My street's flood rating is "excellent"???

At the encouragement of a friend, I just looked on the city's map for the upcoming 2012 bond package that is supposed to reduce flooding. I almost didn't because I was sure my street would be included.

See, my neighbor and I called the city 5 years ago...and even eventually got them to come out and take pictures. You can see my blog about it back in 2007 here: http://janetmorrison.blogspot.com/2007/04/realities-of-life-in-inner-city.html. Look down to the paragraph that starts with "no drainage." I emailed Leo Cheney then. A few years later I went to one of Carolyn Davis's town hall meetings and brought it up again because I noticed that they seemed to be fixing the streets across East Grand where the official Jubilee Park Community Center is. I thought it was odd that they wouldn't come across East Grand. She informed me that there was a bond package and they would be getting to our street...eventually.

Well, eventually hasn't come. I don't know what happened to that other bond package, but now here's another one. Maybe this is our chance. I looked up the map, fully expecting my street to be a yellow or a red line...or at the very most a green line according to this guide:



Instead, my street was given a purple!! See the map here:



Now, if my education serves me right and I can read maps and understand colors correctly, purple is for excellent. That doesn't make any sense to me. When I have visitors over to my house after a rain, they have to leap to get out of their car. In an early morning trip, a friend dropped her keys into the probably 4" water abyss (yes, I just measured it) and then had to reach into that nasty abyss to fish them out since we couldn't see anything in the dark.

Here are some photos so you can see for yourself:

To be fair, I walked on down our street and the further you go from East Grand, the less standing water there is. But just because half of the street drains for the most part, does that mean we on the other half have to deal with standing water, mosquitoes, and the mud and junk it brings to our front door?? 

Lowering the bar doesn't make our kids smarter

I didn't ever think about this, but since every state has their own standardized test (Texas has the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills--TAKS, Missouri has Missouri Assessment Program--MAP, etc.). So, although the states have "standardized" tests, it doesn't mean that we are accurately measuring students' skills equally. And, evidently, from what the Austin American Statesman says,

Research by the National Council on Education Statistics found that in 2003, Mississippi was the only state with an easier fourth-grade reading standard than Texas, assuming all states test the same skills.

The No Child Left Behind (NCLB) requires states to set their own targets and interim goals and submit them to the Department of Education. So, in Texas, we set the bar low so that we can look like we have made major achievements by meeting the goal of all children passing TAKS by 2014.

NCLB also requires standardized testing to track the progress of racial, ethnic, linguistic and economic groups in order to ensure no group is being left behind. However, Texas has set a standard that the group has to number at least 50 and make up at least 10 percent of a campus's enrollment in order for that group to affect progress. In other words, if a school is 95% African-American, with less than 50 and less than 10% English as a Second Language speakers, , they don't have to be tracked. Or if a school only has a handful of Asian students, their academic failure doesn't count against the school.

I'm not a big fan of tracking. Every inner city school I've been in starts blaming groups of kids for their failure to achieve a "recognized" or "exemplary" standard from the state. At the 85% Hispanic, 15% African American school I was at, they constantly referred to the "one 5th grade African American male student" who had "messed up" their results. I find that pretty unfair to "blame" a kid for that, but that's what has resulted from NCLB.

I spent some time with a 3rd grader yesterday and she informed me how she was so nervous about the TAKS test (3rd graders are no longer allowed to advance to the next grade unless they pass their reading TAKS test). She said she gets scared. She kept reassuring me (and herself) that it shouldn't be hard because, "I know my strategies." But then she would tell me about students in her class who made a 17% because they missed X number of problems and how they all had to be careful not to write in certain spots on the test because it would be thought that they filled in an extra "bubble," which would then count them wrong.

The fact that the standards are lower in Texas is extremely disappointing and concerns me for our children. What's worse is that our standards are lower yet so much anxiety is produced in the children as if they were taking the LSAT...and they don't even know that their lowered expectations are setting them up to be less prepared than the rest of the United States. What's even worse than that is our childrens' intellect is being determined by if they fill in a bubble correctly.

I think testing is good...IF it's there simply there as an assessment of how well WE, as teachers, have gotten the skills across. I'm not a fan of producing anxiety-ridden children. Besides that, our world is changing. We've got to change our educational system to match the pace of our ever-changing, highly technological world. It would be nice if the stimulus bill hadn't voted out school infrastructure. Sometimes we have to go beyond testing and figure out what's wrong with the system that's producing the under-prepared children.

Juneteenth--Still working toward freedom

If you don't live in Texas, you may not know what Juneteenth is. Actually, even if you do live in Texas, you may not know.

Juneteenth is a celebration of freedom. On September 22, 1862 President Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation to free the slaves. The proclamation went into effect on January 1, 1983. For slaves in Texas, however, the news of this proclamation did not reach them until June 19, 1865...nearly 3 years later!!

Though it was a momentous occasion and cause for celebration, the “General Order No. 3” that was passed down read like this:

"The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them becomes that between employer and hired labor. The freedmen are advised to remain quietly at their present homes and work for wages. They are informed that they will not be allowed to collect at military posts and that they will not be supported in idleness either there or elsewhere."

Not exactly complete and total freedom...the "Order" still bespeaks injustice.

However, people celebrated their new "freedom" (Juneteenth) that day and every year after that with a "Juneteenth" celebration. Despite the order of "freedom," though, 100 years later freedom in the true sense of the word was not a reality for African Americans. In the '60s, the Civil Rights Movement challenged the definition of that freedom.

And now, 40 years after that, I still question whether people are completely free. As I listen to my friends and neighbors in Rochester Park talk about apartments that are falling apart and moldy, jobs that make their feet swell and create carpal tunnel yet their employer offers no insurance, lack of grocery stores with quality fresh produce, lack of businesses in the community, limited safe places for their kids to play, high obesity rates...how is that freedom??

On Juneteenth (June 19, 2008), we are going to continue working toward gaining freedom in our community.

At 9:00 a.m., we will meet at 6601 Bexar St. to debrief on the guidelines for registering people to vote. We will split people into groups, ensuring that at least one person in the group is deputized, and go door to door in the Rochester Park neighborhood to register people to vote. It is a small area and we hope to be done within a few hours.

However, with your help, we can be done in a much shorter time span...and if we have a large group of people, we will split up into several other neighborhoods as well.

We would LOVE for you to help us! If you would like to be deputized to register people to vote before you come help us, you can go to the Dallas County Elections Department at 2377 N. Stemmons Freewy, Suite 820. It only takes a few minutes. However, you can help even if you are not deputized. We will simply pair you up with someone who is.

Help us celebrate Juneteenth by registering people to vote and enabling a strong voice from South Dallas to be heard!