Achievement Gap in North Carolina Persists Despite NCLB
"Four years of prodding from the federal government has done little to boost student performance or narrow the achievement gap in North Carolina's schools. Except for the first year of the No Child Left Behind Act - the biggest federal foray into public education in more than a generation - overall student scores on state exams have remained largely unchanged since spring 2003," writes Todd Silberman in a recent Raleigh News & Observer article.

State Superintendent of Schools June Atkinson says: "We have plateaued."

Schools with the biggest challenges in the classroom - those with greater numbers of poor children - must also make the most progress. But Statewide, more of those schools are coming under fire for falling short of yearly goals for student achievement and a growing number of them face the prospect of increasingly harsh sanctions for continuing to miss annual performance targets.

The first sanction allows students to transfer to higher-scoring schools. The final sanction mandates such sweeping changes as replacing the entire faculty and principal and changes in governance that could mean state takeover or conversion to a charter school.

About 300 of North Carolina's schools that receive federal money - more than a quarter of all that qualify for the aid - have been sanctioned at the first level. That's almost twice the number of high-poverty schools that faced sanctions two years ago and 100 more schools than last year.

Some districts, however, have seen slight progress over the past four years, and
some individual groups of students have shown significant gains. In Triangle districts, the passing rate for Hispanic students has increased by as much as 10 percentage points on reading exams. Almost 80 percent of Hispanic students in Johnston County and the Chapel Hill-Carrboro district passed the test.
The News & Observer, November 25, 2006
 

Helpers Need Spanish Fluency
Lo siento, no hablo espanol. (I'm sorry, I don't speak Spanish.) As competition for bilingual workers intensifies, the communities served by nonprofit agencies are hearing this response more frequently. Nonprofits struggling to serve the area's growing Hispanic population say that finding bilingual employees is a major obstacle. Hampered by salaries that can't compete with those offered by for-profit companies or bigger nonprofits, and faced with an applicant pool lacking in people who are both bilingual and licensed in their fields, many nonprofits have been unable to keep up with the needs of Spanish-speaking clients.

According to 2005 estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau, about 8 percent of Triangle residents are Hispanic. Rick Miller-Haraway, director of Catholic Charities' Raleigh regional office reports that about 30 percent of his office's clients must receive services in a language other than English. "The social service system has just been overwhelmed with the need," he says, "and I think everybody is responding the best they can."
The News & Observer, October 30, 2006
 

Immigration Activists Target Employers
Grass-roots groups in North Carolina are taking a new tack in their fight against illegal immigration. They're targeting businesses they suspect of hiring illegal workers. The campaigns are mounted by groups such as the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps, an Arizona-based group best known for reporting illegal crossers at the Mexican border. This group is seeking to expand in North Carolina. In California and Arizona, the group's supporters are known for protesting at sites where Hispanic workers congregate, as well as photographing and confronting their employers.

A Raleigh-based group, the political action committee Americans for Legal Immigration, is promoting a Web site where anyone can anonymously accuse a business of hiring people without proper documents.

Mark Potok, who monitors hate groups for the Southern Poverty Law Center, says the rapidly growing anti-immigration movement will almost certainly become more visible in states such as North Carolina, where Hispanic immigration is transforming communities. Researchers estimate that roughly half the 600,000 Hispanics living in North Carolina are here illegally.
The News & Observer, October 28, 2006
 

2006 Hispanic Achievement Conference informative, rewarding
Presented by the NC Society of Hispanic Professionals in partnership with the
NC Department of Public Instruction, the 2006 Hispanic Achievement Conference was held October 20, 2006, at NC State University's McKimmon Center in Raleigh.

Conference speakers addressed effective learning programs for ELLs, inclusive school strategies, and ways to work with parents. An especially interesting session was a panel discussion by current and former ESL students. UNC researchers Margarita Machado-Casas and Karen Zuniga noted that 90% of Hispanics in North Carolina are of Mexican origin and that North Carolina has the highest Latins student dropout rate tin the United States.
Attendee Robin Kube shares her view of the conference.