Author: mopress

Thanks so much for mentioning Judge Dennise Garcia’s swearing in ceremony in your recent counterpunch story. Dennise is my wife, and I served as her campaign manager. Her investiture truly was a wonderful event, but I wanted to correct one small fact about it.

It was Senior US District Judge Barefoot Sanders who swore in Judge Garcia, and not Judge Jerry Buckmeyer. All the other information about Judge Sanders’ career-long involvement with the desegregation case was correct. Judge Sanders oversaw both that case and performed the swearing
in for Judge Garcia.

Sincerely,
Eric Folkerth

—————————————————
http://www.ericfolkerth.com
South Florida Folk Festival Finalist, 2004
Wildflower Songwriter Semifinalist, 2003
Honorable Mention, Billboard and Great American Song Contests
Eric’s music @ the iTunes store:
http://www.ericfolkerth.com/itunes.htm

Judge Appointed to Hear Election Contest

By Greg Moses

Milk River Blog / CounterPunch / ILCA Online /
IndyMedia Austin / Houston / North Texas / L.A. /
GlobalResistanceNetwork

Brenda Denson Prince put on her evening best and walked the red carpet with Jamie Foxx Sunday evening, but she did it at an Oscar watching party in Foxx’s hometown of Terrell, Texas. And as the world turned its attention to Foxx’s acceptance speech, Denson-Prince, for a time at least, was able to forget the battle she wages to give an acceptance speech of her own.

“You walked up on that red carpet and thought you were in Hollywood,” recalls Denson-Prince by telephone. “It was very nice.” And when Foxx won the Oscar for best actor, “there was a standing ovation. Everyone was happy and all. And everyone was as teary-eyed as he was.”

For the first time since election night 2004, Denson-Prince says she felt that Terrell, “was combined as a community should be. At one. United. I hadn’t felt that way in a while.”

For Prince the past four months have been marked by feelings of dreams not quite touched, as she continues to wage a fight to become the first woman County Commissioner to represent Terrell’s corner of Kaufman County.

Readers familiar with the story will know that on election night 2004, Denson-Prince left the central counting station with reports showing her in a comfortable lead, but by the time she got home the numbers had suddenly shifted to a tie. In a subsequent recount, she was handed a three-vote loss. The abrupt change in election-night fortunes has been explained by one technician as the result of a read-out error in the earlier reports, but Prince wants to see a full review of the evidence in court. So she filed suit in December.

The original judge assigned to the case asked to be excused shortly after the story was first reported by the Texas Civil Rights Review. On Sunday, Terrell Tribune’s Will Irwin reported that retired judge and Dallas attorney Os Chrisman has been appointed to hear the election contest.

Chrisman may be a retired judge, but he has not been retiring in the affairs of his state. As an alumni leader at Baylor University, he declared at a public forum in July, 2003 that alumni “aim to have a voice in this university from this day forward.” And he joined in public efforts to remove University President Robert Sloan, who this summer will be moving to the position of Chancellor.

A simple search at the Texas Ethics Commission web site yields only one record of a campaign contribution made by Oswin Chrisman. In late October, records show that he gave $100.00 to Beth Maultsby, Republican candidate for Dallas Family District Court. The donation was small but symbolically significant, since Maultsby’s Democrat opponent Dennise Garcia went on to become ‘Dallas County’s first elected Latina judge.’

An attendee at the swearing in of Judge Garcia reported that the event was laden with Civil Rights history:

“There in front of me was the first Hispanic ever elected as a District Judge in Dallas County,” wrote John Danish in his report to the Irving Democratic Club. Garcia, was, “being sworn in by [senior] federal Judge [Barefoot Sanders] who presided over the desegregation case filed against the Dallas I.S.D.. Her parents, sitting in the front row, had both been spanked as children for speaking Spanish on the playground. Ms. Lupe Valdez, the newly elected sheriff of Dallas County (who also happens to be Hispanic), watched over the ceremony.”

That is the kind of history Denson-Prince hopes to make some day. She is sounding much stronger than the hoarse whisper we first heard in late December, and when asked how she’s dealing with all of this after so many months, she answers simply, “God is Love.” It is a refrain that has sustained Southern struggle for centuries.

Notes:

(1) Contributions to the Brenda Denson-Prince Campaign Fund may be sent to P.O. Box 2434, Terrell, Texas 75160.

