Showing posts with label education reform. Show all posts
Showing posts with label education reform. Show all posts

Friday, November 17, 2017

Jeff Bryant: Democrat Ed Reformers BEWARE!

Although the reform campaign has long been marketed as a bipartisan cause, it's increasingly apparent that the better Democrats do at the polls, the worse the education reform agenda does.... Jeff Bryant
Jeff in a must read piece tells a story about Denver ed deform. Ahhh, I remember how our chief deformer in the UFT, one Randi Weingarten, raved about the Denver deforms when they were announced and even played a role.
For decades, Beltway education policy shops run by Democrats and Republicans have united in a "Washington Consensus" on common goals for public schools, including, closing schools based on results of standardized tests, using students' test scores to evaluate teachers, expanding competition from charter schools, and advocating for alternative pathways to the teaching profession such as Teach for America. For those Democrats who've been generally aligned with education policies promoted by Fordham and other Beltway influencers, it may be startling for them to learn that victories for their party at the ballot box could be interpreted as defeats for the very ideas they've long promoted.
Which means people like Corey Booker are dead to us - note how smart Cuomo is to pull away from this stuff a year ago though we will never let him forget it.

If you followed the humiliating defeat of the deformers, some linked to Democrats, in Massachusetts last year -- one of the few victories in that election -- there are stories about them rebranding themselves as reported by Leonie Haimson:
much confusing and/or deceptive rhetoric on that skimpy website, which appears to be a new  organization to battle the increased awareness that the corp reform movement is funded primarily by wealthy Wall St & corporate executives and ed tech billionaires:

https://www.alliesforedequity.org/
Here is Jeff Bryant's piece on deform on the run -- esp Dems.

Tuesday, September 13, 2016

Ed Deform Coming Unhinged

Is ed deform, mistakenly labeled as a real reform movement, coming apart at the seams? The opt-out movement where 220,000 did not take the test in NY State is the most obvious sign. Also the media criticisms of Eva and Success Academy as the press becomes more skeptical of charter claims.

Look at the media coverage on charter scams, testing, the attacks on teachers as the cause of the problems there has been a turning - you can hear it in commentary as many former ed deform supporters have begin to see the light of the failures of those policies.

Now don't get me wrong -- ed deformers are loaded with dough and have bought a chunk of ed coverage -- ie - Chalkbeat and the Campbell Brown phony The 74 ed media as examples, plus the Gates, Walton, hedge funds etc. They claim the anti-ed deform movement is fueled by the teacher unions when we know full well how little the unions have done as they waffle on the fence though Randi and crew have become more bold as the worm turns - always tailing but we'll take what we can get from them.

In just the past few days here are some things to munch on.

Ravitch: Jesse Hagopian: The Black Resistance to Charters and Corporate Reform is Just Beginning

The New Yorker - wonderful piece: Stop Humiliating Teachers

http://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/stop-humiliating-teachers
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The lawsuit just filed on behalf of the receivership schools

http://nycpublicschoolparents.blogspot.com/2016/09/the-lawsuit-just-filed-on-behalf-of.html
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Fred Klonsky: In Chicago, DFER has been run out of town
https://preaprez.wordpress.com/2016/09/12/in-chicago-dfer-has-been-run-out-of-town/
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Washington State Supreme Court: Charter schools are unconstitutional

http://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/education/state-supreme-court-charter-schools-are-unconstitutional/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=article_left_1.1

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The Charter School Movement Is a Vehicle for Fraud and Corruption

http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/news/a48531/california-charter-schools/
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The Fight to Bring Transparency to California’s Charter Schools

http://www.alternet.org/education/fight-bring-transparency-californias-charter-schools

