Let Me Speak
This is a tumblelog, kinda like a blog but with short-form, mixed-media posts with stuff I like. Scroll down a bit to start reading, or a bit more to read more about me.
The Numbers Behind English Instruction
Preliminary data released by the U.S. Department of Education last month showed that only 25 percent of English Language Learners in Arizona high schools graduate in four years. That number was well below Arizona’s overall 78 percent four-year graduation rate. It was also the lowest number reported in a spreadsheet of national data.
A main component of the current program is the use of a four-hour mandatory block of English instruction. While defenders of the program, including state superintendent John Huppenthal, have called its quality “the best in the nation,” the program also has vocal critics. Elements of the program — including how students are classified as ELL, how they test out of ELL and the separation of students in the four-hour blocks — are the subject of an ongoing Department of Justice Civil Rights Division investigation. The model has also drawn scrutiny from some education experts and at least one member of the state’s English Language Learner Task Force that originally directed how the program should be implemented. In terms of how to measure the ELL educational success, one metric is how fast ELL students are reclassified into mainstream classrooms.
In Arizona, more than 30 percent of ELL students reclassified into mainstream classes last year. That’s higher than most states, and a point of pride for those who defend the state’s program. But critics say that many ELL students here are reclassified before they are English proficient, because the testing policies in place are flawed. Federal civil rights investigators agreed with that analysis. They found that tens of thousands of ELL students may have tested out of ELL classrooms prematurely, prompting a settlement with the state of Arizona that involves both a new test and additional reading and writing services for former ELL students.
It makes a body wonder just how badly the government of Arizona wants to educate students who need extra English instruction. Jan Brewer and Russell Pearce et al. certainly don’t want to give non-white people any other civil rights, so…
Abortion law in AZ illegal, Justice Dept. says in filing
PHOENIX - The state has picked up a new, powerful foe in its effort to deny any public funds to Planned Parenthood for family planning services: the United States government.
In court filings, the Department of Justice is telling U.S. District Judge Neil Wake a law approved earlier this year aimed at cutting off all government funds to Planned Parenthood - even for non-abortion services - violates federal laws. Assistant Attorney General Joseph Mead said those laws clearly allow Medicaid recipients who would be affected to choose to get care from any qualified provider.
He said the state statute would essentially render half a dozen Medicaid regulations “meaningless.”
Abortions up 25% in Arizona after pro-life law took effect
It’s almost like restricting access to abortion DOESN’T work!
Fatal Fetal Defect Counselors Brace For Influx of Families After Arizona’s Abortion Ban
(trigger warning for abortion, birth, pregnancy, miscarriage and forced birth)
This is just unbelievably sad. Arizona has now banned abortions after 20 weeks since the pregnant person’s last period. And as usual, the main people who get late-term abortions — people who will not have a healthy baby and mom when it’s all over — are the victims.
Via thinkprogress:
MISS Foundation and Embrace are non-profits specifically working to develop birth plans for such families, provide counseling, and prepare funeral services. The Legislature has allocated no funding for these services, which are expected to kick into high demand once the abortion ban goes into effect.
About 100 pregnancies are terminated after 20 weeks in Arizona each year. According to Joanne Cacciatore, the CEO of MISS Foundation, one or two families a month currently seek their help preparing for a fatal birth. But they expect their resources to be stretched past maximum capacity soon. Cacciatore said:
This law may have intended to do good, but it can really adversely affect non-profit organizations that desperately want to help people but maybe can’t help the number of people who now come to us. We are already stretched very, very thin. I don’t know where this money would come from. […] They’re finding us on their own. I don’t know what will happen when the Legislature opens this up.
So: no babies are saved, the mothers’ lives are put at risk, and their insurance carriers have to bear the cost of a dangerous labor and delivery (not to mention ongoing prenatal care). Tell me again who this benefits? Oh, right, self-righteous pro-lifers who can pat themselves on the back for saving the precious babies from their grieving mothers.