(2) Of 650,850 votes cast in the Maultsby-Garcia race, 328,969 (50.54%) went to Garcia; 321,881 (49.45%) went to Maultsby, according to the Texas Secretary of State election results posted online.

(3) Name of judge who presided over Judge Garcia’s swearing in was corrected on March 3, thanks to an email from a source close to Garcia.

In Part Four of his closing argument in behalf of Edgewood Intervenors in the 2004 Texas school funding trial, attorney David Hinojosa of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF) argues that accountability systems still allow Texas to fail children in many ways.

Our Texas accountability system is failing our children and is resulting in further lost opportunities for our children.

Texas has adopted the TEKS curriculum, which is more challenging, and our districts agree. Texas has adopted a recommended program as a default graduation plan for high schoolers, and our districts agree.

Our accountability system, however, does not include the measure of many of the other elements of an adequate education, for instance, extra-curricular and co-curricular activities. The State argues that when you offer those programs, you do so at your own discretion, your own money and that such is not needed to provide a meaningful opportunity to succeed.

The State argues that programs and activities such as Texas high school football are not needed, as well as ROTC, debate teams, UIL teams, but if districts choose to engage in these programs, they do so at the expense of providing what they claim to be an adequate education, and that these programs play no part in providing meaningful opportunities.

Yet the undisputed testimony in this case, even by former Galena Park superintendent and now Texas Education Commissioner Neeley, was that extra-curricular and co-curricular activities build leadership, build character, team work, pride, they help reduce dropout rates for some student groups, they allow students to compete at higher levels, they provide opportunities through scholarships, opportunities to enter into certain colleges and to be competitive with other states’ students on a national level.

Further, the evidence showed that while the accountability rating system, itself, proclaims to hold schools and district accountable for every single child in their district, the facts in this case proved otherwise.

The State’s accountability expert agreed that if a student passes in their test scores for a given subject area test, that person is proficient in that subject. And if the student fails to get the minimum cut score for that subject area, then that person is not proficient. Their expert then agrees that campuses and districts that earn a rating of academically acceptable are providing those children with a quality education that is enabling those children to take advantage of meaningful opportunities to succeed.

Even with 75 percent of the kids in the district failing science tests, it doesn’t matter. To the State, those districts are acceptable and are providing a quality education. And for a school district of the state to reach an academically acceptable level, only one-half of the students need to pass the minimum test scores in reading, writing, but the true story isn’t told with those passing rates. It’s with these passing rates. For instance a minimal level of student passing rates for all students in a grade level is only 25 percent for science. The school or district can actually obtain an academically
acceptable rating with a far less passing rate.

The example shows that if a school district last year had 25 percent of a student group that met the minimum sized requirements in its completion and dropout rate criterion, and then this year followed up with a 16 percent passage rate, nine points below standard, that district would still be deemed academically acceptable. That’s what’s acceptable to our State. That’s what they define as an adequate education.

Required improvement wasn’t even measured in the prior accountability system, yet it exists under our current system. What does this tell us? That a district can fail to meet the bare minimum test standards, yet still be deemed academically acceptable, that a campus or a district can be ranked academically unacceptable for two years on the par level, yet be deemed academically acceptable by our state.

The State has also added another provision that was non-existent in the prior accountability rating system, referred to as the exceptions provision. Under this feature, if the district or school has 16 or more assessment measures and is within 5 percentage points of any subgroups, that district is deemed to be academically acceptable, so they can shave 5 percent off of the minimum standards for Hispanics passing science, shave 5 percent of the African-Americans attempting to reach the 35 percent passage rate, 5 percent of economically disadvantaged subgroup passing social studies at only 45 percent, and you would still be academically acceptable in our state.

The minimum size requirements: Even though the State purports to hold each school and district accountable for all of the students in all subjects, the minimum size requirements allow many districts to escape being held accountable. For example, if a district has 28 fourth grade African-Americans and less than 20 percent pass any subject area for that group, you will not have a rating for African-American because its doesn’t meet the minimum size requirement.

The evidence also shows that a group must be at least 30 to 49 students, and of those 49 students, they must comprise at least 10 percent of all the students to be evaluated for campus, district and subject. For example, if you have 35 Hispanics tested in a district on a subject and you have 370 students tested in the subject area in the district, the performance of the Hispanics would be dismissed in the accountability rating system for the subgroup of Hispanics. Even though the school district such as that had only 15 percent of the 35 Hispanics meeting the standards, the district would still be rated as academically acceptable in our state of Texas.