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E.D. Hirsch, Ed Reformer Pivots -rethinking his position on blaming teachershttps://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/education-reform-movements-co-founder-denounces-its-focus-on-teacher-quality/2016/09/11/79da4976-763d-11e6-be4f-3f42f2e5a49e_story.html
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A blistering opinion should shame Connecticut lawmakers, who have failed to address the problem of educational inequality.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/12/opinion/a-holistic-ruling-on-mbroken-schools.html?smprod=nytcore-iphone&smid=nytcore-iphone-share
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Ed deform is racist in nature:

Ed Deform Racist Policies Attack Black Teachers - a Civil Rights Issue for Our Times

http://m.motherjones.com/politics/2016/09/black-teachers-public-schools-education-system-philadelphia

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Charter privateers on the defensive but not giving up on their Orwellian takeover schemes 

 

Thursday, April 7, 2016

Sam Smith on Ed Deform: Education reform was really about urban socio-econmic cleansing

...school test scores represent a symbol that the city is getting the poor under control or out of the way. It was not about educating the city's young but about marketing to the city's newcomers.
What has happened is as if we had tried to reach the moon with space vehicles designed by economists, lawyers and corporate buddies of the president... It has, in the end, a hopeless mush of sleaze, stupidity and statistical static, all having remarkably little to do with real education.... growing evidence that the assault on public education is part of an urban socio-economic cleansing that has long been underway as the upper classes attempt retrieve the cities they surrendered to the poor many decades ago....

 Sam Smith at Undernews wrote this in 2010 and republished it on April 1, 2016.
Today's simple term is "gentrification" but in this piece Sam takes us beyond that narrow term. I'm really impressed he did this piece 6 years ago.
....it was absolutely clear and absolutely unmentionable that the upper classes - both white and black, incidentally - wanted the city back again and were using a plethora of tactics to achieve this goal, especially after our energy consciousness increased and it became apparent that the suburbs were no longer the favored haven, but the ghettos of the future. Furthermore, it was clear that satisfying this goal was behind most of the major new city programs, ranging from the subway to the baseball stadium - only please always call it economic development rather than getting rid of the poor.  
I would not just say the upper classes, especially when it comes to black people - but to the rising black classes out of poverty who have been tempted by the charter offer of banishing the ultra poor. Sam touches on the charter issue:
Public education "reform" fit the plan in some ways. For example, although it was widely claimed that charter schools did not discriminate in their selection of students it was obvious that parents - a central factor in any child's ability to learn - differed drastically between those with enough ambition to apply for a charter school seat and those either indifferent or with too much else on their mind. The charter schools were in this way a subtle part of socio-economic cleansing as they helped to reduce the old public facilities to what were once called "pauper schools." Then there was the carefully crafted schemes for closing "failing" public schools. But there is far more to schools than aggregate test scores. They help define a community, anchor its loose pieces to common ground, and provide a place for children to meet and play in a decent and clean environment.
I saw this in action not long ago at a meeting in Arverne about schools related to the hot new development in Rockaway - Arverne By the Sea - who were promised an elementary charter school but are getting a middle school charter instead. It is a very mixed community and one black parent said it flat out. They don't want their kids to go to the local "project" school and want their own school. I tried to offer her an idea that if they went to the "project" school they would create an activist base of parents to turn that school into a place good for all. She wasn't hearing that idea and maybe I don't blame her. She wanted her charter. And she is getting it - Eva is moving a school into the area.

But as a Rockaway resident when we hear stories about shots being fired on a regular basis out of the projects can we blame them?
Too complicated for my aging brain, so I'll just let Sam Smith address the issue.

http://prorevnews.blogspot.com/2016/04/education-reform-was-really-about-urban.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+prorevfeed+%28UNDERNEWS%29

Education reform was really about urban socio-econmic cleansing

From our overstocked archives


SAM SMITH, 2010

Unanswered in all the noise about "education reform" is why, over the past decade, America's establishment has become so obsessed with controlling public education, a complete reversal of two centuries of American faith in locally controlled schools.

There are answers that the op-eds will give you, such as the need to compete in the global marketplace, but this is pretty weak stuff and not the raw material for major presidential policy under two administrations.

