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USA: Película. Buscando a Dori (Finding Dory)

Reseñas

 

Dirigida por: Andrew Stanton, Angus MacLane

Reseña de Película :

«Buscando a Dory» de Disney•Pixar reúne en la gran pantalla a uno de los personajes más queridos del público, un pez cirujano color azul que vive feliz en el arrecife de coral en compañía de Nemo y Marlin. Pero de repente, Dory recuerda que tiene una familia en algún sitio y que a lo mejor alguien la está buscando en algún sitio. Así que embauca a Marlin y Nemo en una increíble aventura oceánica que les llevará al prestigioso Instituto de Vida Marina (MLI) de California, un acuario y centro de recuperación de especies marinas.

Para encontrar a su madre y a su padre, Dory pide ayuda a tres de los habitantes más estrafalarios del MLI: Hank, un pulpo cascarrabias que suele zafarse de los cuidadores; Bailey, una ballena beluga que está convencida que su sonar biológico está estropeado; y Destiny, un tiburón ballena corto de vista.

Dory y sus amigos se adentran con destreza por los complejos mecanismos internos del MLI y descubren la magia de sus defectos y las de sus amistades y familias.

Descripción de los personajes

DORY (voz de Ellen Dgeneres) es un pez cirujano de color azul brillante con una personalidad muy alegre. Sufre de pérdida de memoria a corto plazo pero eso no es ningún obstáculo para su carácter optimista… hasta que se da cuenta que ha olvidado algo importante: su familia. Es cierto que ha encontrado una nueva familia en Marlin y Nemo, pero le atormenta la idea de que en alguna parte alguien la está buscando. Puede que Dory tenga problemas para recordar exactamente qué está buscando o a quién, pero no piensa rendirse hasta descubrir su pasado y de paso aprenderá a aceptarse a sí misma.

MARLIN (voz de Albert Brooks)  ha viajado por todo el océano pero eso no significa que quiera volver a hacerlo. Así que no tiene muchas ganas de acompañar a Dory en una misión a la costa de California para localizar a su familia. Está claro que Marlin sabe lo que se siente al perder a la familia; de hecho fue Dory quien le ayudó a encontrar a Nemo no hace tanto tiempo. Puede que el pez payaso no sea muy divertido, pero es leal. Comprende que debe dejar de lado su personalidad nerviosa y escéptica y embarcarse en otra aventura, esta vez para ayudar a su amiga.

Un año después de su gran aventura en el extranjero, NEMO (voz de Hayden Rolence) vuelve a ser un niño normal: va al colegio y vive en el arrecife de coral con su padre y su vecina Dory, el pez cirujano azul. No parece que su angustiosa aventura haya hecho mella en su espíritu aventurero. De hecho, cuando Dory recuerda retazos de su pasado y sueña con emprender un ambicioso viaje por el mar para encontrar a su familia, Nemo es el primero en ofrecer su ayuda. Puede que Nemo sea un pez payaso joven y despreocupado con una aleta de la suerte, pero apoya al 100% a Dory. Después de todo, Nemo sabe muy bien lo que significa ser diferente.

HANK (voz de Ed  O¨Neill) es un pulpo. En realidad, es un «septopulpo» porque perdió en algún sitio un tentáculo y de paso su sentido del humor. Pero Hank es tan competente como sus congéneres de ocho brazos. Hank es un experto en desaparecer gracias a sus técnicas de camuflaje y es el primero en recibir a Dory cuando ésta llega al Instituto de Vida Marina. Pero no os equivoquéis, no quiere hacer amigos. Hank sólo desea una cosa: un billete en un camión de transporte para llegar a un acogedor acuario de Cleveland y disfrutar de una vida tranquila en soledad.

DESTINY (voz de Kaitlin Olson) no nada muy bien que digamos, pero tiene un corazón enorme. De hecho, todo en ella es enorme y con razón, porque las ballenas son los peces más grandes de los mares. Destiny vive en el Instituto de Vida Marina y un día, un pez cirujano azul extrañamente familiar llamado Dory aparece en su piscina. A Destiny le avergüenza su falta de elegancia fruto de su mala vista, pero Dory cree que nada maravillosamente bien. Y Dory está encantada al saber que su amiga tamaño gigante también habla balleno.

BAILEY (voz de Ty  Burrel)   es una ballena beluga que vive en el Instituto de Vida Marina y está convencido que su sonar biológico está estropeado. La buena noticia -o la mala, dependiendo a quien preguntemos- es que los doctores del MLI no encuentran ninguna anomalía. La afición de Bailey por el drama sigue fastidiando a sus vecinos: El tiburón ballena Destiny no consigue que le haga caso por mucho que lo intenta. Puede que escuche a su nueva amiga Dory que tiene un montón de ideas estrafalarias.

JENNY (voz de Diane Kaeton)   y CHARLIE (voz de Eugene Levy)   harían cualquier cosa por Dory, su única hija. La animan, la protegen e intentan darle las armas que necesitará para navegar por el mundo con una memoria defectuosa. Jenny puede parecer un poco frívola pero es una madre protectora y un buen ejemplo para su hija. A Charlie le encanta bromear pero para él lo más importante es enseñar a Dory a sobrevivir a pesar de sus problemas de memoria.

