WE'LL BE OK IF WE WEATHER THIS STORM OF APPROVAL

“We want to be able to replicate what is happening here in Brownsville across the country,” Alejandra Ceja, Executive Director of the White House Initiative on Educational Excellence for Hispanics.

By Juan Montoya

Well, we're worse off than we had originally thought.

It's bad enough that we are what a former Brownsville Independent School District trustee called "a dropout factory," but now the White House guys say they want to "replicate" what is happening here across the country?

Well, we never.

I attended the schools in this district and dearly love it, its students, and its teachers. Some of its administrators (former and current) I can do without. But after reading his fluff piece on how great our schools are, I must beg to differ.
When I saw that the BISD was going to be used as a model for other school districts across the country, I recalled reading an article by local gadfly Moses Sorola in the local daily. Sorola, an Air Force veteran, was published in November 2011 and – unless day has turned to night and the seas in the southern hemisphere are turning the opposite way – the statements that we will somehow serve as models for the rest of the country seem ludicrous.
Let's face it, a Supreme Court ruling ordered the BISD to accept any student showing up at the schoolhouse doors who had a PUB bill showing he lived at a Brownsville address. It didn't matter whether the address was a ramshackle trailer park where his parents rented just so they could have a Brownsville address and then left to live at their home in Matamoros during the weekend.
As a result, each year we get a new crop of English-limited students who the district has to teach despite their language deficiencies. When they are socially promoted to the next grade, the effect is exponential. How on earth are English-limited students supposed to compete with the rest of the state and the country?
This drags down scores, raises student-teacher ratios, you name it.
But I digress.
Sorola pointed out in his article that "a review of records for the Texas Southmost College for the Fall of 2010 reveals that TSC has a, 227 dual-enrollment students and that 31.3 percent were not college ready. This is the cream of the crop," he continued, "and they're not ready.
"TSC has a total of 966 non-dual enrollment students and 65.8 percent are not college ready. The statistics would be much higher if we were to count the students who graduated from BISD but did not enroll in the first year of college."
But, as the saying goes, when they're handing out compliments right and left, you must as well line up and get some yourself.
This BISD trustee Minerva Peña did, which kind of reminds us of the politicians who keep trying to work themselves into the picture even though they are not the subject of the story.
It had to do with the success of chess programs in the local school and local college, which by the way was started  by a teacher, not a college president or BISD trustee. Minerva, an overgrown pom-pom girl who has never forgotten was it was to be cheered on the sidelines, chimed in with this gem:
"(Chess) "teaches you how to think,” she said. “It teaches you how to think five moves ahead.”
Well, if you have ever seen her in action, Minnie must be playing reverse chess because for the most part she's, shall we say...challenged?, in dealing with district matters.
Not to be outdone by Mensa member Peña was UTB President Julieta Garcia, who said she is an advocate of  keeping college costs down. She said tuition has gone up because the state has reduced funding to colleges and universities, not because professors are being paid more.
Well, those of us who remember why the UTB-TSC rupture occurred know that it was purely self-defense on the part of the local students and the taxpayers who not only paid the highest tuition rates of all community colleges in the state, but also produced the sorriest academic results as well.
The new TSC administration and its trustees – who by the way were not quoted in the story – delivered on their promises of a new beginning in accessible higher education by lowering tuiition rates by as much as $1,000 per semester. Now, if the white House guys want to replicate that elsewhere, we'd really be getting somewhere.

Although it's nice to get a pat in the back every once in a while, let's not get carried away by this sudden storm of approval. The BISD trustees and the administration know we have a ways to go. Let's get at it.