There are answers that can be found in the general shift in government towards data as a worthy substitute, or delaying tactic, for action. As long as you're assessing something you don't actually have to do anything about it.

Then there's the milking of the cash cow of testing. For example, the Washington Post now gets the bulk of its profits from the Kaplan education division, profits bolstered by the paper's constant editorial boosting of the test tyrants. And Neil Bush started a company designed to help students pass the tests of his brother's No Child Left Behind policy.

Certainly there is precedent for this, such as the efforts to privatize Social Security and subsidize health insurance companies, all part of a three decades rip-off of public programs by private industry.

But how, for example, does one explain that this effort has been carried out with such an extraordinary absence of knowledgeable educators or skilled teachers? What has happened is as if we had tried to reach the moon with space vehicles designed by economists, lawyers and corporate buddies of the president.

It has, in the end, a hopeless mush of sleaze, stupidity and statistical static, all having remarkably little to do with real education.

There is, however, an even more disreputable matter lurking in the background that has not been exposed, debated or confronted - namely growing evidence that the assault on public education is part of an urban socio-economic cleansing that has long been underway as the upper classes attempt retrieve the cities they surrendered to the poor many decades ago.

For several decades, I followed this phenomenon as a journalist in my hometown of Washington, DC. It was a topic seldom mentioned in the corporate media and not polite to mention at all in the better parts of town.

In 2006 I wrote, "Part of the socio-economic cleansing of the capital city - still underway - included draconian measures to discourage the minority poor from staying in DC. Some of these were fiscal -- such as a tax break for predominately white first-time homeowners but no breaks for the lower income blacks pushed out by them. But they also included a variety of punitive measures including new restrictions on jury trials, increased lock-ups such as for trivial traffic offenses, stiffer sentencing, soaring marijuana arrests, a halving of the number of court-appointed defense attorneys, increased penalties for pot possession, and the shipping of inmates to distant prisons

And in 2007: "This is a 60% black city undergoing socio-economic cleansing. One suburban county has so many black former DC residents that it is known here as Ward 9. But it's no joke. Here are just a few of things that have happened: Huge budget cuts of which 60% of the burden fell on the poor; closing of four of the city's ten health clinics; slashing the number of public health workers; cutting the budget for libraries, city funded day care centers, welfare benefits, and homeless shelters; creation of a tax-subsidized private "charter" school system; dismantling the city's public university including a massive cut in faculty, destruction of the athletic program and elimination of normal university services; selling the city's public radio station to C-SPAN; transferring prisoners to private gulags hundreds of miles away; a dramatic increase in the number of lock-ups including for traffic stops; and the subjugating of the elected school board to an appointed board of trustee."

There were other signs: the destruction of public housing units, the removal of a homeless shelter from the center city, and even a blockade of a crime- hit black neighborhood - with entry permitted only for approved cause - not unlike apartheid South Africa or the Israelis in the West Bank - about which the liberal gentry class said nothing.

In other words, it was absolutely clear and absolutely unmentionable that the upper classes - both white and black, incidentally - wanted the city back again and were using a plethora of tactics to achieve this goal, especially after our energy consciousness increased and it became apparent that the suburbs were no longer the favored haven, but the ghettos of the future.

Furthermore, it was clear that satisfying this goal was behind most of the major new city programs, ranging from the subway to the baseball stadium - only please always call it economic development rather than getting rid of the poor.

Public education "reform" fit the plan in some ways. For example, although it was widely claimed that charter schools did not discriminate in their selection of students it was obvious that parents - a central factor in any child's ability to learn - differed drastically between those with enough ambition to apply for a charter school seat and those either indifferent or with too much else on their mind. The charter schools were in this way a subtle part of socio-economic cleansing as they helped to reduce the old public facilities to what were once called "pauper schools."

Then there was the carefully crafted schemes for closing "failing" public schools. But there is far more to schools than aggregate test scores. They help define a community, anchor its loose pieces to common ground, and provide a place for children to meet and play in a decent and clean environment.

