English Language Learner / Flores v. Arizona

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Arizona State lawmakers respond to a federal judge’s most recent court order in the 15-year-old Flores v. Arizona lawsuit.
The judge ruled that the State continues to violate federal law by not providing adequate educational programs for English Language Learners.
Guests:
Rep. Tom Boone, (R) House Majority Leader
Rep. David Lujan, (D) Phoenix, District 15

Steve Goldstein:
Tonight on "Horizon", educating kids who don't speak English. State lawmakers join us with the latest on the Flores lawsuit. We'll visit the Phoenix Art Museum to take a look at 17th century Dutch masterpieces. And an A.S.U. study on cigarette advertisements. That's all next on "Horizon."

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Steve Goldstein:
Good evening and thanks for joining us tonight on "Horizon." I'm Steve Goldstein. Late last week U.S. District Court Judge Raner Collins ruled that the state continues to violate federal law when it comes to educating English language learners. We'll talk with state lawmakers to see if an appeal of the court's decision is on the horizon. But first David -- David Majure has this report.

David Majure:
Make, academic progress in reading, writing and math can be especially difficult for children who are learning to speak English. An estimated 135,000 Arizona students qualify as E.L.L. or English Language Learner. The Murphy Elementary School district has a student population that's 58% E.L. L.

Gloria Rivera:
They may be non-English speakers, no English at all. Or they may have a solid foundation in their primary language. We have students the middle.

David Majure:
Gloria Riviera is the district's coordinator of multicultural services. She says E.L.L. students work alongside their English-speaking peers like this classroom at -- two hours a day are dedicated to language and literacy but English acquisition activities continue all day long. According to Riviera remarks teaching E.L.L. students requires a lot of time, teacher training, special resources and a significant amount of cash. At Murphy it costs about $1,900 per E.L.L. student. $1,900 is far greater than the $365 per E.L.L. student the state currently provides. To make up the difference, the Murphy school district uses money from a variety of other funding sources.

Tom Horne:
I think the key issue is that we can show there are districts on current funding doing an excellent job. The difference between those and the districts not doing an excellent job is not the amount of money they have, it's the leadership in those districts.

David Majure:
State School Superintendent Tom Horne -- the Nogales Unified School district is at the heart of the 15-year-old Flores v. Arizona lawsuit that seeks to increase state funding and improve public education for English language learners.

Tom Horne:
Nogales is completely changed. It was probably the worst district in 2000. That's why the plaintiff chose it as the plaintiff. Now it's probably our best district because they had a really excellent superintendent from 2001 to 2005. His name is Kelt Cooper. In the judge's decision they refer to him as Super Cooper because that was some of the testimony. And I've since hired him to help other districts achieve what he was able to achieve on the funding as it exists now. He was able to achieve results for English language learners better than our statewide average for kids, including kids who grew up in English speaking house holds.

Tim Hogan:
They want to say how great the program is at Nogales but they don't want to spend what Nogales does.

David Majure:
Tim Hogan filed the lawsuit on behalf of E.L.L. families from the Nogales Unified School District. Like Murphy the Nogales district spends more on E.L.L. students than the state provides.

Tim Hogan:
The evidence at Nogales was the state spends $1,570 extra on an English language learner student. The additional funding Nogales has been able to generate for its programs for English language learners has come from sources that they shouldn't have to take the money from. For example they've taken money away from other kids' programs in Nogales to develop good programs. They've taken federal money that they shouldn't be taking to devote to E.L.L. programs. So, you know, it's robbing one program to pay for another, basically. And fundamentally it's a state obligation to fund these programs.

Tom Horne:
From the standpoint of federal law which is what we're talking about, it doesn't make any difference how much money comes from the state and how much money comes from the local school districts. The question is, are the students receiving appropriate education to overcome language handy caps. The answer is yes, they are.

Tim Hogan:
And the court has been insisting for the last seven years that the minimum funding level cannot be arbitrary. It can't just be what the Legislature feels like appropriating. It has to be based on the actual cost of providing that education to these kids.

Teacher:
Does everybody know where they're going?


David Majure:
One final note, Riviera says Legislation that limits state E.L.L. funding to two years per child is unrealistic, because in her district it generally takes much longer to become proficient in English.

Gloria Rivera:
As a general rule, in order for our English language learners to exit out of the structured English immersion program it takes about 4 1/2 years. If you look at our academic data in this case, aims, our student who have exited out of the structured English language program do better than our English speakers here. So in Murphy I do believe that we are making some academic gains. But we still have a ways to go.

Steve Goldstein:
Joining me to talk about the latest developments in the Flores Lawsuit are Republican State Representative Tom Boone, Majority Leader for the Arizona House of Representatives and Phoenix Democrat, Representative David Lujan who serves on the House Appropriations Committees. Gentlemen, thanks for being here. Representative Boone, will legislators appeal this ruling?

