Category: Uncategorized

Note: Angela Valenzuela is an education activist with values that we
respect. Here is a Thanksgiving note she recently shared with her list.
Posted by permission of the author.–gm

Dear Friends and Colleagues:

I want to take this opportunity to share with listserv subscribers
a little bit about me. This may be conveyed through a story that
appeared today in the San Angelo Standard Times about my recently
deceased mother, Helen Rios Valenzuela. (I’m from San Angelo, Texas).
My Mom passed away last week and here’s the link to today’s story that I think is well done:

There is only one error in the story. It says that my Mom is from
Phoenix, Arizona, when she’s actually from Superior, Arizona. However,
as a five year old, she did spend half a year alone in Phoenix in a
children’s hospital specifically for polio victims. She definitely beat
the odds. She wasn’t supposed to have ever walked and she did. She
wasn’t supposed to have had any children and she had three. And as a
female, Mexican American high school dropout who grew up during the Jim
Crow segregation era (de facto segregation, for Mexican Americans), she
was not supposed to have succeeded in life. In fact, my Mom graduated
from college with very high honors. There’s a part of the story about my Mom deciding to go to college
that I want to add. I was a senior in college when my Mom decided to go
(she had already taken and passed her GED). Incidentally, it was really
neat for me to cross paths with her daily during my senior year in
college. She was always surrounded by young college people who sought
her out. And I remember her bringing them home since our home was
already a social and intellectual center where we discussed and
questioned everything. And anyone who entered that space participated.

My Mom possessed a unique ability to accept, respect, and be open to
each person’s opinion and individuality. Since what always mattered
most to her was the relationship, you could tell her anything. This
certainly played an important role in my own development primarily
because it freed me to follow my dreams.

To continue, my Mom observed how by my junior year in college I was
questioning so much of what I had grown up with and how I was changing
as a consequence. I grew more distant as I felt that my parents could
no longer relate to me as they had previously. All of this saddened my
Mom as we had always had a close relationship. Several months after
enrolling in college, she asked me if I knew why she had decided to go
to college. I told her that I had an idea but wasn’t sure that I really
knew. My Mom then told me that she had always cherished our
relationship so much that she decided to go to college so that she
wouldn’t lose me.

I remember feeling amazed and profoundly flattered by her comment even as I attempted to grasp the strength of her love for me.

We’ll miss my Mom this Thanksgiving, especially since it was her
favorite holiday. We thought that she’d a least make it to
Thanksgiving…. In any case, I’m thankful to my Mother for her
unconditional love and passion for life.

I share all of this because my Mother’s life and death have been
very instructive to me, as well as to so many others. Perhaps this will
be instructive to you as well. Please know that I, too, am well—as is
my family.

Peace,

Angela Valenzuela

P.S. There is a photo, obituary, and additional comments by me about my Mom on my blog at:
http://texasedequity.blogspot.com/

Dear Mr. President:

The undersigned national Latino organizations write to express our
extreme disappointment with the Statement of Administration Policy
(SAP) issued yesterday supporting the "Border Protection,
Antiterrorism, and Illegal Immigration Control Act of 2005" (H.R.
4437). This bill defies any attempt at serious or effective immigration
reform, which you yourself acknowledged is urgently needed. Your SAP is
baffling in light of recent statements made by RNC Chairman Ken
Mehlman, which correctly
point out that the House Republican proposal overreaches in ways which
are harmful to the country and which will alienate the Latino
community.
Your support of H.R. 4437 is inconsistent with the very principles for immigration reform that you have put forward.
The impact of H.R. 4437 on the Latino community would be
devastating. This bill is excessively harmful to American
families,
businesses, and communities as well as immigrants. Among its many
appalling provisions: it criminalizes 11 million undocumented workers;
it subjects family members, employers, religious institutions, and
others to criminal penalties under broadened definitions of smuggling,
harboring, and transporting; it expands expedited removal and mandatory
detention; and it creates an unworkable employer verification system
that will
displace millions of workers and disrupt the economy. All of these
provisions will have a far-reaching impact on the entire Latino
community, yet none would solve our very real immigration problems.
H.R. 4437 does not put us on a path toward comprehensive immigration
reform; rather it stymies
constructive debate and is an affront to those who are truly
interested in solutions.

As you know, leaders from both political parties have
acknowledged the need to address our immigration problems in a
comprehensive manner and are working on realistic, rational immigration
reform legislation.

However, House Republicans have provided this shortsighted and
mean-spirited bill which is intended to appear tough on immigration
without resolving our nation’s immigration problems. Only a
comprehensive approach that provides a path to citizenship for current
undocumented immigrants, creates new legal channels for future flows of
needed immigrants, reduces family immigration backlogs, and protects
worker rights will reduce undocumented immigration and bring order to
our immigration system.