Describing DC's plans to close eleven schools (mostly in order to build condos), DC Statehood Party activist Chris Otten argued a few years ago, "There are lots of ways we can use our publicly owned properties -- homeless services and shelters, child care, before- and after-school care, services for children with special needs, transitional housing and permanent affordable housing, health care, literacy programs, training for jobs and workforce readiness, senior services, gardening and green spaces, recreation. It's outrageous that Mayor Fenty would rather transfer them to his friends and other well-connected and powerful real estate and development interests."

But Fenty and other mayors were not only willing to get rid of such schools, they were willing to damage community in the process and force young residents to travel far away from their community and its values. It was not only bad educationally cruel it was mean to the communities as a whole.

But these schools were located on suddenly valuable ground and so the government stole from the children and their parents and gave to the developers.

And there was something more at work.

It took the recent DC mayoral election to make me realize that I had been putting too much emphasis on educational considerations in examining what was happening. What I had missed was that the war on schools was not designed to bring the upper classes into the education system but primarily as a a marketing tool to bring the upper classes and corporations back to the cities. The message was, as with crime sweeps, baseball stadiums and the subway. It was now safe, folks, to live here.

In DC, the battle peaked between incumbent mayor Adrian Fenty, who with his school chancellor Michelle Rhee was strongly committed to the Bush-Obama school model, and his opponent and strong critic, Vincent Gray.

Eddie Elfanbeen did a precinct by precinct analysis of the contest. Some 31 precincts gave Fenty 75% or more of the vote while 53 gave him 25% or less. All of the top Fenty precincts were heavily white while all the top Gray precincts were heavily black. But more significant perhaps was that the former were all upscale precincts while the latter were at the lower end of the income scale. .

This year Fenty got 80% of upscale white Ward 3 and 16% of far poorer and black Ward 8.

Now, here's the hooker. Only five percent of the public school system consists of white students. So why did it matter so much? For example, why did heavily gay precincts - with a constituency least likely to ever use the school system - give over 70% of their vote to Fenty?

It seems that it mattered because school test scores represent a symbol that the city is getting the poor under control or out of the way. It was not about educating the city's young but about marketing to the city's newcomers. Another poll, for example, found that Fenty won overwhelmingly the vote of those who had lived in DC less than ten years and Gray those who had lived there longer.

Thus, it was not unlike the crime war phenomena. Back in the nineties I noted that "Between 1985 and 1988, in the wake of the revived drug war, murders in Washington, DC soared from 145 a year to 369. During this period, the city's office of criminal justice planning did an unusually detailed analysis of homicides. The report illustrates [that] it was virtually impossible to be killed in Washington if you were a young white girl living in upscale Georgetown on an early Thursday morning in July. If, on the other hand, you were a young black 20-year-old male living in low-income Anacostia, dealing drugs on a Saturday night in June, your chances of being killed were far greater than the overall statistics would suggest. And if you were not buying or selling drugs at all, your chances of being killed in DC were about the same as in Copenhagen."

But being safe and feeling safe are two different things. And, as with crime, it was important for effective marketing to be seen as keeping the problem population under control.

Of DC, Leigh Dingerson wrote recently:

"There’s nothing remarkably visionary going on in Washington. The model of school reform that’s being implemented here is popping up around the country, heavily promoted by the same network of conservative think tanks and philanthropists like Bill Gates, Eli Broad, and the Walton Family Foundation that has been driving the school reform debate for the past decade. It is reform based on the corporate practices of Wall Street, not on education research or theory. Indications so far are that, on top of the upheaval and distress Rhee leaves in her wake, the persistent racial gaps that plague D.C. student outcomes are only increasing. . . Despite glowing reports from the adoring media, D.C.’s education miracle is a chimera at best. . . "

But that, it turns out, was probably the point: to create a political illusion that would support the city's myth, sell real estate, and attract new residents and businesses. Just as it didn't matter that Washington's Metro was designed in a way that actually increased rather than reduced street traffic, it didn't matter that school reform didn't improve things. It only had to seem to change things.