FLUKE (voz deIdris Elba)   y RUDDER (voz de Dominic West)  son una pareja de perezosos leones marinos que recogieron en el Instituto de Vida Marina. Marlin y Nemo se los encuentran roncando al sol en una roca muy solicitada justo a la entrada del centro. Estos leones marinos disfrutan al máximo de su tiempo libre y no les gusta que les molesten durante la siesta… pero es peor oír sus ladridos a que te muerdan.

SR. RAY (voz de Bob Peterson) es el profesor cantarín del arrecife. Se toma muy en serio enseñar a Nemo a y sus compañeros submarinos. A nadie le gusta más la clase del Sr. Ray que a Dory. Aunque no sirva de mucho, le encanta hacer de ayudante del profesor durante las interesantes excursiones que hacen con él.

BECKY (voz de Torbin Bullock) es una gavia muy original que siente debilidad por Marlin. Aunque inspira poca confianza, sobre todo en cierto pez payaso escéptico, es más lista de lo que parece.

CRUSH (voz de Andrew Stanton) y su SQUIRT (voz de Bennett Dammann) son las tortugas más guay del mar. Siempre están dispuestas a echar una mano, o más bien una aleta, a un pez en apuros. Llevar más de cien años cursando los mares tiene sus ventajas.

LAS NUTRIAS son una auténtica monada. ¿Quién puede resistirse a sus tiernas y peludas caritas?.

Fuente: http://www.lahiguera.net/cinemania/pelicula/7251/sinopsis.php

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Estados Unidos: One Of The Nation’s Poorest Districts Has Found A Way To Help Immigrant Students

Noticias

América del Norte/Estados Unidos/02 de Julio de 2016/Autora: Tara García Mathewson/Fuente: Huffingtonpost

RESUMEN: La población de Bhután ha crecido hasta convertirse en un grupo floreciente, muy unido de cerca de 3.000 personas. Son parte de una población de refugiados sustancial desde el sur de Asia, África y Oriente Medio, que ha transformado la ciudad y sus escuelas. Los estudiantes en el Distrito Escolar de Syracuse hablan más de 70 idiomas diferentes y cuatro de los más comunes entre ellos son de Nepal, Karen, Somalia, y árabe. En 2010, para servir mejor a esta población, el Distrito Escolar de Syracuse creó una nueva posición – los trabajadores de nacionalidad – para servir como un puente entre las nuevas comunidades de inmigrantes y las escuelas. Dahal es uno de ellos, y una gran parte de su trabajo es la interpretación. Él ayuda a los padres inmigrantes comunican con los maestros de habla Inglés y los funcionarios del distrito y asegura que los padres tienen la oportunidad de ser escuchados.

SYRACUSE, N.Y. — When Dadhi Dahal first came to the United States in early 2009, the Bhutanese population in Syracuse, New York was quite small — the first refugees from Bhutan, fleeing ethnic cleansing policies in their home country, arrived in 2008, after they had spent years in refugee camps in Nepal.

Fast forward eight years. The Bhutanese population has grown into a flourishing, tightly knit group of about 3,000 people. They are part of a substantial refugee population from South Asia, Africa and the Middle East that has transformed the city and its schools. Students in the Syracuse City School District speak more than 70 different languages and four of the most common among them are Nepali, Karen, Somali, and Arabic.

In 2010, to better serve this population, the Syracuse City school District created a new position — nationality workers — to serve as a bridge between new immigrant communities and the schools. Dahal is one of them, and a big part of his job is interpretation. He helps immigrant parents communicate with English-speaking teachers and district officials and ensures that parents have an opportunity to be heard.

The district, one of the poorest in the country, works hard to maintain open channels of communication with parents — because it’s important to student success, and because it’s the law. A failure to communicate effectively with immigrant parents is a violation of their civil rights, considered discrimination based on national origin, which is prohibited by the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Without language services, non-English-speaking parents are considered to be blocked from equal access to school information and resources.

As refugees spread out across the U.S., settling in the Southeast, Midwest, and many rural areas that, before, were fairly insulated from large immigrant populations, schools are being forced to adapt to a new reality. Syracuse is one of the more proactive districts when it comes to providing language access. While it struggles, at times, to meet its obligations, districts in other cities and states have fared worse. Dozens have been investigated by the Office of Civil Rights or the Department of Justice in recent years following complaints that they did not provide interpreters or translated materials to parents who needed them. These schools are in Yuma, Arizona; New Orleans, Louisiana; Richmond, Virginia; Detroit, Michigan; Modesto, California; and Seattle, Washington, among others.

“Providing an interpreter is a fundamental responsibility of a district when they have children or parents who do not speak English,” said Roger Rosenthal, executive director of the Migrant Legal Action Program in Washington, D.C.

Rosenthal has been advocating on behalf of immigrant families for more than 30 years, and he has been glad to see the Obama administration turn up the pressure on districts that don’t meet their obligations to them.

