Cloaking Inequity

Harkin has released his Strengthening America’s Schools Act of 2013. A re-authorization of ESEA and revision to NCLB. I will try to produce Cloaking Inequity’s analysis in the next few days. Press release: http://lnkd.in/nZJjKT Bill: http://lnkd.in/mrG3Ns Bill summary: http://lnkd.in/DvA3pY See Cloaking Inequity’s posts on high-stakes testing and accountability. I am in Brazil for meetings at the Senate in […]

How can you make a post about an academic paper winning an award interesting? Start with Charlie Sheen quotes of course! I’m different. I have a different constitution, I have a different brain, I have a different heart. I got tiger blood, man. I’m not bi-polar, I’m bi-winning. I win here and I win there. […]

Join KLRU for the live taping of Blackademics: Education, Performance and Youth Empowerment Date: Wednesday February 13, 2013 Time: 7 pm (doors open at 6:30 pm) Location: KLRU Studio 6A (map) RSVP: Event is free, but RSVP is required. RSVP now Join us for a live recording of nationally and internationally renowned black studies scholars as […]

Sandy Kress wrote a Sept. 29 column for the Austin American-Statesman entitled “Kress: The Facts on School Accountability.” Sandy Kress is known as a key architect of the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) education reform passed in 2002 and is now a handsomely paid lobbyist for Pearson Education. Pearson is a testing company which gets […]

I am giddy!! I had writer’s block all summer. I owed Professor Rich Milner and two co-authors (Dr. Muhummed Khalifa and Dr. Linda Tillman) my portion of a chapter for the upcoming Handbook of Urban Education to be published by Routledge. We were asked to write on a “direction for future work (and needs) in the field of […]

Its finals week at UT-Austin. Lindsay Redd and Lindsay Butterfield created this short animated discussion between George W. Bush and John Dewey for their final project presentation today in my Education Foundations course. Enjoy!

It will take 80 more years for No Child Left Behind to close the achievement gap.

Sean Reardon, Stanford University Professor of Education, comment (October 4, 2012 INVALSI Accountability Conference in Rome, Italy) based on his latest research on achievement gaps in the United States. 

Today we are pleased to release the report Is Texas leading its peers and the nation?: A Decadal Analysis of Educational Data. The Institute for Urban Policy Research and Analysis at the University of Texas at Austin commissioned a policy this report in the spring of 2012 to examine education data for the state of Texas, […]

 In this article, Julian Vasquez Heilig, Keffrelyn Brown, and Anthony Brown offer findings from a close textual analysis of how the Texas social studies standards address race, racism, and communities of color. Using the lens of Critical Race Theory, the authors uncover the sometimes subtle ways that the standards can appear to adequately address race while […]

I gave another interview on the cheating scandal in El Paso (1,2,3) yesterday. The question that often arises is this only a case of bad apples? The research literature has long shown serial dishonesty in Texas Education Agency’s (TEA) publicly reported dropout and graduation numbers (See for example IDRA; Losen, Orfield, & Balfanz, 2006; Vasquez Heilig & Darling-Hammond) suggesting […]

Vasquez Heilig, J., Cole, H. & Aguilar, A. (2010). From Dewey to No Child Left Behind: The evolution and devolution of public arts education. Arts Education Policy Review, 111(4), 136-145. This historical narrative tracks the evolution and devolution of visual arts education from Dewey’s progressive era pedagogy and the theory of the arts as experience through the modern accountability […]

Vasquez Heilig, J. (2011). As good as advertised?: Tracking urban student progress through high school in an environment of accountability. American Secondary Education, 39(3), 17-41. No Child Left Behind’s mandated high-stakes testing and accountability policies have pervaded districts and schools nationwide. To examine student progress and graduation in the midst of first generation Texas-style accountability, this study tracked individuals […]

Vasquez Heilig, J., Young, M. & Williams, A. (2012). At-risk student averse: Risk management and accountability. Journal of Educational Administration, 50(5). The prevailing theory of action underlying accountability is that holding schools and students accountable will increase educational output. While accountability’s theory of action intuitively seemed plausible, at the point of No Child Left Behind’s national implementation, little empirical […]