Meanwhile the real city remained.

In 2008, one in five DC residents was poor, a higher rate than in any year since 1997-98. Since the late 1990s, some 27,000 more DC residents fell into poverty. Thirty-two percent of the District of Columbia's children live in poverty, nearly twice the national average. And in 2008 there were over 52,000 families on the waiting list for affordable housing.
But perhaps most important for the educational system, and discussion about it, is something hardly ever discussed: in the first decade of this century, employment among residents with a high school diploma fell to the lowest level in nearly 30 years. Just 51 percent of DC residents at this education level were working.

Every one in the system - parents, teachers, students - knew this reality and reacted accordingly. This, more than any other factor, defined public education in DC. But few wanted to face it.

After all, the poor don't balance your budget. Cutting their services and shoving them out into new suburban ghettos can. And they certainly don't attract tax paying residents and businesses. So you talk the talk of education reform but walk the walk of socio-economic cleansing. 
 

Tuesday, October 20, 2015

Leo Challenges Eva at AFT/Shanker Institute

It is a good thing when Leo and the AFT take on the Evil Madness so openly in the Shanker Institute report: Student Discipline, Race And Eva Moskowitz’s Success Academy Charter Schools. I'm on the move, heading back to New York, so don't have time to read it all - I'm including it below. I noted this criticism from Leonie:

The continued insistence on the issue of backfilling I think is wrong-headed. Instead we should have data on attrition, which the state refuses to provide. Even if they backfill, does that negate the injustice of kicking out low-achievers? Moreover, if they do start backfilling, that will further disguise how many kids they kick out only to replace them with others. ... Leonie Haimson on Leo Casey's Shanker Institute report on Success Charter Discipline
Leo is Leonie's favorite person in the world as he so often attacks her when she dares to criticize the union's darling partners in crime in the de Blasio admin. When Leonie talks I listen but will take a closer look when I get home later.

Here's an excerpt:
At a recent press conference, Success Academy Charter Schools CEO Eva Moskowitz addressed the issue of student discipline. “It is horrifying,” she told reporters, that critics of her charter schools’ high suspension rates don’t realize “that five-year-olds do some pretty violent things.” Moskowitz then pivoted to her displeasure with student discipline in New York City (NYC) public schools, asserting that disorder and disrespect have become rampant."
Sure - suspending a 5 year old who does terrible things ought to work - work getting the parents to pull their kid and out them in a public school.


http://www.shankerinstitute.org/blog/student-discipline-race-and-eva-moskowitz%E2%80%99s-success-academy-charter-schools


Student Discipline, Race And Eva Moskowitz’s Success Academy Charter Schools



At a recent press conference, Success Academy Charter Schools CEO Eva Moskowitz addressed the issue of student discipline. “It is horrifying,” she told reporters, that critics of her charter schools’ high suspension rates don’t realize “that five-year-olds do some pretty violent things.” Moskowitz then pivoted to her displeasure with student discipline in New York City (NYC) public schools, asserting that disorder and disrespect have become rampant.
This is not the first time Moskowitz has taken aim at the city’s student discipline policies. Last spring, she used the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal to criticize the efforts of Mayor Bill De Blasio and the NYC Department of Education to reform the student code of conduct and schools’ disciplinary procedures. Indeed, caustic commentary on student behavior and public school policy has become something of a trademark for Moskowitz.