The legal rationale for language access requirements has existed for decades, but the Obama administration has been more aggressive than others in holding schools accountable. While the Civil Rights Act doesn’t specifically require schools to offer interpretation and translation services to parents — or any special supports for their non-English-speaking children – it bars discrimination based on national origin in any program or activity receiving federal dollars. The courts have consistently relied on this rationale to require schools to provide these services, and a “Dear Colleague” letter from the Education Department’s Office of Civil Rights and the Department of Justice in 2015 went into explicit detail about what schools have to do to communicate with immigrant parents.

    Providing an interpreter is a fundamental responsibility of a district when they have children or parents who do not speak English. Roger Rosenthal, executive director of the Migrant Legal Action Program

The letter says that schools must have a process in place to identify parents who need language assistance and assign the resources to provide it. They must ensure interpreters and translators are trained in their roles and understand the ethics and confidentiality requirements involved. And their services must be offered for free by competent staff members or contracted individuals.

Fuente: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/syracuse-schools-translator_us_5776b7cae4b04164640fe39b

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EEUU: After Orlando: Two, Three, Many Stonewalls

Noticias

América del Norte / Estados Unidos / 03 de julio de 2016 / Por: Left Voice

 

In the month of gay Pride, a homophobe named Omar Mateen walked into the Pulse Night Club in Orlando and committed the deadliest mass shooting in US history. It was an attack against overwhelmingly Black and Latino LGBT people, but the media and bourgeois politicians insist on painting this attack as one of “radical Islam” against the American people.

Tatiana Cozzarelli

“You know all our lives they’ve told us the way we are isn’t right. Well this (bar) is our home. We’re family… So tonight we’re going to celebrate the way we are. It’s not only OK, it’s beautiful”

Stone Butch Blues, Leslie Feinberg

—

To understand the massacre at Pulse, the LGBT club in Orlando, we must first understand what clubs mean to the LGBT community. For those of us who do not find a home with our families due to homophobia and transphobia, those of us who cannot feel safe in the streets, the club is our home. A place to feel safe, to feel sexy, to feel free.

The club was the birth of our movement; the place where we stood up to the homophobic and transphobic cops who incarcerated and raped us. The Stonewall riots, which began at the Stonewall bar, led by queer and trans people of color, marked the birth of the LGBT rights movement- a movement against police violence and against homophobia and transphobia.

For LGBT Latinxs, finding a home is even harder in a society that is racist, homophobic and transphobic. How can one feel at home when the countries our families come from are dominated by the Catholic church? A church which convinces our families that we are sick and that loving us means rejecting who we are and who we love. How can we feel at home at gay clubs with white people who treat us as exotic rarities? How can we feel at home in an American society which deports our brothers and sisters, in which a Presidential candidate calls us rapists and criminals? How can we feel at home when LGBT Black and Latino people face so much employment discrimination with high rates of joblessness and precarious, low wage employment? Pulse was having a Latino night- a night that brought Latino queers out for a time to celebrate, to feel at home, to dance to the rhythms that we heard in our homes growing up in the company of other queers.

That night of celebration was cut short in the most horrifying way; there are no words for the horror of the massacre in that club. There are no words for the attack on every LGBT person that day.

The shooter’s name was Omar Mateen, a New York-born 29-year old person of Afghan descent who worked as a security guard for the company G4S since 2007. According to FBI officers, Mateen called 911 and claimed allegiance to ISIS. Omar Mateen, who was openly homophobic and had a history of domestic violence, chose Pulse, a Gay Night Club to perpetuate the hate crime. There he shot to death 50 people, severely wounding 53 more. These are facts that point to a clear anti-LGBT motive behind the attack.

The media has struggled to paint this as a terrorist act against American citizens, which will lead to policies and politics like those in the aftermath of 9-11. Trump has used this incident to reiterate his unacceptable Islamophobic policy of banning Muslim people from entering the United States. Aside from stirring up fear and racism in Americans, this proposal serves no purpose in curbing mass shootings, which are nearly always perpetrated by white men and not foreign born “terrorists.” The shooter was born and raised in the United States, a product of the United States’ own virulent militarism, patriarchy and homophobia.

When a Muslim person does perpetrate an act of violence on US soil, the overwhelming majority of Muslims become the victims of violence – verbal attacks at best and physical violence at worst. From individual racists who beat up people who look like they might be Muslim to FBI investigations of Muslims, Islamophobia kills. This horrible act of hatred cannot become an excuse to further oppress Muslim and middle eastern people. It cannot be an excuse for further surveillance and detainment of Muslims, as we saw in the aftermath of 9-11.

We can and we should respond with rage against this horrible act of violence. But that rage cannot be directed at another group that is oppressed by the same government and the same right wing oppressors of LGBT people. We must transform the rage into organization and fight against homophobia, transphobia, racism and the institutions that perpetuate these.

We must fight against the lawmakers who voted against trans people using the restroom because of “public safety” concerns. We can have hate and we can have rage at this policy and the lawmakers who voted for it. We must hate those religious leaders who use their pulpit to preach bigotry, convincing followers that we are unnatural, that we are sick and going to hell. We must hate Trump and his racist rhetoric. We must hate the two-faced hypocrisy of the Democrats who deport our families and our friends, who bomb and murder abroad.

