Fired Texas Principal Speaks Out: ‘It Would Be Best to Speak English in Classrooms’

On November 12, 2013, Amy Lacey, the principal of Texas’ Hempstead Middle School, was placed on administrative leave and subsequently fired when she made a simple request to students: speak English.

Now that the gag order has expired, Lacey is speaking out about what happened that day, dispelling rumors that she banned Spanish from the school’s campus.

“I informed students it would be best to speak English in the classrooms to the extent possible, in order to help prepare them for [state] tests,” she wrote in a letter to the Houston Chronicle explaining her side of the story. “It is important to note that I did not ban the use of Spanish anywhere in the school or at any time, even though teachers had reported to me that they had experienced instances in which students had been asked to stop talking during instruction, and they responded that it was their right to speak Spanish — ignoring the fact that they shouldn’t have been speaking [in any language] during class without permission. The perception of the teachers was that students were being disrespectful and disrupting learning, and they believed they could get away with it by claiming racism.”

By telling students to speak English, Lacey was not being racist, she was merely pointing out that the academic language in Texas is, by law, English.

“Even so, I did not suggest that there would be any adverse consequences for any student speaking Spanish at any time. I merely encouraged students to speak English in classrooms by advising them that it would be to their advantage to do so especially with regard to state testing,” she continued. “English language immersion is an accepted best-practice teaching strategy, and Hempstead ISD board policy provides for its practice.”

She ended the letter thanking those who supported her “even when true facts were never given to the media” because she and others were not allowed to publicly defend her position.

“I think the public needs to know that in public education there are only one or two district personnel designated to talk to media,” she wrote in closing, “so any teachers that would have liked to speak on my behalf were not allowed without risking their job status.”

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Jindal Admin: Common Core Is Illegal Federal ‘Scheme’

Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, locked in multiple legal battles with his own school board over Common Core education standards, has has made a new, ambitious legal claim.

Common Core, he says, is not merely bad policy, but a violation of federal law. It's an allegation that could encourage lawsuits against the standards in other states currently implementing the standards.

In a brief submitted Wednesday as part of a lawsuit against Louisiana's Board for Elementary and Secondary Education (BESE), Jindal's attorneys claim that a consortium used to create multistate standardized tests aligned with Common Core was transformed into a cudgel to force states to obey federal edicts on education.

The Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) is a consortium of more than a dozen states who are working together to create common assessments built around Common Core. Louisiana was an early member of the consortium, and until two months ago was preparing to use PARCC materials for the state's 2015 standardized tests.

Such plans collapsed into chaos, though, when Jindal issued a set of executive orders declaring that the state's contract with PARCC violated state law and required the creation of a brand new contract to craft standardized tests, which Jindal said should not be aligned with Common Core. BESE has alleged that Jindal's actions are illegal, and has vowed to continue forward with Common Core-derived tests while joining a lawsuit against the governor.

"Simply put, PARCC is the implementation platform for a carefully orchestrated federal scheme to supervise, direct and control educational curriculum, programs of instruction and instructional materials in direct violation of federal law," the report argues.

PARCC's creation, as well as the creation of the Smarter Balanced consortium (which serves the same purpose but has different members), was enabled through grants by the federal government through the Race to the Top program. That federal involvement, Jindal's team argues, irretrievably taints the organization as well as Common Core more broadly, even though the government was not directly involved with the standards' creation. The Department of Education Organization Act (DOEA) and other federal laws, they say, explicitly bar the Department of Education from taking actions that increase federal control over education.

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Australia: Children who miss school days are hugely disadvantaged

How alarming then that so many Aussie kids are missing school. The average public school student in NSW is absent for almost three weeks each year. Three weeks! That’s not just a few silent letters, but whole tracts of maths and the entire periodic table.

High school students are worse — an OECD survey in 2012 revealed almost a third of Australian 15-year-olds (32 per cent) said they’d skipped at least one day of school in the previous two weeks. Compare that with the UK (18 per cent), New Zealand (17 per cent) and Japan and Korea (less than two per cent) and it becomes clear we’re raising a generation of slackers.

Until recently, it was the disadvantaged in the firing line. Hence Tony Abbott’s new policy to get indigenous students back in the classroom by docking their parents’ welfare payments if they don’t attend. A similar scheme was trialled in disadvantaged areas in Queensland, but abandoned in 2012 after only a 4 per cent increase in attendance rates.

So far, so predictable. Except it’s not. Because as the authors of a study have found, the new truants are just as likely to come from middle class households where mum and dad think nothing of taking young Toby out of class for a month to go to Europe. Or for a spontaneous week skiing. You don’t need to be able to spell hypocrisy to know that’s what this is.

Absenteeism is no longer a socio-economic issue, but a cultural one, and it’s poised to make dummies out of all of us. This week, the first major study linking poor attendance to lower NAPLAN results found that even a single absence can lead to a decline in academic performance.

“A 10-day period of unauthorised absence in a year is sufficient to drop a child about a band in the NAPLAN testing,” says the report’s co-author, Stephen Zubrick, from the University of Western Australia.

I’ve argued vociferously against the likes of Mark Latham, who says we should look to Asia for our education model. No one wants our happy-go-lucky, sand-and-surf kids to be stuck in learning gulags with small pillows strapped to their wrists so they can snatch sleep between round-the-clock lessons.

But if we’re to increase productivity, hone our intellectual capital and compete globally, we have to get serious about education and, at heart, that means recognising that school is a child’s job. Whether they’re a barefoot kid in the Kimberley or a private school girl a la Ja’mie, their role is to learn. That means grammar and algebra, not the tapas bars of Barcelona, because it’s convenient to tag a month in Europe onto Dad’s business trip to Spain.

Childhood is not one long Cheezel party. Yet increasingly, it seems the same parents who are over-invested in their child’s schooling — complaining about teachers, questioning results — are under-committed when it comes to their child actually attending. This, too, is the first generation raised by parents who constantly offer choice. “Oh you don’t want to go to school? OK.”

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