The National Move to Reform Student Discipline Practices
To understand why, it is important to provide some context. The New York City public school policies that Moskowitz derides are part of a national reform effort, inspired by a body of research showing that overly punitive disciplinary policies are ineffective and discriminatory. Based on this research evidence, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Psychological Association and School Discipline Consensus Project of the Council of State Governments have all gone on record on the harmful effects of employing such policies. The U.S. Education Department, the U.S. Justice Department, civil rights and civil liberties organizations, consortia of researchers, national foundations, and the Dignity in Schools advocacy coalition have all examined the state of student discipline in America’s schools in light of this research.1

Their findings? Suspensions and expulsions, the most severe forms of school discipline, are being used excessively in American schools, often for such minor infractions such as “talking back” or being out of uniform. Further, these severe punishments are being applied disproportionality to students of color, especially African-American and Latino boys, students with disabilities and LGBT youth.

As a result of these data, the U.S. Education Department and U.S. Justice Department issued guidance to schools, based on their finding that discriminatory uses of suspensions and expulsions were in violation of Title IV and Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Since this guidance came from the federal agencies that are charged with the enforcement of the Civil Rights Act, it added the force of the law to the powerful moral arguments for addressing the problem of discriminatory discipline. School districts and schools, public and charter, took notice. The more progressive minded, such as the new de Blasio administration of the New York City Department of Education, began to reform their disciplinary practices in accord with these regulations. As a consequence, the suspensions and expulsions from New York City’s public schools have been dramatically reduced.
Moskowitz makes no explicit mention of these developments in her attacks on the de Blasio administration, although a careful reading shows that they are a calculated response to them. Instead, with unverifiable anecdotes, cherry-picked statistics, and out-of-context quotations, Moskowitz dismisses New York City’s student discipline reforms as “edu-babble” and “nonsense.”2
In a revealing video interview that accompanied the Wall Street Journal op-ed, editorial board member Mary Kissel launches the conversation by declaring that the “Obama administration wants laxer discipline standards for minorities in public schools.” Moskowitz does not disagree. Under the cover of attacks on the policies and practices of New York City public schools, Moskowitz has delivered a shot across the bow of President Obama, retiring Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and incoming Acting Secretary John King. The message is, if you choose to enforce civil rights law when it comes to discipline in Success Academy charter schools, expect an all-out political war.

The Data on Success Academy Schools
Why would Moskowitz feel the need to lay down a gauntlet in opposition to a president and two secretaries of education who have all been vigorous charter school supporters? For that matter, why take on the entire civil rights community? To answer these questions, I decided to take a look at the data on suspensions from New York City schools, both public and charter. There are three repositories of these data: the Civil Rights Data Collection of the U.S. Education Department; the School Report Cards of the New York State Education Department; and the school discipline data reports of the NYC Department of Education to the City Council, as required by New York City’s Student Safety Act. (The UCLA Civil Rights Project provides a user friendly portal for viewing the federal data and, while the Student Safety Act data is not available on the internet, the New York Civil Liberties Union publishes useful annual Suspension Data Fact Sheets.) With three different repositories of data, one would think that it should be a simple matter to locate accurate information. But the reality is rather different.