We should also hate all those who stand in the way of refugees entering the country- often Muslim refugees fleeing violence created by ISIS. ISIS – a product of the brutal and unrelenting devastation unleashed by imperialism against the Middle East. We should hate those who leave refugees to drown in the ocean or rot in camps while waiting to find a home. These refugees are denied entry into the US by the same people who wish to deny LGBT people the right to marry, or even to pee in public bathrooms. The same people who deny entry to Latino immigrants.

Our lives matter only in this moment- to fulfill a right wing political agenda to demonize Muslims. Queer lives don’t matter when we are deported or killed by the police. Our lives do not matter when LGBT people make up 40% of homeless youth youth due to the homophobia that pushes us out of our homes.

Obama has called this a terrorist act against American citizens. It’s a cruel joke that when it is politically expedient, Latinos suddenly become political citizens. To the police, to the government, to random racists we will never be Americans, regardless of our citizenship status. Obama is careful not to say that Latinos are in the US for our jobs, lest the anger the Latino voting bloc who sees the Democrats as the “lesser evil.” Yet he has deported more immigrants than any other president in history- deporting many undocumented immigrants seeking refuge from violence in their home countries-violence that is the product of an imperialist foreign policy endorsed and implemented by Democrats and Republicans alike.

The hypocrisy of Obama’s speeches on violence is clear when we examine his foreign policy and the overwhelming number of civilian casualties caused by the drone war. The Republicans and Democrats are united behind this foreign policy of mass killings in the Middle East. They stand on their moral pulpit from atop a mass grave dug by decades of imperialist devastation- from the drones of today to the sanctions of the 90’s, to the proxy wars and coups of the Cold War.

While Obama speaks out in favor of LGBT people on US soil, he hands out millions of dollars in aid to countries such as Saudi Arabia where the punishment for being LGBT is death.

At home, LGBT people have limited recognition and protection if they are citizens. Abroad, their dreams, their bodies, their lives are sacrificed on the mangled alter of US strategic interests.

Even in the US, the state maintains homophobic policies like the FDA policy ban on men who have sex with men from donating blood. There are 53 LGBT people in the hospital in need of blood while LGBT men are banned from donating due to this explicitly homophobic policy. In a wrenching moment of brutal violence against LGBT people, the state which claims to protect us bans even such a basic act of solidarity as giving blood.

2015 was the deadliest year for trans women in the US, and 2016 began with several killings of trans women in one month- overwhelmingly Black trans women. Yet there were no actions taken to address or curb this wave of violence. LGBT people are dying, and our deaths are not reported in the news; they are not mourned or even noticed by politicians. To the government, the lives of LGBT people, especially LGBT people of color, have never mattered.

In the face of this tragedy, some will call for prayers. Some will call for love. Some will call for peace. I call for us to organize with the spirit of Stonewall- demanding that not one more of us be killed and recognizing that our problems are not individual, but rather perpetuated by the US government- Republicans and Democrats. I will call for us to organize using our rage to destroy a system that does not care whether we live or die, whether we live free or in prison.

 

Originally published: http://www.leftvoice.org/After-Orlando-Two-Three-Many-Stonewalls

 

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EEUU: Jack Daniels’ Secret History Shows the Recipe Was Actually Developed by a Black Slave

Noticias

América del Norte/EEUU/Julio 2016/Autor: Shaun King/ Fuente: New York Daily News

Resumen:  Ninguna historia es más verdadera y profundamente americana que la historia del whisky Jack Daniels y la familia Brown. George Garvin de Brown aprendió a hacer whisky de un hombre negro llamado Nearis Green. Nearis, un destilador altamente cualificados, un estadounidense esclavo que era propiedad de Dan Call.

Listed at #20 on the Forbes list of America’s wealthiest families is the Brown family. Their combined net worth is $12.3 billion. Their most known product?

Jack Daniels whiskey. It’s now sold in over 170 countries and is a complete cash cow — racking up billions of dollars a year for investors and for the Brown family itself. George Garvin Brown, their great-great-great-grandfather, founded the company exactly 150 years ago this year. Jack Daniels is now the best selling whiskey in the world. Its iconic black logo and angular bottles are instantly recognizable.

They’ve kept it in the family. George Garvin Brown IV is now the chairman of the company board. He’s filthy rich, received degrees all over the world, fancies ski vacations, and considers himself a «wine geek.»

No story is more truly and deeply American than the story of Jack Daniels whiskey and the Brown family. By truly and deeply I mean that the company, a century-and-a-half after its founding, is now publicly admitting that the down-home story they’ve always told about George Garvin Brown learning how to make the whiskey from an old white preacher named Dan Call is a lie.

George Garvin Brown learned to make whiskey from a black man named Nearis Green. Nearis Green, a highly skilled distiller, was also an enslaved American owned by Dan Call.

So, please allow me to reframe the story of Jack Daniels whiskey a bit.

