said.
Both schools kept their freshmen at their middle schools, hoping to ease their transition into senior high. But Winn agreed with many vocal parents who called the plan a failure.
''There have been places where I don't think we executed very well -- I've said that publicly and taken full responsibility for it, '' said Crew, who has already announced changes to the ninth-grade program for this fall.
``The issue becomes, how do you get out of the way and allow good teaching to be fostered in every single one of these schools?''
Crew agreed with Winn's call for a review of all the teachers and administrators at the struggling schools. Winn said he is ''not convinced'' the schools have the best possible faculty, but Crew said he has the right staff in place.
The two leaders continue to speak fairly regularly, but Crew said they never discuss the most important topics.
''A real conversation would include a conversation about what we need to do this,'' he said.
``There's been no such conversation about that.''
© 2006 MiamiHerald.com and wire service sources. All Rights Reserved.
http://www.miami.com
Wednesday, July 5, 2006
Black failure in school – who's to blame?
Posted: July 5, 2006
1:00 a.m. Eastern
By Walter Williams
© 2006 Creators Syndicate Inc.
Let's look at the recent "Nation's Report Card," published annually by the U.S. Department of Education's National Center for Education Statistics. Nationally, in reading, only 13 percent of black fourth-graders and 11 percent of black eighth-graders score as proficient. Twenty-nine percent of black fourth-graders achieve a score of "basic," which is defined as having a partial knowledge and skills necessary to be proficient in the grade. Fifty-nine percent score below basic, not having any of the necessary knowledge and skills. It's the same story for black eighth-graders, with 40 percent scoring basic and 49 percent below basic.
In math, it's roughly the same story. For black fourth-graders, 12 percent score proficient, 47 percent score basic and 40 percent below basic. For black eighth-graders, 8 percent score proficient, while 33 percent score basic and 59 percent score below basic; however, 1 percent of black fourth-graders and eighth-graders achieved an advanced score in math.
Teachers and politicians respond to this tragic state of affairs by saying that more money is needed. The Washington, D.C., school budget is about the nation's highest at around $15,000 per pupil. Its student/teacher ratio, at 15.2 to 1, is lower than the nation's average.
Despite this, black academic achievement in Washington, D.C., is the lowest in the nation. Reading scores for Washington, D.C.'s fourth-grade black students are: 7 percent proficient, 21 percent basic and 71 percent below basic. For eighth-graders, it's 6 percent proficient, 33 percent basic and 58 percent below basic. It's the same sad tale in math. For fourth-graders, it's 5 percent proficient, 35 percent basic and 59 percent below basic. For eighth-graders, it's 3 percent proficient, 23 percent basic and 73 percent below basic. With these achievement levels, one shouldn't be surprised that the average black high-school graduate, depending upon the subject, has the academic achievement level of the average white sixth, seventh or eighth-grader.
Racial discrimination has nothing to do with what's no less than an education meltdown within the black community. Where black education is the very worst, often the city mayor is black, the city council is dominated by blacks, and often the school superintendent is black, as well as most of the principals and teachers – and Democrats have run the cities for decades. I'm not saying there's a causal connection, just that one would be hard put to chalk up the rotten education to racial discrimination.
There's enough blame for this sorry state of affairs for all participants to have their share: students who are hostile and alien to the education process, parents who don't care, teachers who are incompetent or have been beaten down by the system, and administrators who sanction unwarranted promotions and issuance of fraudulent diplomas that attest that a student has mastered 12th-grade material when in fact he hasn't mastered sixth- or seventh-grade material.
No one can solve the educational problems that black people confront except black people themselves. First, it's foolhardy, and black people cannot afford to buy into the idea, that no black child should be saved from the education morass until all black children can be saved. That means we must find a way to permit the escape from rotten schools for as many black children who want to be educated and have supportive parents as we can. Educational vouchers or tuition tax credits would provide such a mechanism.
At one time in black history, there was a high value placed on education, so much so that blacks risked punishment to acquire education in areas of our country where black education was prohibited. Being 70 years old, I know there was a time when schools and black parents cooperated with one another to see to it that children behaved in school and did their work. In principle, the solution to black education problems is not rocket science. The problem is summoning the will.
Dr. Walter E. Williams is the John M. Olin Distinguished Professor of Economics at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va.
Posted on Sat, Jul. 08, 2006
`VAMOS A CUBA'
Show sensitivity toward Cuban Americans, too
By FRANK BOLAÑOS
bolanospress@gmail.comIf the Newark, N.J., School Board decided to issue Little Black Sambo as a third grade reader, how would that largely African-American community react?
Famed progressive educator Carl L. Marburger posed this question in 1974, when he said controversial schoolbooks in rural West Virginia showed the public school system's ``astonishing insensitivity to local cultural values.''
Those aggrieved local folks endured the insults, catcalls and jeers of the liberal elite until Marburger, a self-described liberal's liberal, spoke up and gave them pause. Today, the Miami-Dade School Board and I are being accused of censorship for our efforts to remove from school libraries Vamos a Cuba, a children's book that paints a false and distorted portrait of life in communist Cuba.
If the teachers' unions, Miami Herald columnists, the ACLU and Fidel Castro himself are to be believed, the School Board is pillaging school libraries, burning books, oppressing the intellectual freedom of helpless children and stomping on the First Amendment.
None of this is true; this is not a First Amendment issue. Censorship occurs when government refuses to allow people to purchase material, not when it refuses to provide that material at no charge.