We are shocked and saddened by your Administration’s statement of
strong support for H.R. 4437. It is difficult to understand how you
will explain your posture on this legislation to the Latino community,
which is following this debate very closely. We urge you to withdraw
your support for H.R. 4437 and get back on the path toward
comprehensive immigration reform.

Sincerely,

League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC)
Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF)
National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials (NALEO)
Educational Fund
National Council of La Raza (NCLR)

Talk about criminalization. The Honorable Aaron Pena dragged
up this story from a San Francisco source: After spending $20 million
of our money investigating the life and friends of Henry Cisneros, a
special prosecutor has been ordered by the US Senate to release his
final report already. It has been kept under seal since August
2004.
We used to be among the good rep’s short list of links, but no
more. He’s gone all Quorum Report on us and AP, not even a
PinkDome link anymore. But we understand, he needs voters, not
philosophers on his side. For example, his answer to the border
drug wars is a committee
on substance abuse. That’s how one behaves in front of voters,
nurturing commonsense hypocrisies with warm milk. Apparently, it
can’t be helped. Here at TCRR we say, legalize it all: the drugs
and the people, too. BEFORE the border war breaks out.
Whatcha wanna bet  Quorum Report readers would think about that?

On page 45 of the Texas Supreme Court decision on school funding, we
find ambivalence on how to measure Texas education through a
standardized national exam. In the first half of the paragraph, the
court buys into the argument made by a State witness that scores should
be adjusted for "socioeconomic and family characteristics" meaning that
poor and non-white students should be compared not to rich white
students but to other poor and non-white students. Since half of Texas
students live in poverty, the choice of comparison makes a big
difference.

In the second half of the paragraph, the court admits that if the
purpose of a public school system is to get students ready for college,
then unadjusted scores in Texas indicate some worrisome failure:

Academic success is also measured by the National Assessment of
Educational Progress (NAEP) achievement test, as witnesses for all
parties at trial acknowledged. In 2000, controlling for socioeconomic
and family characteristics, Texas was first out of 47 states overall,
first for white students, fifth for African-American students, ninth
for Hispanic students, first for fourth- and eighth-graders in math,
and second in rate of improvement. In 2003, Texas ranked first in the
nation in closing the gap between African-American and white
fourth-graders in math, and second in the nation in closing the gap
between Hispanic and white fourth-graders in math and reading. But
unadjusted NAEP data, which may more accurately reflect college
preparation, showed Texas sinking to 37th among the states in
fourth-grade and eighth-grade reading, although it had risen to 22nd in
fourth-grade math and remained 34th in eighth-grade math.

The issue is crucial to deciding on the adequacy and
worthiness of education in Texas. Does the Constitution allow the
Supreme Court to consider education of poor students in Texas ‘good
enough’ so long as it’s no worse than the education of poor students
elsewhere? Or does it flatly mandate widespread college-level prep? Of
course one answer IS more expensive than the other. In choosing the
cheaper path, the Supreme Court seems to rely on rankings of
‘improvement’–a criterion that sounds something like ‘all deliberate
speed’. The court goes on to note that:

In 2003, Texas ranked last among the states in the
percentage of high school graduates at least 25 years old in the
population. Texas also has a severe dropout problem: more than half of
the Hispanic ninth-graders and approximately 46% of the
African-American ninth-graders leave the system before they reach the
twelfth grade. The gaps between white students on the one hand and
African-American and Hispanic students on the other are especially
troublesome since the African-Americans and Hispanics are projected to
be about two-thirds of Texas’ population in 2040. According to the
plaintiffs’ expert, if these gaps are not reduced, Texas will ‘have a
population that not only will be poorer, less well-educated, and more
in need of numerous forms of state services than its present
population, but also less able to support such services . . . [and]
less competitive in the increasingly international labor and other
markets.’

Yet with all these existing challenges the court finds that because
Texas is improving steadily with respect to other states, the education
system is not ‘arbitrary’ and thus cannot be ruled inadequate by
constitutional standards.

Having carefully reviewed the evidence and the district
court’s findings, we cannot conclude that the Legislature has acted
arbitrarily in structuring and funding the public education system so
that school districts are not reasonably able to afford all students
the access to education and the educational opportunity to accomplish a
general diffusion of knowledge.

"We recognize," said the court, "that the standard of arbitrariness
we have applied is very deferential to the Legislature, but as we have
explained, we believe that standard is what the Constitution requires.
Nevertheless, the standard can be violated." The court rejected
all the state’s arguments that would keep the court from staying
involved if facts of Texas education do not continue to improve.

–gm