A white Christian preacher in Lynchburg, Tenn., «owned» people. One of those people he «owned» was Nearis Green, a black man who was a skilled distiller of liquor. That black man, a slave, taught George Garvin Brown how to make whiskey. The recipe and methods were deeply African.

For 150 years the story of how this whiskey came to be, who taught George Garvin Brown how to make it, and why it succeeded, though, was as white and Eurocentric as a story could be.

Even as late as last year, Jack Daniels was distributing carefully crafted infographics on the founding of the company — that never mention a single word about Nearis Green. Hundreds of thousands of people per year have been touring the Jack Daniels museum without a single mention of Nearis Green — not because his contribution was only recently discovered, but because the reality and truth of the company is far more complex and messy than they’ve ever really wanted to admit.

That, ladies and gentlemen, is the United States of America in a nutshell. How this country was founded, how wealth was made, and how it all has been maintained for centuries is not beautiful, but ugly and often malicious.

Cultural appropriation is not just white women wearing cornrows or Bantu knots and pretending like they came up with it. It is also taking what an enslaved black man taught you, building a multi-billion dollar corporation off of it, then erasing his entire contribution from the history books as if he never existed.

Nearis Green was a highly skilled genius, but all of the benefits from such a fact have been reaped by generation after generation of another man’s family.

Now, think of the story of Nearis Green and read this quote from the recent speech Jesse Williams gave at the BET Awards:

«We’ve been floating this country on credit for centuries, yo. And we’re done watching and waiting while this invention called whiteness uses and abuses us, burying black people out of sight and out of mind while extracting our culture, our dollars, our entertainment like oil, black gold. Ghettoizing and demeaning our creations, then stealing them, gentrifying our genius, and then trying us on like costumes before discarding our bodies like rinds of strange fruit. The thing is though, that just because we’re magic doesn’t mean we’re not real.»

Cultural appropriation is not cultural appreciation. It’s theft. It’s plagiarism. It’s revisionist history.

Fuente de la noticia: http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/37771-jack-daniels-secret-history-shows-the-recipe-was-actually-developed-by-a-black-slave

Fuente de la imagen: http://readersupportednews.org/images/stories/article_imgs21/021677-jd-070116.jpg

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EE.UU.: El Supremo entrega derrota en inmigración, triunfo parcial en acción afirmativa

Noticias

LasAmericasNews/02 de julio de 2016/Por: Paula T. Castellanno/Washington DC.-

El fallo no pasó, alerta para los que aplicaron para este proceso cuidarse del fraude no hay nada que aplicar, nohay cuota que pagar por la Acción Ejecutiva. Cuidate de no cometer ninguna felonia para evitar ser deportado ya que no aplica.

La Corte Suprema de Estados Unidos confirmó el jueves que la Universidad de Texas puede usar la raza como un factor en su proceso de admisión, pero tras un voto 4-4, las órdenes ejecutivas del presidente Obama respecto a la inmigración y los programas DACA/DAPA permanecerán bloqueadas.

“El anuncio de la Corte Suprema abre la puerta para la separación forzada de madres y niños, padres y niños, y padres y madres. Esta decisión tendrá consecuencias sociales radicales como las familias están devastadas a causa de la deportación,” afirmó Sherrie Kossoudji, profesora asociada de trabajo social y economía en la Universidad de Michigan.

Ella ha escrito numerosos artículos sobre la situación jurídica de los trabajadores inmigrantes en los EE.UU. y los incentivos para cruzar la frontera ilegalmente.

Jason De León, un profesor asistente de antropología que por años ha estudiado la migración de México a Estados Unidos en el borde cerca del desierto de Sonora, añadió que la decisión constituye “un revés de los pequeños pasos que Obama ha tomado hacia una reforma de inmigración racional y pone de relieve la negativa de los republicanos actuales para entretener las medidas que reflejan algunas de las esgrimidas por la administración Reagan a mediados de la década de 1980 para hacer frente a este problema recurrente.

“Por otra parte, se trata de un retroceso en términos de construcción de confianza política en la comunidad latina en los Estados Unidos y es un fracaso más de la derecha de reconocer que la inmigración es un tema clave que, en el largo plazo, no puede ser tratado eficazmente con el uso de retórica xenófoba o bloqueos simplistas de índole legal o física”.

Richard Primus, un experto en derecho, e historia y teoría de la Constitución de Estados Unidos es el ex secretario de la jueza Ruth Bader Ginsburg de la Corte Suprema y comentó el fallo 4-3 respecto a la acción afirmativa del caso Fisher v. Universidad de Texas en Austin.

“Fisher es el triunfo de la perspectiva de la jueza Ginsburg sobre la acción afirmativa”, dijo. “La toma de decisiones conscientes de la raza es ahora claramente aceptable.”

Pero Richard Friedman, profesor de derecho en la Universidad de Michigan, es un experto en evidencia e historia del Tribunal Supremo de Estados Unidos, dijo que hay que ver la decisión con cuidado.

“La opinión del juez Kennedy por una escasa mayoría de una Corte de siete miembros, parece diseñada para resolver este litigio particular, el cual tiene una historia única, y decidir lo menos posible”, dijo. “Incluso la Universidad de Texas no puede estar segura de que su programa sobrevivirá otro desafío en varios años.”