Subsidize falsehoods?
Just as the First Amendment grants basic freedoms to those espousing even the most repugnant of views, I support Alta Schreier's right to author and publish Vamos a Cuba. I defend the right of any Miami bookstore to sell it and I defend the right of any American to read it. Indeed, let the author promote and sell her book and compete in the marketplace of ideas.
But taxpayers must not be forced to subsidize falsehoods, propaganda or insulting imagery. As Thomas Jefferson, wrote, ``To compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves and abhors is sinful and tyrannical.''
Simply put, Jefferson, a framer of the Constitution our critics cite, would see no reason for our schools to spend sparse taxpayer money to promote the circulation of misinformation and lies many in our community equate to oppression and the loss of liberty and life.
If our public schools provided Little Black Sambo to African-America children, I would stand with their parents as this would be offensive, racist and an inappropriate use of tax dollars. If our public schools put the grotesquely anti-Semitic children's book The Poisonous Mushroom into libraries, I would stand with Jewish parents to oppose this abhorrent act and misappropriation of public funds. The struggle against Cuban communism is no less important.
In 1995, The Miami Herald was forced to trash an entire section after an offensive cartoon of Martin Luther King Jr. was mistakenly printed inside. Over the nationally syndicated cartoonist's objections, editors made the bold decision to pull a half million copies of the paper's Sunday magazine, Tropic.
They did it by hand; it took two full days. It was hard and expensive work to correct a mistake that took only moments to make. Similarly, a foolish decision by an entrenched bureaucracy had to be corrected and has cost our school district valuable time, money and focus.
Castro regime's horrors
After the mess, The Miami Herald's executive editor at the time wrote that the newspaper's First Amendment obligation is ``to present the broadest range of perspectives and opinions in its news and opinion pages. But a newspaper also has an obligation to protect its readers from the outrageously offensive or the egregiously insensitive.''
If such an obligation exists at a privately funded newspaper, certainly Miami's public officials have a responsibility to ensure that taxpayers aren't forced to subsidize racism, anti-Semitism or communism with public dollars.
Likewise, taxpayers shouldn't have to foot the bill for entrenched and misguided bureaucrats who want to whitewash the horrors of life under Castro and his brutal regime.
Frank Bolaños is a member of the Miami-Dade School Board.
Posted on Wed,Jun.21,2006
CAMPAIGN 2006
Villalobos loses chamber backing
The Florida Chamber of Commerce revoked its endorsement of state Sen. Alex Villalobos and decided to back his opponent.
BY BETH REINHARD
breinhard@MiamiHerald.comBucking decades of political history, the Florida Chamber of Commerce revoked its endorsement of Republican state Sen. Alex Villalobos of Miami on Tuesday, assailing his votes in favor of class-size limits and against school vouchers and tort reform.
The chamber has never backtracked on an endorsement in its 90-year existence. The group threw its support to Villalobos' ''more pro-business'' GOP rival, Miami-Dade School Board member Frank Bolaños.
The turn of events would have been unthinkable just a few months ago, when Villalobos was on track to become president of the Florida Senate. But a leadership coup, coupled with Villalobos' school-related votes that crossed Gov. Jeb Bush and other GOP leaders, pushed the well-established incumbent out of the inner circle.
The contest between Villalobos and Bolaños is expected to be one of the most contentious campaigns in Florida this year. Bolaños was appointed to the School Board by Bush in 2001. Villalobos has not faced a challenger since his election to the Legislature 14 years ago.
FUNDRAISING SOURCES
Just as unions are crucial to Democratic primary candidates, business groups are key to Republican campaigns because of their fundraising and networking power.
''It's extremely valuable at the start of my campaign to win the support of the business community,'' Bolaños said. ``It's one more example where my opponent has let people down, forgotten where he came from and done an about-face with regard to conservative ideas of our governor and our party.''
Like Bush, Bolaños has been an outspoken critic of the class-caps amendment that voters approved in 2002, arguing that the costs will crush school budgets. Villalobos steadfastly opposed Republican efforts supported by the Senate to water down the class-size amendment.
''I was frankly very surprised and disappointed by the chamber's position on public education,'' Villalobos said. ``My district voted overwhelmingly for smaller class sizes. I'm supposed to vote against the teachers and the people in my district to get the chamber's endorsement?''
Villalobos also opposed a chamber-backed proposal to continue offering private school vouchers to struggling public school students, a program that the Florida Supreme Court declared unconstitutional. The failure of that proposal and the class-size amendment repeal were among the biggest defeats of Bush's political career.
The chamber had decided to endorse Villalobos in November, based on his 2005 voting record that perfectly matched the chamber's agenda. But the senator's score dropped from a perfect 100 to 66 this year, making him one of the lowest-ranking Senate Republicans.
One of the key issues on which the chamber and Villalobos disagreed was a law that allowed plaintiffs' lawyers to go after deep-pocketed codefendants, regardless of their share of the blame. Villalobos voted against nixing the ''joint-and-several liability law,'' a longtime goal of corporate interests in Tallahassee.
'While we appreciate Sen. Villalobos' past support, we were truly saddened by his new allegiance to labor unions, plaintiff lawyers and other out-of-state special-interest groups,'' chamber Vice President Mark Wilson said in a written statement.
The incoming Democratic leader of the Florida House, Dan Gelber of