Mobility also affects the true story in the accountability system. There are still other students who are excluded from the accountability rating system, and there’s a list from the State’s accountability specialist. She admitted that low income and minority school children, as well as migrant school children are more mobile within a given period than other children. She admitted that all children who take the TAKS within a particular school district are not necessarily in the district’s accountability subset. They must be enrolled in the district or campus as of October 3lst, 2003, and they must take the TAKS test in the same campus or district for the 2004 test which has happened.

So if a child moves to another district after October the 31st, and they test in another subject in another district, that child would be excluded from the accountability subset and the results would not affect the accountability rating for the district that the child left, and the same goes for the district that the child attended. And the same holds true now — which is also new under the accountability system. The same holds true now for campuses within the same districts, that even if a child moves after October 3lst of a given year and goes to another campus within the district, it’s not going to be reported. It may be reported in the district results, but not within the campus results.

I just want to touch upon the completion rate. Within the completion rates that are set by Texas, if you graduate, you earn a GED or you continue in the fall of the next year, you’re still deemed a completer. I asked the dropout fact witness for the State, “Well, what exactly has that continuing student completed in order to be in the completion?” she basically said nothing. But yet they’re still called a completer, distorting our completion rate. GED recipients are still to this day — although they’re supposed to be phased out — are still deemed completers.

And then speaking of the leaver code that Mr. Wood has referred to earlier, it’s true that a child can leave back to their country and if the district goes to that house and their neighbor s

ays, “Oh, the child left back to the country. They said they needed to go back and work in the field,” or something, in the factory.

“Are they going to school,” the district asks.

“No, they’re not going to school.” “Okay. Then we can mark them under this leaver code.” And they’re not deemed a dropout. Even though they dropped out, they’re still not a dropout under the Texas system.

And the completion rates are also subjected to required improvement. So you could have a district in successive years have a 55 percent completion rate and then a 70 percent completion rate, meaning that 35 percent have dropped out, because otherwise they’re deemed a leaver and they’re dropped from the cohort, you can have that many dropouts, and in our state of Texas you would still qualify to be an academically acceptable district.

And this annual dropout rate used the grades of seven to twelve, and the State figured out, “Well, that’s probably not too accurate. Let’s go ahead and change it to completion rate,” even though that, of course, is not too accurate in and of itself. And they set new standards. And 2 percent is academically acceptable for grades seven and eight. These are kids who are at the age of 12 to 14. And 2 percent can drop out and that is okay, because that’s academically acceptable in Texas. And that is also subjected to the required improvement, so the district doesn’t necessarily have to have just only 2 percent. They can have up to 6 percent one year, 4 percent in the next several years and still be academically acceptable in Texas.

We will have the under-reported student — those under-reported students, the districts just have no record of them. If you have more than 500 under-reported students, you might not be able to get an academically acceptable. So if you have 500 under-reported students, students who just left, you don’t have documentation for them, they’re basically lost, they’re part of the disappearing children in Texas, but districts with up to 500 under-reported students under the new regulations which are being phased in — it used to be up to a thousand.

Now the new ones are getting tough. Now they’re saying you can only have 500 students. There’s no accountability rating system for alternative education standards at this time, so districts can place their children in those facilities and their rating will not be affected.

There’s no accountability rating system for our LEP children at State standards, even though NCLB holds schools and districts accountable, within our own state educating our LEP population, they have no accountability rating for LEP children.

From S. Africa:

Cant really disagree with you, but please … We white South

Africans know our wrongs of the past. But please dont lump us in with the imperial “coalition of the

willing”. We had nothing to do with that one!

Cheers

Altus

Momberg
Die Burger

**********
Affirmative action for the Oscars? You are seriously disturbed. —

Anonymous

**********
An interesting column, for which I thank you.

It was not lost on me that last week’s winning Project Manager on THE APPRENTICE, Heidi, was

white. She was directing a team of two other whites and two blacks. Their team won, and normally, the

whole team would enjoy a reward. But last week’s reward was a helicopter tour of Manhatten, and there

were only three seats available.

Guess who got to ride?

Yours

sincerely,
MG Matejic

**********
Academy Awards

“To Kill a

Mockingbird” is one of my favorite movies, but like most movies about the civil rights era-think of

“Mississippi Burning” – whites are cast the “real” heroes. Sydney Poitier “In the Heat of the

Night,” is an exception, but Rod Steiger rather than Sydney Poitier won the

Oscar.