“Quizás uno de los aspectos más notables de la opinión es que el juez Kennedy adopta (la idea) de los beneficios de los procesos de admisión integrales que tienen en cuenta la raza y sugiere que planes como el ‘10% de Texas’ son constitucionalmente vulnerables.”

Tomado de: http://lasamericasnews.com/index.php/es/noticias-es/inmigracion/8337-el-supremo-entrega-derrota-en-inmigracion-triunfo-parcial-en-accion-afirmativa

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Estados Unidos: The real problem isn’t teachers

Noticias

América del Norte/Estados Unidos/Julio de 2016/ washingtonpost

RESUMEN: En abril, un tribunal de apelaciones en California confirmó las leyes del estado con respecto a la tenencia de maestros y despidos por el vuelco de la decisión anterior por un tribunal inferior para la revisión de los estatutos de protección de trabajo en vista del caso muy publicitado “Vergara v. California”. Los demandantes en Vergara eran estudiantes de la escuela públicas respaldadas por un grupo de reforma de la defensa escuela llamada “estudiantes materia” y afirmaron que las leyes de protección laboral para los maestros son la razón por la que los niños pobres y de minorías terminan con los maestros más ineficaces. La corte encontró que las pruebas no demuestran que los estatutos impugnados causan inevitablemente impacto en los demandantes afirmó. Activistas de la reforma y antisindicales han prometido continuar la lucha legal contra las leyes de protección del trabajo docente que dicen ser contra los estudiantes. Tales retos legales son sólo una parte de lo que muchos profesores consideran que es una guerra en su profesión por los reformadores escolares y los políticos que han tratado de «interrumpir» la educación pública con los sistemas y programas que los educadores piensan robarles su profesionalismo y generar daños al proceso de aprendizaje.

Por: Valerie Strauss
In April, an appeals court in California upheld the state’s laws regarding teacher tenure, dismissal and layoffs by overturning a lower court’s earlier decision to scrap job-protection statutes in the highly publicized Vergara v. California case. The plaintiffs in Vergara were public school students backed by a school reform advocacy group called Students Matter, and they claimed that job protection laws for teachers are the reason that poor and minority children wind up with more ineffective teachers who are hard to fire. The court found that “the evidence did not show that the challenged statutes inevitably cause” the impact the plaintiffs claimed. Reform and anti-union activists have promised to continue the legal fight against teacher job protection laws that they say work against students.
[California appeals court upholds teacher tenure, a major victory for unions]
Such legal challenges are just part of what many teachers consider to be a war on their profession by school reformers and policymakers who have attempted to “disrupt” public education with systems and programs that educators think rob them of their professionalism and hurt the learning process.
Teachers unions again made national news this week when the Supreme Court denied a petition from plaintiffs in Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association to rehear the case. A group of California teachers had challenged a law that they said violates their First Amendment rights by requiring them to pay dues to the state’s teachers union. California is one of about 20 states in which public employees are required to either join the union or pay a fee to support the union’s collective-bargaining activities — which support all workers, whether or not they are union members.
With this decision, it seems to be a good time to look again at how teachers are faring. Here’s a post about how and why teachers have become scapegoats for problems in public education and what should be done to change the dynamic. It was written by Alexander W. Wiseman, associate professor and director of the Comparative and International Education (CIE) program at Lehigh University’s College of Education. He has more than 20 years of professional experience working with government education departments, university-based teacher education programs, community-based professional development for teachers and as a classroom teacher in both the United States and East Asia.

