Senate Effectively Kills DREAM Act for Lame-Duck Session
In a procedural vote today, the U.S. Senate effectively killed the chances of the DREAM Act passing during the current lame-duck session of Congress.
The Senate lacked five of the 60 votes it needed for further debate and consideration of the measure, designed to give undocumented students who have graduated from U.S. schools a path to legalization. The 55-41 vote in favor of consideration of the DREAM Act, announced shortly after 11:30 a.m., fell largely along party lines, with all but a few Democrats voting in favor and all but a few Republicans voting against it.
Last week, senators had already voted not to consider a version of the DREAM Act that had been introduced in the Senate. Today’s procedural vote was on whether to consider a version that the House approved with a 216-198 vote on Dec. 8. The House version had only a few nuanced differences from the Senate version, such as fees for students applying for the benefits of the act.
Advocates of the DREAM Act considered its chances of passing now, during the lame-duck session, to be much better than they will be in January, when Democrats give up control of the House to Republicans. While the DREAM Act had bipartisan support when it was first introduced in 2001, lately many more Democrats than Republicans have backed it.
The Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors Act, or DREAM Act, would provide a path to legalization for undocumented high school graduates who meet certain criteria and complete two years of college or military service. To be eligible, the graduates would have to have arrived in the United States before age 16 and be no older than 30. They also would have to have lived in this country for five continuous years and have no criminal record.
In a debate before the procedural vote, Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., argued that “this bill, at its fundamental core, is a reward for illegal activity.”
Sessions criticized the federal government for not preventing immigrants from illegally crossing the U.S.-Mexico border. He characterized undocumented immigrants as threatening the lives and well-being of U.S. citizens, such as ranchers who live near the border. “Before we can consider regular status for anyone living here illegally, we must secure the borders first,” he said.
Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., echoed Sessions’ views, saying lawmakers need to “secure our borders before we do anything else.” He added that any legalization plan for undocumented immigrants should be part of big-picture immigration reform, not considered as a stand-alone bill. He accused lawmakers who supported the DREAM Act of bringing it to the Senate only for political reasons. “You care more about politics than you do about governing the country,” he contended.
In arguing for passage of the DREAM Act, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., contended that the measure was not “a free pass” for undocumented youths but rather required them to “prove themselves.”
Feinstein urged her colleagues to vote for the act because without it, “these young people are left with a dead end.”
Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., a sponsor of the DREAM Act who has advocated for the measure for a decade, showed lawmakers photos of four undocumented youths who are high-achievers and summarized their stories. Two of them, he said, want to serve in the U.S. military and are unable to do so because of their undocumented status. Durbin said that his support of the act is “not a political stunt,” and he called on his “colleagues on both sides of the aisle to summon the courage to vote for justice” by backing the act.
According to tweets on Twitter from advocates of the DREAM Act, youths dressed in caps and gowns, some who would presumably have benefited from the act, kept watch on the Senate debate and procedural vote from the Senate visitors’ gallery.
Leveraging Ed-Tech for Global Competitiveness
The following is a guest post from Education Week intern Nora Fleming:
Panelists from the White House, U.S. Department of Education, and nonprofit and private sector organizations, including the Gates Foundation, gathered Friday in Washington to talk about how the U.S. can use technology more effectively to improve schools and become more globally competitive.
The meeting, titled “Leveraging Technology to Reclaim American Educational Leadership,” was hosted by The Brookings Institution, a Washington-based nonprofit focused on public policy research.
Many of Friday’s speakers echoed similar points about how technology in education can individualize learning, decrease costs for school districts, increase accessibility of information, and bridge the achievement gap. But they offered different viewpoints on the quickest and most efficient ways to implement technology and create new academic standards and curriculum for 21st century learners.
Unfortunately, the U.S. might be spending too much time weighing strategies for best practices instead of taking immediate action, said James Shelton, assistant deputy secretary for innovation and improvement at the U.S. Department of Education.
“The time we think we actually have, we don’t,” Shelton said. “The reality is that while we are standing still, not only are other countries passing us by, but they are increasingly improving on the trajectory and the pace that they are making that improvement.”
Not only is the U.S. slow to adapt to a 21st century education model, the investment in education technologies has also been exceptionally low, a White House official said.
A solution for how to increase investment in education may come by following strategies pursued in global healthcare, Tom Kalil, White House deputy director for science and technology policy suggested. Kalil discussed how large pharmaceutical companies had been inclined to put money behind creating drugs curbing male pattern baldness more than vaccines for poor people until several countries pledged an “advanced market commitment,” or a promise to purchase a product not yet on the market, if those companies agreed to develop such vaccines in a given time period.
“If we can do that in global health, why not in education?” Kalil asked.
But the barriers may not just be making investment in education more attractive and lucrative, some experts said. Terry Moe, a Stanford University professor and Hoover Institution fellow, argued that sometimes teachers unions and other government interests get in the way of technological advancement when they see technology as a substitution for labor, or more specifically, their jobs.
Karen Cator, the director of the U.S. Department of Education’s office of education technology, disagreed. She said she found most teachers were embracing the power of educational technology because it helped them incorporate more personalization and creativity in the classroom.
“It’s not true that it’s a technology vs. teachers or an us vs. them issue,” she said.
eLearning Update: New Ga. Virtual School Approved
Yesterday, the Georgia Charter Schools Commission voted to approve four new charter schools, including one virtual K-12 campus, and increase per pupil funding for virtual students from $3,400 to $5,800, according to the Atlanta-Journal Constitution.