![kyssthis16:
kileyrae:
“This is for our young C-SPAN [viewers]: Justin Bieber and Selena Gomez. These young people have overcome their very different national origins and become apparently a happy couple. I’m sure Justin helped Gomez learn all about American customs and feel more at home in her adopted country. Oh, wait a minute. I’m sorry. Because I’m not a trained Arizona official, I somehow got that backwards. Actually, Ms. Gomez of Texas has helped Mr. Bieber of Canada learn about his adopted country. Justin, when you perform in Phoenix, remember to bring your papers.” - Representative Luis Gutierrez (D-IL)](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m6bei7AsWS1qe0jrmo1_400.jpg)
“This is for our young C-SPAN [viewers]: Justin Bieber and Selena Gomez. These young people have overcome their very different national origins and become apparently a happy couple. I’m sure Justin helped Gomez learn all about American customs and feel more at home in her adopted country. Oh, wait a minute. I’m sorry. Because I’m not a trained Arizona official, I somehow got that backwards. Actually, Ms. Gomez of Texas has helped Mr. Bieber of Canada learn about his adopted country. Justin, when you perform in Phoenix, remember to bring your papers.” - Representative Luis Gutierrez (D-IL)
Arizona Plans to Criminalize Passive Resistance
gnarlybynature:sinidentidades:
Finding the traditions of Gandhi and Reverend Martin Luther King to be effective, the Arizona Legislature is working to criminalize passive resistance.
No more sit ins or die ins to fight corporate rule will be allowed. If you engage in passive resistance, you will be charged with resisting arrest. Because a sit in is just like shooting at officers to avoid detainment, right?
NO MOTHERFUCKING WORDS. NONE.
^^
Arizona should have its statehood revoked and be reestablished as a federal protectorate.
Seriously, Arizona perfectly encapsulates why states rights is a shitty idea.
Arizona Official Considering Banning Ethnic Studies In Universities Too
Two years ago, Arizona outlawed the teaching of some ethnic studies courses in K-12 schools, and now it may expand the prohibition to universities too.
Just weeks after the state passed its infamous immigration law, it also passed a law aimed at scuttling Tucson’s Mexican-American studies program, which critics claimed taught kids to resent white people. The argument, at the time, was that teaching subjects like critical race theory to kids in high school amounted to indoctrination because they were not old enough to question the teaching critically, like university students.
But now, Arizona’s chief education official sees university-level Mexican-American sudies programs as a danger too:
Arizona’s superintendent of schools, John Huppenthal, says Tucson’s suspended Mexican American studies curricula teaches students to resent Anglos, and that the university program that educated the public school teachers is to blame.
“I think that’s where this toxic thing starts from, the universities,” Arizona Superintendent of Schools John Huppenthal said in an interview with Fox News Latino. “To me, the pervasive problem was the lack of balance going on in these classes,” Huppenthal said.
Not surprisingly, a long list of Latino groups and education activists have protested the move, as they did when the state shut down Tucson’s program, decrying the imposition on free speech. “What we’re trying to do is expose children to a much broader perspective, so that we’re not indoctrinating,” said Augustine Romero, the former director of Tucson’s Mexican American Studies Department.
The ethnic studies law, which bans schools from offering courses designed for a specific ethnicity, had far-ranging consequences, including banning books like Shakespeare’s The Tempest and other seemingly anodyne works of literature.
And while many call the state prohibitions unprecedented, Devon Peña, the former director of the National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies said, “There is a precedent, and it’s called McCarthyism.” “It’s just a witch hunt of a different color. Now, instead of going after the reds, they’re going after the browns.”
John Green's tumblr: How to Get Your Book Banned in Arizona
Step 1: Write about people who aren’t white.
Step 2: THERE IS NO STEP TWO.
You will very rarely see me curse, tumblypoos, but…but…I mean, what the fuck? How is this even possible? This reads like an Onion article.
To be clear, it is now ILLEGAL to teach de la Pena’s novel (which I’ve read…
This whole article is amazing. First they shut down a successful program and ban books that teach the history of the civil rights movement, then they spend six figures on an “audit” that just confirmed that this school district’s Mexican-American studies program was “doing a good job”. It further noted that, “students who took Mexican-American studies were more likely to attend college, and that the program helped close the achievement gap”. Of course, after spending six figures on this comprehensive and complete analysis, the state then immediately disregarded it as “flawed”, for no other reason than it disagreed with their preconceptions.
They take money from the incomes of hard working members of the community, then spend it on nonsensical ‘studies’ that they reject (unless, of course, they agree with their conclusions).