Tom Boone:
We're discussing that. We had a meeting with our attorney today, actually. We're taking under advisement his advice. There'll be announcement tomorrow.

Steve Goldstein:
What expectations can you have if the ninth sick up is appealed to in this case?

Tom Boone:
We felt from the beginning and that's why we appealed it the first time that judge quite honestly wasn't listen together facts and changes that have taken place since 2000. The ninth circuit agreed with us and sent it back and forced the judge to go through eight days of hearings to get that information. However, still he evidently isn't paying attention to it because he's saying basically nothing has changed. He's hung up on some sort of a process that we have to go through in determining a program and a cost before we get to the results. The fact of the matter is, the results speak for themselves. Nogales has made tremendous progress in satisfying federal law. We believe they're in compliance. So that's where we're at.

Steve Goldstein:
Representative Lujan, your reaction first to the ruling and then to what Representative Boone had to say.

David Lujan:
I wasn't surprised by the ruling. We said last year that we thought that law that was passed last year was inadequate and fell far below what was required in order to meet the federal law requirements. It's disappointing to hear. We heard last week when the order came out that some of the Republican leadership said they're going to continue to fight that. And I think that that's disappointing. Because the real opponent in such a fight are the thousands of school kids all across Arizona who only want to have the resources to get a public education. And we need to stop spending money on lawyers and let's sit down at the table and come up with a solution. One of the things I heard today was that if the recent eight days of hearings, we had at any one time seven lawyers representing the state on one side where you had Tim Hogan representing the school districts on the other. How much in attorney's fees are we paying on those seven days when you have all that many attorneys? I want to know how much we're paying for attorneys in this case.

Tom Boone:
If I could address the resources issue, all we're hearing is about the money. Quite honestly if anything was proven in the eight days of hearings we had in Tucson was not all about money. It's more about leadership than anything else. Nogales has proven with no more money from the state is they made significant progress and in fact in compliance with no child left behind, which is the current federal law. They quite honestly overtook E.O.A. which is what we were sued upon.

David Lujan:
What the judge said in his recent order is that it is about money. Because the state keeps wanting to put Nogales up as the example of a school district that's doing a good job. As a superintendent said, they have a superintendent at the school district. But the judge specifically said it was because the district has smaller class sizes, because they have teachers that are specifically trained in E.L.L. All that takes money. Nogales is spending $1,570 per student. Whereas the law that we passed last year would only provide $444 per student. So it is about money. Glendale Union High School District, another district the state likes to put up as an example of a district doing a great job is spending over $3,000 per student. Here we want to give them $400 per student.

Steve Goldstein:
One problem Judge Collins pointed out was the problem of using federal funding inappropriately. What's your response to that?

Tom Boone:
We believe he's dead wrong. Title I specifically allows moneys to be spent on English language acquisition specifically for at risk students, which could qualify in this particular case. So we disagree with that. And if I could --

Steve Goldstein:
Representative, please finish.

Tom Boone:
And if I could go back to the resources for just a second, what Nogales did was they reallocated their existing resources with no additional money from the state and made progress. They are in compliance with no child left behind. They did things for example, like there were aides in the classroom and all the classrooms before the superintendent came there. That superintendent basically relieved all the aides of their duties because quite honestly the aides that were hired came across the border didn't even know English themselves. How could they help student in the classroom? Reallocated the money, increased teacher salaries, lowered the class sizes and accomplished what they did in those money.

Steve Goldstein:
On the federal funding issue?

David Lujan:
Mr. Boone said the judge was wrong. It's interesting. The states own witness on that was an official from the U.S. Department of Education. 29-year veteran. He is the federal government's expert on title I funding. He said the proposal to use federal funds before you use state funds was the most play can't violation of supplanting that he has ever seen in his career and would actually jeopardize $600 million worth of federal funding that schools receive if it was to be implemented.

Tom Boone:
And if I could address that. The witness that Mr. Lujan is referring to was put on the witness stand by the attorney general's office who has fought this lawsuit since the beginning and is in disagreement with the Legislature and Mr. Horne. So that witness was not in my opinion the state's witness. The state's that was a witness put on by the attorney general's office. They have fought this from the beginning. They've never represented the state appropriately. That's why the Legislature had to step in last March and find their own attorney.

David Lujan:
This is the government's own expert on this issue.

Steve Goldstein:
Tom, your reaction to the problem Judge Collins had was rating the funds for two years when some cases presume that it will take much longer than two years for English language acquisition.

Tom Boone:
Good point. The law refers to as the additional group new wait which is an automatic money that school districts received under the bill. It doesn't stop the funding after that point. It's merely requested the school district have to submit another request for funds and justify why they weren't in two-years able to adequately teach English to that student. Then they can apply for more money from the compensatory instruction funded by the bill. Again misunderstanding by the judge.

