Help us make this website useful for educators, parents, students, and legislators.  Send comments and suggestions to the creators:

Anissa Rodriguez - anissajean@gmail.com
Benjamin Kramer - bpkramer@mail.utexas.edu
Susie Robertson - susierob@hotmail.com

Guide to the Website

As the product of a semester-long examination of race, culture, politics, and power in Texas public schools, this website demonstrates our ability to analyze current policies and practices toward English Language Learners (ELLs) through a critical, race-based perspective. Such a perspective takes as its starting point the position that policies that affect minority students tend to have an implicit agenda of preserving the inequitable power relations in Texas society. Because approximately 90% of Texas's ELLs are Spanish-speaking, and because most of these students are of Mexican or Mexican-American origin, there is the additional complication that the vast majority of the students in question are not "typical" immigrants -- in fact, many are native-born Texan. Most feel the additional tensions of living in a region that shares deep cultural, linguistic, and historical ties with Mexico while they experience with abundant clarity that there is only one, true language of power - English, with its attendant Anglo-American values. We the authors feel that the policies currently in place do a tremendous harm to all the citizens of Texas by ignoring both the changing makeup of the state and the vast potential of a multicultural, multilingual society.

The bulk of the information within this website presents our case for the inherent biases of policies and practices currently in effect throughout the state. In our Analysis of the Problems, we explore a number of issues that bring unique pressures against ELLs and their teachers. Items discussed include:

In the Evidence and Testimonials page, we provide specific examples of biases in testing and instruction. We first stack English and Spanish TAKS questions side by side to see that the Spanish version is considerably less reliable in its clarity and fluency. Then, we turn to testimonials gathered from policy-makers, teachers, researcher, and students in order to give an "on-the-ground" sense of how the accountability system is affecting actual people.

In the Links section, we provide the reader the same source documents we used to reach our conclusions.

Lastly, in the Guide to Action section, viewers can download and take release versions of the TAKS and RPTE exams, then send their legislators comments on the experience. We offer recommendations for both incrementally improving the situation for ELLs in Texas and for large-scale overhaul of our education/accountability systems.

As a website, our work rests in the public sphere much more than it ever could as an end-of-term project. It usefulness depends in part upon the contributions that readers wish to add to it. Please consider sending us email with your own testimonials or opinions, including reservations or disagreements you have with its contents. While we hope that our work will contribute to a grass-roots movement to counter the current destruction of social institutions, cultural pride, teacher morale, and students' hopes for future prosperity, we also hope to sustain an honest "virtual dialogue" in the spirit of an open, democratic society. We challenge every reader to respond in some fashion, either back to us or to a policy-maker or implementer in our state.

back to top