Take the data published by the U.S. Education Department: The most recent available dataset is for the school year 2011-12, when the New York City Department of Education was under the administration of Mayor Michael Bloomberg. Bloomberg’s NYC DoE reported suspension rates of 1.7 percent for secondary school students and 0.3 percent for elementary school students, figures which were far below the seven percent suspension rate it had provided under the Student Safety Act.3
But this inconsistency pales next to the data for Moskowitz’s Success Academy Charter Schools: Across all Success Academy schools, just two suspensions were reported to the U.S. Department of Education for 2011-12. During the same year, hundreds of suspensions were reported to the New York State Education Department, for an overall suspension rate of 17 percent.4
The numbers that Success Academy chose to report to the federal government were not only so radically at variance with those reported to the New York State Department of Education, but also so obviously wrong, as to appear contemptuous of the charter networks’ obligations under federal civil rights law.5
To provide the most complete picture possible of what is happening in both the Success Academy schools and regular New York City public schools, it was necessary to gather data from a number of different sources. Let us start with most recent dataset, for the year 2013-14, which was published late last spring as part of the New York State School Report Cards. According to the state data, in 2013-14, Success Academy Charter Schools had a total of 728 suspensions for a suspension rate of 11 percent, while the New York City public schools had a total of 9617 suspensions for a suspension rate of one percent.
We know that the NYC public school data is understated, however, because (just as in the case of its report to the U.S. Education Department cited above) only the most serious suspensions are ever reported to the New York State Education Department. Upon request, the New York City Department of Education supplied the Shanker Institute with the total number of all suspensions for the 2013-14 school year. These data showed 53,504 suspensions; yielding an annual suspension rate of five percent.6
From the standpoint of Success Academy, therefore, the most charitable reading of these numbers is that the charter school network suspended its students at more than double the rate of the New York City public schools, eleven percent to five percent.7
But these numbers are only the beginning of the story. New York charter school management has defended student suspension rates in their schools that are much higher than those of New York City district schools on the grounds that they educate more students with challenges – students living in poverty, students with special needs, and English Language Learners. The New York State Education Department data includes a fairly robust set of student demographics that make it possible to test this claim by comparing the student demographics of Success Academy charter schools and New York City public schools for the 2013-14 school year.8
In fact, on the most important measures, the student demographics of Success Academy schools indicate a lower need student population than are served by New York City public schools as a whole: while 81 percent of New York City public school students are “economically disadvantaged,” 74 percent of Success Academy students fall into that category; while 18 percent of New York City public school students have “learning disabilities,” 14 percent of Success Academy students fall into that category; and while 15 percent of New York City public school students are English language learners, only 5 percent of Success Academy students fall into that category.9
Thus, insofar as one credits the argument that a student population with greater needs will necessarily have more problems with behavior and more student suspensions, Success Academy schools should be suspending fewer – not more – students than the New York City public schools.
Why Age Matters
There is one more key issue of comparability that is often lost in these discussions: the age of students. As students enter into adolescence, misbehaviors generally increase and disciplinary consequences for those misbehaviors (such as suspensions) tend to climb in number. For a true “apples-to-apples” comparison, we should look at data for students in the same age groups. As it happens, during the years discussed here, Success Academy Charter Schools served no high school students and had very few students in middle school – in fact, over 90 percent of their students were in the elementary school grades of K through 5.
To adequately compare suspension rates in Success Academy Charter Schools with rates in the New York City public schools, we requested that the New York City Department of Education provide the Shanker Institute with a breakdown of student suspensions by grade level: In 2013-14, the elementary school grades had 6,634 suspensions, the middle school grades had 18,873 suspensions and the high school grades had 27,997 suspensions. That is, the elementary school grades accounted for nearly half of all New York City public school students (47 percent), but only 12 percent of all suspensions; the middle school grades accounted for 22 percent of all students, but 35 percent of all suspensions; and the high school grades accounted for 31 percent of all students, but 52 percent of all suspensions. In other words, in 2013-14, there was 1 suspension for every 67 students in the elementary school grades of New York City public schools and one suspension for every 11 students in the middle and high school grades. By contrast, in Success Academy Charter Schools, there was one suspension for every nine students in 2013-14, and these students were overwhelmingly concentrated in the elementary school grades – a higher suspension rate than for New York City public middle and high school students. Shockingly, when students of the same ages were compared, Success Academy Charter Schools was suspending students at a rate roughly seven times greater than in the New York City public schools.10