Steve Goldstein:
Representative Lujan?

David Lujan:
Yes. The evidentiary hearing which was requested by the Republican Leadership last year because they wanted more evidence to substantiate the funding that is provided to E.L.L. students. The evidentiary hearing showed every district that got up time and time again said it takes three to five years to educate E.L.L. students. Here the state wants to cut off funding after two years. After that they're going to make the districts use their federal funding and all this other money before they can apply for the funds.

Tom Boone:
If I can address the three to five years.

Steve Goldstein:
We're almost out of time so I have to end with this. Are we going to have a special session? If so what's the effect?

David Boone:
I would think not have a special session. Depending on what the outcome is of what we decide in terms of our legal counsel. And you'll know that tonight or tomorrow morning. For sure then we'll decide whether we'll appeal or not we'll go from there.

Steve Goldstein:
Would you like to see a special session, Representative Lujan?

David Lujan:
I would like this resolved before the session ends. The students of Arizona deserve no less.

Steve Goldstein:
Representative Tom Boone and David Lujan. Thank you.

Steve Goldstein:
The Rembrandt -- producer Sooyeon Lee takes us into the museum for a peek at this amazing exhibit.

Sooyeon Lee:
In 1800, this museum is considered the national treasure of the Netherlands. It houses the world's most stunning and complete collection of 17th century Dutch painting and decorative art. Five years ago, the museum announced it will be closing for several years for renovations. Jim Ballinger, Director of the Phoenix Art Museum, had an idea. He called the Rice Museum to find out if the collection will be touring during the renovations.

James Ballinger:
Interestingly enough, the answer was no that they weren't thinking about that. And about a year later we asked them again. And they said no, we're not going to do that. I don't know. Several months after that we got a call and said, are you still interested? Because now we're thinking we might do this. That's kind of how it got started. We were never going to the Netherlands. That should be stop number one because of the collection.

Sooyeon Lee:
Now, 90 works by the 17th century Dutch masters including 14 by Rembrandt are here in Arizona.

Tom Loughman:
Our exhibition is Rembrandt and the golden age of Dutch art, treasures in the Rice Museum, Amsterdam.

Sooyeon Lee:
Tom Loughman is curator --

Tom Loughman:
The quality of the works of art is stunning. There's never been a work of golden age Dutch art competition to come to Arizona that's either this large or of this high quality.

Sooyeon Lee:
As you enter the exhibit, you are greeted by Rembrandt's painting the Portrait of Apostle Paul.

Tom Loghman:
Rembrandt worked at a time in Holland that experienced unparalleled wealth. So Amsterdam became a great he and his contemporaries created some of the finest paintings of their age of the 17th century, generally considered to be part of the Barouche Movement in art. Rembrandt then had a great legacy in the 19th century terrorist artists looked back toward Rembrandt with great reference in part because he was an artist printmaker working in both media.

Sooyeon Lee:
But there's more to the show than just Rembrandt. Loughman says this show brings together a more complete picture of the golden age of the Netherlands.

Tom Loughman:
Our exhibition is organized around seven major groups. We're standing right now in a group of religious paintings. There's also a wonderful selection of landscape. There are wonderful still lives accompanied by the decorative arts one sees in the paintings. We have genre pictures, artist self-portraits and pictures of artists doing their craft. Finally a selection of works of art that show the aristocracy.

Sooyeon Lee:
Aristocracy.

Tom Loughman:
This section defines Dutch art, landscape. We're standing in front of one of the landscapes that dominates the section, a great view of a town by riverside by [indiscernible] one of the great landscape painters would painted the low countries. Not only is his landscape of this riverside town remarkable for its beauty, but it also combines all those elements that I grew up with thinking of Dutch landscape. The sense of the low horizon line, the grand sky with these clouds drifting through. Genre paintings are paintings which show ideal types of everyday life. So rather than being actual snapshots of real people doing real things, the ideal of what an upper-class family does in the evening, like playing music, or what a lower-class family might be doing at a tavern, drinking and smoking.

Sooyeon Lee:
The popularity of the genre painting illustrates an important point in art history. For the first time, individuals with money and not just churches and aristocrats were buying and commissioning artwork.

Tom Loughman:
Genre paintings were very popular in the 17th century. In the large part because painters were painting for the open market, individual people, upper middle class people were buying paintings in great numbers to put in their homes for the first time in the history of art.

James Ballinger:
It was the first time you had a developing mercantile class or business class where people made enough money, frankly, to be able to buy art. It's not the church or the state commissioning. So if you look at this competition, you see genre paintings of people just doing what they do in everyday life. You see scenes of the harbor of Amsterdam and all these ships. You say, well, what are all these boats doing? Well, at that time they ruled the oceans. They were the great shippers, bringing goods to and from Europe. It was that whole explosion of the economy, much like say China is going through today we read about.