By Alexander W. Wiseman
Recent U.S. education reform efforts — such as the Vergara vs. California lawsuit filed on behalf of nine students and similar suits in Minnesota and New York — point to teacher job protections negotiated by unions as a root cause of a troubling reality: unequal access to high-quality education. But this is at the least a distraction and at the most a purposeful misdirection of attention from the real problem.
Critics argue that the rules governing the hiring and firing of teachers, such as tenure, have the unintended consequence of burdening the most economically disadvantaged schools with the least effective or prepared teachers, thereby providing a sub-par education to the very students who need public education the most.
It does not take an expert to spot the absurdity of blaming the unequal distribution of highly effective teachers for the fundamental inequalities that pervade American society. Unequal access — to education, to jobs, to bathrooms, for goodness sake — because of one’s race, gender, sexual orientation, economic status, geography or nationality pervades our society. The damage inflicted on our young people as a result of these inequities vastly outweighs the ill effects of a handful of bad teachers.
Teachers are such easy scapegoats. Having worked in and with education systems in the United States, Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, South Africa, and Germany, I can confidently declare teacher shaming to be a worldwide phenomenon. In this country, myths depicting teachers as either lazy clock-punchers or rousing saviors — chronicled recently in a New York Times article, “Why teachers on TV have to be either incompetent or inspiring” — only serve to perpetuate the idea that if a kid fails to learn, his teacher is wholly to blame.
The high-profile lawsuits in California, Minnesota and New York have raised two important questions:
One, how much responsibility for unequal education can be reasonably laid at the feet of public schools and teachers — and how much belongs to the broader community for failing to dismantle persistent and durable barriers to equal opportunity such as poverty, systemic racism and income inequality?
Two, is the way we currently measure teacher quality helpful, or even accurate?
Given pursuits such as the Vergara trial, it seems clear that the balance between a school’s responsibility and the community’s is currently too heavily weighted in the school’s direction. When it comes to addressing the challenges we face as a nation, access to high quality education must be a part of the solution — but it cannot be the whole package.
For example, access to a good education is not going to make up for the fact that mom and dad lack jobs or that their full-time jobs do not pay enough to keep the family clothed, housed, healthy, and fed. The highest-quality teachers in the world do not have the power to lift an individual student out of poverty if the country’s system of wealth distribution is rigged against her. Teachers and public schools are not equipped to end the systemic racism that underlies the fact that five times more young black men are shot dead by U.S. police than young white men and that one in three black men can expect to go to prison in their lifetime. There are some problems in the community that cannot be surmounted by education alone, yet education and teachers are persistently portrayed as a panacea for all of society’s ills.
Collectively, we are failing to accurately measure teacher quality and, thus, failing to help teachers succeed. The current discourse on teacher quality focuses disproportionately on teachers’ influence on students’ test scores. Test scores are only one piece of the larger picture of teacher and student success. Positive changes in a student’s attitude toward a subject, as well as increased confidence, is linked with improved academic success and must be included in any assessment of teaching quality.
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Context also plays an important role in a teacher’s craft and is rarely considered. What are teachers doing in the classroom? How are they teaching? Are they simply babysitting or are they helping their students to engage the curriculum? And, are they modifying it for the students depending on their needs?
In addition, a teacher’s background — socio-economic status, gender, ethnicity, race, level of education, whether they are teaching in the field in which they are trained — as well as the backgrounds of his or her students come into play. Incorporating some of these factors into teacher evaluations would not only allow for a more complete assessment of a teacher’s quality than test scores alone, it would also provide a professional development road map by which to help teachers training and improvement.
If we want highly effective teachers in every classroom, we must re-balance the scales, admit that teachers and schools can bear only so much of the responsibility for unequal access to education, and accept that some of the fault is in our collective failure to provide equal opportunity.
For U.S. education to live up to its promise as “the greater equalizer,” we must abolish outdated ideas that teachers are either incompetent or Jaime Escalante. Developing an evaluation system focused on helping teachers succeed is one way to start.
Fuente: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2016/06/30/the-real-problem-isnt-teachers/

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Estados Unidos: Is it time to eliminate tenure for professors?

Noticias

América del Norte/Estado Unidos/julio de 2016/The Conversatión

Resumen: La Universidad Estatal de Florida descartó recientemente la tenencia para la entrada de nuevos profesores para la facultad. Los Nuevos profesores de esta universidad pública serán contratados sobre la base de contratos anuales que la escuela puede negarse a renovar en cualquier momento

