by John Fensterwald
While insisting that it did nothing wrong, a Central Valley school district has quickly settled a lawsuit filed by several chapters of the American Civil Liberties Union on behalf of a half-dozen parents and teachers who charged that the district had adopted a destructive program for English learners, which the state, in turn, failed to monitor.

ACLU Chief Counsel Mark Rosenbaum said no teachers defended the program.
Mark Rosenbaum, chief counsel of the ACLU of Southern California, vowed Friday that it would be filing similar suits in order to force the state Department of Education to fix flawed programs that other districts offer English learners.
Under the terms of a settlement released last week, Dinuba Unified has agreed to immediately replace the controversial reading program, Second Language Acquisition Development Instruction, or SLADI, to hire two English language learning consultants suggested by the plaintiffs, and to offer after-school and summer interventions for students who had been assigned SLADI. The unorthodox program, which the district first tried in 2007, takes a grammar- and spelling-intensive approach to learning English. It started with first and second graders, who were pulled out of class for 2½ hours daily for the first half of the year to study parts of speech and learn sentence construction. Rosenbaum likened it to teaching swimming by memorizing the chemistry of water. Teachers and parents who sued said that children fell behind their classmates in reading and were denied exposure to literature and vocabulary. The settlement says that the age-appropriate replacement programs will be designed to “to enhance oral language skills, written language skills, comprehension and access to core curriculum, as well as to integrate ELL students to the fullest extent possible.”
Dinuba Unified Supt. Joe Hernandez said the program produced “great results.” Click to enlarge.
Nonetheless, in a YouTube video and press release, Superintendent Joe Hernandez defended SLADI, which he said brought “great results,” and led two of five elementary schools to raise scores enough to escape penalties of Program Improvement status under the No Child Left Behind law. He dismissed the suit as a philosophical disagreement and implied the only reason the district is settling is to escape $1 million in expenses from a protracted legal fight. (The district has agreed to pay plaintiffs’ attorneys $142,000 in fees and costs anyway.)
“People can always fight about philosophy, but we know the real factors in the success of our students are the quality of our teachers and the resources we can devote to them,” Hernandez said. At the same time, he acknowledged that the district already had “formed a teacher-based committee to recommend improvements to its program,” and planned to go before the school board when the lawsuit was filed at the end of May.
According to the lawsuit, however, teachers had expressed clear dissatisfaction with SLADI. In the fall of 2011, the Executive Board of the Dinuba Teachers Assn. sent a statement to the district stating, “Teachers within our association have determined that this program is ineffective” and that “teachers have ethical and moral issues with this program.” A month before the lawsuit was filed, the full Association condemned SLADI as a “backwards model that could prove detrimental” to students and criticized the district for adopting a program that defied accepted research.
Rosenbaum said the district would be hard-pressed to find one teacher who defended the program.
Dinuba is a 6,000-student K-12 district serving the 24,000-population city of the same name located east of Route 99, midway between Fresno and Visalia. More than 90 percent of Dinuba Unified students are Hispanic and about one third are English learners.
Since Dinuba Unified was in Program Improvement as a district, the state had to sign off on the program that the district adopted for English learners. In rubber stamping SLADI, the state was derelict of its oversight responsibilities, the lawsuit said.
“This is a good example of why the state needs to be involved,” said Rosenbaum, accusing the state of an “abject failure to aggressively enforce the State Constitution (with its requirement for equal educational opportunity) and federal mandates.” The rapid out-of-court settlement left the ACLU without a chance to pursue action against the state, for now.
Recognizing that the quality of programs for English learners varies widely and standards for classifying and reintegrating English learners are inconsistent, Sen. Alex Padilla, a Los Angeles Democrat, proposed two bills this year. SB 1108 would require districts and county offices to report the criteria they use for redesignating English learners as proficient in English to the State Department of Education, which would then made recommendations to the Legislature; that bill appears headed toward passage. But SB 1109, which would have established a master plan for English learners – looking at best practices and techniques for instruction, parent involvement, and the long-term learning needs of English learners – died in Senate Appropriations. http://www.edsource.org/today/2012/district-settles-with-aclu-over-progr...

By Peter Bibring, Senior Staff Attorney
Yesterday, a district court judge threw out claims brought by members of Southern California’s Muslim community that the FBI undertook a massive operation to surveil them on the basis of their religion. In tossing these claims from the suit, which was filed by the ACLU of Southern California, the Council on Islamic American Relations (CAIR) and the law firm Hadsell Stormer Richardson & Renick LLP, the court didn’t say that the FBI had not engaged in the alleged surveillance, or that it had indeed complied with the First Amendment. Instead, the court relied on the government’s invocation of the “state secrets” privilege, saying that even trying to determine whether the FBI had violated the Constitution might risk disclosure of information that could harm national security.
From the term “state secrets,” you might think the case involved spies, hush-hush arrangements with foreign governments, or people detained at secret foreign prisons – as some state secrets cases do. But this one involves the FBI’s investigation into law-abiding U.S. citizens and residents in Orange County, California, called “Operation Flex.” In June 2006, FBI agents recruited Craig Monteilh, a man with a file full of felony convictions, to pose as a convert to Islam at one of the largest mosques in the area. The FBI paid Monteilh to spend the next fourteen months meeting as many members of the Muslim community as he could. He made audio recordings of every interaction, as he gathered names, telephone numbers, e-mails, political and religious views, travel plans, and other information on hundreds of individuals in the Muslim community. According to Monteilh’s own sworn statement, he was told to pay special attention to community leaders and those who seemed especially devout.
The absurdity – and illegality – of Operation Flex were well documented this week on the radio show This American Life. When asked if the FBI had particular targets in the Muslim community that they wanted to have investigated, Monteilh said, “No. They said the targets would come to me.” In other words, Operation Flex was a fishing expedition that targeted people because of their religion. But in the end, after Monteilh began incessantly about jihad and violence, members of the community did exactly what you’re supposed to do: they reported him to the FBI. After hundreds of hours of Monteilh’s time and thousands of taxpayer dollars “Operation Flex” resulted in zero criminal convictions. No one was ever even charged with a terrorism offense.
According to the district court, we’ll never be allowed to know whether the FBI violated the Constitution when they authorized Operation Flex because it would require the disclosure of state secrets. Because the state secrets privilege essentially gives the government a blank check to halt a lawsuit in its tracks, it is currently under fire in Congress. “The ongoing argument that the state secrets privilege requires the outright dismissal of a case is a disconcerting trend in the protection of civil liberties for our nation,” said Representative Jerrod Nadler (D-New York), who earlier this summer introduced a bill to limit state secrets in favor of less drastic alternatives. The privilege also has a troubling history. One of the first modern cases to apply the privilege relied on it to dismiss a suit against the government over the crash of a military plane because of the secrets in the accident report. But decades later, the daughter of one of the pilots discovered that the accident report wasn’t secret at all, and described only negligence — human errors that were embarrassing to the government.
U.S. Justice Department attorney Anthony Coppolino argued that revealing who was being investigated, how they were being investigated, and why they were being investigated would reveal the government’s motives and alert the enemy. But it’s far from certain that the case would require disclosing all that information. And if it ever proved necessary, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) provides clear procedures for protecting sensitive information. In a particularly unfortunate twist, because the district court allowed the FISA claims against the individual FBI officers to go forward, it may well end up looking at the same evidence to resolve that claim that it would need to address the claims it threw out.
In our democratic society, it is wrong for the courts to allow the government to avoid defending the legality of its conduct under the Constitution when the rights of hundreds of law-abiding Muslim citizens in Southern California are at stake. We intend to appeal the court’s decision.