The new virtual school will be Georgia Connections Academy. The state already has three other virtual charter schools: Georgia Cyber Academy, which currently serves students in grades K-9 and will be up for a vote to include grades 10, 11, and 12 in January, and two other virtual schools that have already been approved by the commission but said they could not operate on the funds previously provided. With the increase of per-pupil funding, both virtual schools are expected to return to the state.
Georgia educators hope that this decision will bring the state to the forefront as a leader in virtual education.
“What we just did is to bring Georgia’s educational system into the 21st century,” Ben Scafidi, chairman of the Georgia Charter Schools Commission, told the AJC. “Come this fall Georgia will be a national leader in virtual education.”
Report Advises Schools on How to Relate to Minority Parents
Some parents of minority students may not be inclined to get involved in their children’s schools if they feel the staff make negative assumptions about them and aren’t interested in their cultural background, a report released today by the National Education Association and the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund says.
The report, “Minority Parent and Community Engagement: Best Practices and Policy Recommendations for Closing the Gaps in Student Achievement,” spells out how educators can improve their relationships with parents of several different minority groups, including Latinos, African-Americans, and Native Americans. Among them are to investigate and give serious attention to complaints from minority parents or students, and to be aware of staff who may be making inappropriate statements about a person’s race or ethnicity or legal status. When schools provide interpretation and translation services to parents, they shouldn’t assume that parents understand educational terminology, the report advises. Parents may need some extra explanations of education jargon.
For each minority group, the report lists the activities of organizations that support parents in that group to learn more about education. A parent program run by ASPIRA, Inc., for example, has a 10-session curriculum for Latino parents on topics such as leadership skills and school structure. The Parent Institute for Quality Education runs classes, taught in 16 different languages by people who are members of the communities they serve, about how parents can create a positive educational environment for their children at home and also connect better with schools.
Earlier this week, the Center on Education Policy released a report that showed that in some states it could take decades to close some of the achievement gaps between whites and some minority groups, at the rate they are going. The report estimated, for example, that it will take 105 years for Washington State to close the achievement gap between white students and African-American students, if progress to narrow the gap continues at the same rate in that state that has been the case recently.
The report showed that overall states are succeeding in narrowing the gap between whites and Latinos at a faster past than they are for closing it between whites and African-Americans or whites and Native Americans. You can learn more about the report in my story for EdWeek, “Study: States Must Move Faster to Close Achievement Gaps.”
The issue of the importance of parent engagement in schools came up in a web chat hosted by EdWeek yesterday with Juan Sepúlveda, the director of the White House Initiative on Educational Excellence for Hispanics.
“We know from speaking to thousands of people across the country that one crucial issue for our families is just understanding the overall education system and how families can navigate the entire process,” Sepúlveda said, noting that only 13 percent of the Latino population has a college degree. He added that “for most of our [Latino] families there is no set of experiences on how to deal with the education system, particularly in relationship to going to college.”
Duncan Calls for Senate to Pass DREAM Act Before Adjourning
Expecting the U.S. Senate to cast a procedural vote on the DREAM Act tomorrow, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan urged U.S. senators to “do the right thing” and back the proposed legislation that would give some undocumented youths a path to legalization in this country.
“It’s the right thing to do for our country and the health of our country’s economy,” Duncan said in a call today with reporters. He added that he’s been telephoning both Democratic and Republican senators, and will continue to make more calls today, to try to convince them to pass the legislation.
He said that the young people who would benefit from the measure are those who “have done everything right, have played by all the rules, who want to contribute to society.” He said that passing the DREAM Act would enable about 65,000 undocumented youths who graduate from U.S. high school each year to go on to college.
While the act got more backing from Democrats than from Republicans when it was passed in the U.S. House of Representatives last week, Duncan said that “this has always been a bipartisan issue.”
The Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors Act, or DREAM Act, would provide a path to legalization for undocumented high school graduates who meet certain criteria and complete two years of college or military service. To be eligible, the graduates would have to have arrived in the United States before age 16 and be no older than 30. They also would have to have lived in this country for five continuous years and have no criminal record.
Critics of it say that it is amnesty for people who have broken the laws of this country.
Scantron Corporation Continues to Grow
Pull out your No. 2 pencils–we’ve got a question for you.
Which company has the San Antonio, Texas-based Scantron Corporation recently acquired?
A. Elluminate
B. SynapticMash
C. GlobalScholar
D. All of the above
If you answered C, you are correct! And my blogging partner Ian wants me to remind you that on Scantron tests, the answer is usually C. You would also be correct if you answered Spectrum K-12, which they acquired back in the Fall.
The merger was announced today in a press release. As you may have guessed, Scantron makes assessment and survey materials and is probably best known for its fill-in-the-bubble multiple choice answer sheets. The Bellevue, Wash.-based GlobalScholar, which makes the Pinnacle Suite, provides online management solutions for a variety of education data such as student information systems; gradebooks; learning management systems; longitudinal data collection, analysis and reporting; and teacher development.
“There is a growing sense of urgency to provide solutions that will help bring a new level of excellence to education systems. Scantron and GlobalScholar’s combined solutions will provide powerful tools for teachers, administrators and parents, in schools and districts of any size, as they work to improve the achievement levels for all students,” said Bill Hansen, the president of Scantron and former United States Deputy Secretary of Education, in a press release.