William B. Case

**********
Greg-

A fine

exploding of Oscar night on CounterPunch.org. Your geography lesson about the stars and presenters is

priceless.

I watched the show and was quickly disgusted with the state-sanctioned humor

of Billy Crystal and Bob Hope, and also with Michael Moore embarrassing his supporters once more.

Adding in the horror of Errol Morris receiving an award, it was a typical Oscar night. The only thing

that’s left to do is read Peter Travers’ yearly postmortem on the Academy’s choices in Rolling

Stone.

For what it’s worth I’m a longtime Michael Moore fan who is horrified at his

recent behavior – lashing out at Mumia, endorsing Wesley Clark.

Cheers,
Dave

Patten
Taunton, MA

**********
good one on counterpunch on the oscars,

white bread and mayonaisse. Of course, black folk in this country, even those who call themselves

African, still consider themselves American first and foremost, no matter how bad they may be treated.

And their leadership wether it be political or cultural has long lost their base in the black

institutions that integration was
meant to destroy.

Once upon a time black folk

controlled what how their children were educated, the stores they shopped in, the very institutions

that were critical to their lives. Today, what do black folk control outside of their churches?

Wouldnt you agree integration was the most effective tool to destroy black

institutions? As for the oscars, what has really changed?

Thomas C. Mountain

**********
Note: In the article “Oscar White?”, I tried to convey a complex

response to the Oscar telecast that appreciated the individual talent displayed, including Billy

Crystal, but critiqued the group dynamic. And that is how I undestand the logic of affirmative

action.

Affirmative action pays special attention to the collective patterns of

behavior, how the group acts as a group.

To the brief note that claims I am “seriously

disturbed” I offer a brief counter suggestion. Why can’t the Oscars be more like the Grammys? Like

the Grammys, perhaps the Oscars could include market categories that would help diversify the talent?

There was one email that I have permission to post, but which I have decided not to.

As the editor of an anti-racist site, I am tempted to display comments that I consider racist, in order

to show the contours of the problem. But rather than post the raw language, I will summarize and

discuss the point of view.

The email in question alleges that black actors deserve no

respect because they only portray characters that are either too shocking or too submissive. The

writer wants to see role model characters that work hard and DO NOT try to be

African.

The email, like some others I have received, also conveys an impression that I

am not white.

Well, it is interesting that the writer does not complain about white

actors who win awards for playing characters who are shocking and quite non-American. “Monster”

presents a dramatically shocking character, for example. Not a role model.

“Monster”

also says something about the meaning of shocking, because in today’s cultural environment, white

violence always counts as less shocking than black sexuality. Janet Jackson and her brother pay a

heavy price for being “too shocking” in their sexuality. Meanwhile, you can make your own list of

networked images of violence that will count as family entertainment.

As for the

argument that hard-working role models are needed, eleven Oscars went to a film that did not demand

simple conformity to a middle-class lifestyle. Characters could be Hobbits, Elves, or Trolls. They

did not have to “try” to be hard-working Americans in order to qualify for record-breaking awards.

So the email expresses a double standard that demands from Black actors a certain

conforminty that is not expected from white actors.

The writer goes on to say that

Japanese Americans provide a better model. Again, the argument is representative of certain racist

trends. The writer perceives Japanese American as more “assimilationist” and therefore more

acceptable. But the argument has at least two flaws.

First, my complaint was about a

lack of divesity at the academy awards. If Japanese Americans were indeed more acceptable to white

audiences, for the reasons alleged, then why are there no prominent stars to prove it?

Second, the writer is really calling for diversity that is not diverse. By presenting a thoroughly

assimilationist demand, the writer exemplifies the problem with Oscar White–how it does not

sufficiently challenge assimilationist attitudes.

Integration of opportunity should not

carry the pre-requisite of cultural assimiliation. In fact, the whole “Diversity” rationale for

affirmative action presumes that we can learn a lot from each other.

And please do not

assume that I am not white. If you want to backlash on my opinions, please don’t drag other folks

into your circle of attack.

Finally, I can sympathize with folks who are disappointed at

Michael Moore’s fling with real-politik (and his ethno-centrism) but on Oscar night he was trampled by

an Elephant! Do we have to paint a picture?