The State College of Florida recently scrapped tenure for incoming faculty. New professors at this public university will be hired on the basis of annual contracts that the school can decline to renew at any time.
The decision has been highly controversial. But this is not the first time tenure has come under attack. In 2015, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker called for a reevaluation of state laws on tenure and shared governance. As of March 2016, a new policy at the University of Wisconsin has made faculty vulnerable to lay offs.
The tenure system provides lifetime guarantees of employment for faculty members. The purpose is to protect academic freedom – a fundamental value in higher education that allows scholars to explore controversial topics in their research and teaching without fear of being fired.
It also ensures that faculty can voice their opinions with university administration and ensure that academic values are protected, particularly from the increasingly corporate ideals invading higher education institutions.
Our research on the changing profile of university faculty shows that while the university enterprise has transformed dramatically in the last hundred years, the tenure employment model remains largely unchanged. So, has the tenure model become outdated? And if so, is it time to eliminate it altogether?
Growth of adjunct faculty
The demographic of higher education faculty has changed a lot in recent years. To start with, there are very few tenured faculty members left within higher education.
Tenure-track refers to that class of professors who are hired specifically to pursue tenure, based largely on their potential for producing research. Only 30 percent of faculty are now on the tenure-track, while 70 percent of faculty are “contingent” . Contingent faculty are often referred to as “adjuncts” or “non-tenure track faculty.” They are usually hired with the understanding that tenure is not in their future at that particular university, and they teach either part-time or full-time on a semester-to-semester or yearly basis.
Most contingent faculty have short-term contracts which may or may not be renewed at the end of the contract term. As of 2010, 52 percent of contingent faculty had semester-to-semester part-time appointments and 18 percent had full-time yearly appointments.
Researchers suggest that the increase in contingent appointments is a result of the tenure model’s failure to adapt with the significant and rapid changes that have occurred in colleges and universities over the last 50 years.
The most significant of these changes is the rise of teaching-focused institutions, the largest growth being in the community college, technical college and urban institutions that have a primary mission to educate students with little or no research mission. Between 1952 and 1972 the number of community colleges in the United States nearly doubled, from 594 to 1141, to accommodate a large increase in student enrollments, leaving four-year institutions to focus on research and development.
Campuses changed, not tenure system
Most commentators have described the growth of contingent faculty as a response to financial pressures in the 1990s.
But our research shows that this growth actually began in the 1970s when market fluctuations caused unexpected growths in college enrollment. Between 1945 and 1975, college enrollment increased in the United States by 500 percent. However, rising costs and a recession in the late 1970’s forced administrators to seek out part-time faculty to work for lower wages in order to accommodate these students. The practice increased dramatically thereafter.
In addition to enrollment changes, government funding for higher education decreased in the late 1980s and ‘90s. The demand for new courses and programs was uncertain, and so campuses needed more flexibility in faculty hiring.
Further, over the last 20 years new technologies have created new learning environments and opportunities to teach online.
Tenure-track faculty incentivized to conduct research were typically not interested in investing time to learn about new teaching technologies. Consequently, a strong demand for online teaching pushed institutions into hiring contingent faculty to fill these roles.
As a result, what we have today is a disparity between the existing incentive structures that reward research-oriented, tenure-track faculty and the increased demand for good teaching.
Why the contingent faculty model hurts
Critics of tenure argue that the tenure model, with its research-based incentives, does little to improve student outcomes. But the same can be said of the new teaching model that relies so heavily on contingent faculty – it is not necessarily designed to support student learning.
Research on contingent faculty employment models illustrates that they are poorly designed and lack many of the support systems needed to foster positive faculty performance.
For example, unlike tenure-track faculty, contingent faculty have little or no involvement in curriculum planning or university governance, little or no access to professional development, mentoring, orientations, evaluation, campus resources or administrative support; and they are often unaware of institutional goals and outcomes.
Furthermore, students have limited access to or interaction with these faculty members, which research suggests is one of the most significant factors impacting student outcomes such as learning, retention and graduation.
Studies have shown that student-faculty interaction provides students with access to resources, mentoring and encouragement, and allows them to better engage with subject material.
Recent research on contingent faculty has also identified some consistent and disturbing trends related to student outcomes that illustrate problems related to new faculty workforce models. These include poor performance and lower graduation rates for students who take more courses with contingent faculty, and lower transfer rates from two-year to four-year institutions.
Using transcripts, faculty employment and institutional data from California’s 107 community colleges, researchers Audrey Jaeger and Kevin Eagan found that for every 10 percent increase in students’ exposure to part-time faculty instruction, they became 2 percent less likely to transfer from two-year to four-year institutions, and 1 percent less likely to graduate.
Additionally, studies of contingent faculties’ instructional practices suggest that they tend to use fewer active learning, student-centered teaching approaches. They are also less engaged with new and culturally-sensitive teaching approaches (strategies encouraging acknowledgment of student differences in a way that promotes equity and respect).
Consequently today, when the pool of Ph.D. students is growing, the number of tenure-track positions available for graduates is shrinking. As a result, a disconnect has evolved between the types and number of Ph.D.s on the job market in search of tenure, and the needs of, and jobs available within, colleges and universities.
Some estimates show that recent graduates have less than a 50 percent chance of obtaining a tenure-track position. Furthermore, it is graduates from the top-ranked quarter of graduate schools who make up more than three quarters of tenure-track faculty in the United States and Canada, specifically in the fields of computer science, business and history.
A new tenure system?
We appear to be at a crossroads. The higher education enterprise has changed, but the traditional tenure model has stayed the same. The truth is that universities need faculty who are dedicated to teaching, but the most persuasive argument in support of tenure – its role in protecting academic freedom– has come to be too narrowly associated with research.
Academic freedom was always meant to extend to the classroom – to allow faculty to teach freely, in line with the search for truth, no matter how controversial the subject matter. Eliminating tenure completely will do little to protect academic values or improve student performance.
Instead, the most promising proposal that has emerged many times over the last 30 years is to rethink the traditional tenure system in a way that would incentivize excellent teaching, and create teaching-intensive tenure-track positions.
Under an incentive system, when considering whether to grant tenure, committees can take into account excellence in teaching, by way of student evaluations, peer review, or teaching awards. For faculty on a teaching-intensive track, tenure decisions would be made based primarily on their teaching, with little or no weight given to research.
Though not every contingent faculty member would be eligible for such positions, these alternative models can change the incentive structures inherent in the academic profession. They may be able to remove the negative stigmas surrounding teaching in the academy and may eliminate the class-based distinctions between research and teaching faculty that have resulted from the traditional tenure model.

Foto: There are fewer tenured faculty in the higher education system. St. Ambrose University, CC BY-NC
Studies show lower graduation rates as a result of the faculty workforce model. Sakeeb Sabakka, CC BY

Fuente:
https://theconversation.com/is-it-time-to-eliminate-tenure-for-professors-59959?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Latest%20from%20The%20Conversation%20for%20June%2028%202016%20-%205130&utm_content=Latest%20from%20The%20Conversation%20for%20June%2028%202016%20-%205130+CID_6225528da3143d2bcbf2ce92bc2cc92c&utm_source=campaign_monitor_us&utm_term=Is%20it%20time%20to%20eliminate%20tenure%20for%20professors

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