Sooyeon Lee:
This painting by Franz Hall shows a wide range of Dutch art and its influences.

Tom Loughman:
Hall was known in his day for having a totally different style. Instead of the fine style of his contemporaries, he was the pioneer of what was called the rough style. Quickly painted, broad brush strokes, true bravura coming off of the canvas. So we see in a painting like this time personality of the sitter. It was Hall's who was one of the artists the impressionists looked to in the 19th century for their fresh, vivid and quickly painted compositions.

Tom Loughman:
I hope that all of our visitors come to the exhibition either to see a show about Rembrandt and coming away from it having a profound understanding of what life was like in 17th century Holland and understanding that Rembrandt was but one of the great masters of that era.

James Ballinger:
The other thing I think it's important to understand is to have the number of works by Rembrandt in the context of what made him so important. Here is a learning experience that is pretty easy to capture. Rembrandt's work is dramatic and his use of light and his bravura in his brush stroke of bringing the life he does to paintings influenced so many artists after that that are still painting today. They don't even know that's where it came from. It helps us I think understand a whole lot of things around us even today. That's a pretty special opportunity for people.

Steve Goldstein:
A lifetime of smoking quite often starts in the teen years. A new study by an A.S.U. professor backs that up. A study by -- finds that advertising aimed at teens in subtle ways entices teens to take that first puff. Here to tell us about that study is Professor Sinja. First question, what was the study about and what were some of its major conclusions?

Rajiv Sinha:
We looked at smoking behavior for the entire life cycle of a smoker. For example if somebody starts smoking at the age of 20 and given the life expectancy in the united states of 80 years. We looked at 60-year smoking horizon. And basically a model of three factors. The benefits of smoking, the so-called hit that smokers get when they light up, and the costs of smoking which are the withdrawal symptoms that a smoker experiences when he attempts to give up and the mortality of risks. And we look at the modern price, the differences between planned smoking behavior and actual smoking behavior. We actually have very interesting results. Because we find that smokers behave very differently when they're faced with ads at a very young age. And so when tobacco manufacturers target teenagers in say high school, it has a particularly pernicious effect that most people don't realize. Not only do smokers smoke much longer than they normally would have, but unfortunately smokers who would not normally smoke if they weren't targeted turn out to become lifetime smokers.

Steve Goldstein:
As far as advertising is concerned, radio and TV ads for cigarette smoking have been limited for the past three decades. So where are these advertisements coming from?

Rajiv Sinha:
Not only have they been limited for the last three decades, actually in 1997 there was the tobacco settlement when tobacco manufacturers agreed not to advertise to teenagers. But unfortunately, they are continuing to do so. And in fact, in 2002 R.J. Reynolds was fined $20 million for targeting teenagers. But this is a drop in the ocean for an industry which spends $15 billion in advertising. Not all to teenagers but a significant portion. So basically now what they're trying to do is go under the radar and target teenagers, anyway, not necessarily through advertising but through point of purchase ads. So for example, they go to convenience stores. If you go to convenience stores, you know, a lot of the convenience stores are around high schools, tend to have a maximum penetration in terms of advertising that these tobacco manufacturers do. They place ads near candy, where the candy is. And worst of all, they place ads at eye level of teenagers. So they're lower than you would expect at eye level for adults.

Steve Goldstein:
What sort of influence have smoking aids have, perhaps Nicorette or the anti-tobacco gum of some sort?

Rijav Sinha:
Right. This is a particularly interesting finding that we came up with. Normally you would expect that smoking aids have an overall beneficial effect. But if you look at smoking aids in terms of people already smoking, they do have a minor effect in helping them reduce their smoking. But unfortunately there is a downside to smoking aids as well. And what the downside is that they actually make it more likely for people thinking about smoking to actually start smoking. Because the reason is because they are able to think about the withdrawal symptoms being less of a constraint on this.

Steve Goldstein:
Finally, Doctor Sinha, were you ever a smoker yourself?

Rajiv Sinha:
Yes, unfortunately I was. I started smoking as a teenager actually when I was in college. But I smoked only four years. I figured out that it's not worth my -- I did my calculations according to my model and I figured out that it wasn't worth smoking. But fortunately for me I was able to quit on my very first attempt. So my model didn't apply to me at all.

Steve Goldstein:
Dr. Rajiv Sinha thank you very much for joining us.

Rajiv Sinha:
Thank you very much.

Steve Goldstein:
And thank you for joining us for "Horizon," for Wednesday night. We'll see you tomorrow night. I'm Steve Goldstein.

Tom Boone:Republican State Representative;David Lujan:Majority Leader for the Arizona House of Representatives and Phoenix Democrat, also serves on the House Appropriations Committees;Rajiv Sinha:Associate Professor, Marketing, Arizona State University ;

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