The Matter of Race
What were the race and ethnicity characteristics of Success Academy’s suspended students? Only the Civil Rights Data Collection of the U.S. Department of Education requires that districts and schools report the race and ethnicity of suspended students; but, as previously noted, since Success Academy reported only two of its hundreds of suspensions to the federal government, we have no direct source of information on this matter. We do know, however, that in the 2013-14 school year, seven of the eighteen Success Academy charter schools (Harlem Success I through V, Bed-Stuy Success I and Bronx Success I) accounted for nearly 90 percent of all suspensions, with suspension rates above the average for all Success Academy schools. In each of those schools, the combined share of African-American and Latino students was in the high 90 percent range.
While Success Academy is on the extreme end of the spectrum, the problem of excessive suspensions for African-American and Latino students runs deep across the charter school sector in New York City, as the Advocates for Children’s report, “Civil Rights Suspended,” has documented.
The challenge posed to Success Academy and similar charter schools by the U.S. Department of Justice and U.S. Department of Education’s guidance on student discipline is serious. To be in conformance with civil rights law, these schools will need to make radical reforms to their “no excuses” school culture and practices. Now that Moskowitz has laid down the gauntlet on this issue, many eyes will be on the Obama administration for its response. Changing policies, practices and cultures to make schools into safe and welcoming places that do not resort to the excessive and discriminatory use of suspensions and expulsions is hard, challenging work.
Educators across the country will be watching closely to see if all schools are required to take it on. If the greatest transgressors of federal civil rights law are given a bye for political reasons, it is hard to see how the law can be successfully enforced anywhere. Public scrutiny of the issue is bound to grow in the wake of John Merrow’s powerful PBS News Hour piece on Success Academy’s suspension policy. The Obama administration’s initiative to end excessive and discriminatory suspensions and expulsions will ultimately stand or fall on its willingness to take on those, such as Moskowitz’s Success Academy Charter Schools, who openly refuse to abide by federal civil rights law.
Perhaps the specter of having to make these student discipline reforms was, by itself, sufficient cause for Moskowitz to take on the Obama administration, Duncan, King and the entire civil rights community. But it is not the only issue; Success Academy’s student discipline policies are also intimately tied to its practice of refusing to “backfill” empty student seats. I will take up the issue of “backfilling” in a follow-up post on Success Academy Public Schools.
*****
ENDNOTES
1 See the work of the U.S. Department of Education, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, the Advancement Project, the American Civil Liberties Union, the UCLA Civil Rights Project, Discipline Disparities: A Research to Practice Collaborative, the Atlantic Philanthropies, and the advocacy coalition Dignity in Schools.
2 By way of illustrations, consider the following two examples: First, there is the claim in Moskowitz’s op-ed, repeated in the video interview, that “4 percent of New York City high-school students carry a weapon to school; 2 percent carry a gun.” These statistics do not reflect the actual numbers of students who were found in possession of a weapon in their school – despite the fact that in New York City, the penalty for possession of a weapon in school is a suspension, and thus appears in the suspension data. But it appears that the real numbers were too low to suit Moskowitz’s purposes, since she claims to have obtained her alternative numbers from the NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene epidemiological report, “Firearm Deaths and Injuries in New York City,” a report that incorporates data from the NYC Youth Risk Behavior Survey. A fuller examination of this survey provides a different picture of school safety than Moskowitz portrays. Since 1997, the numbers of New York City high school youth who reported carrying a weapon of any sort have fallen by more than half, and the numbers who reported carrying a gun have been halved. Indeed, the rate of weapon and gun carrying among high school age youth in New York City is well below the national average. Moreover, the numbers of youth carrying weapons are not uniformly spread across the city, but concentrated in neighborhoods of high poverty – the South Bronx, Harlem and Central and Northern Brooklyn: the rates of firearm violence (death and injury) among high school and college age youth in these areas were at least twice the City’s average. Now that Success Academy has begun to open its own high schools, one could employ Moskowitz’s logic in this op-ed to Success Academy charter high schools located in its areas of concentration in the South Bronx, Harlem and Central and Northern Brooklyn, and conclude that 8-10 percent of their students would be carrying a weapon in school. It is a safe bet that when it comes to assessing the safety in her own schools, the CEO of Success Academy will be returning to the statistics of students actually found in possession of a weapon in school that she was so quick to disregard in discussing public high schools.
Second, Moskowitz mocks the use of “restorative practices” in New York City public schools by ridiculing a quote from a website, which has no connection either to New York City schools or to any of the significant forces in the movement to reform student discipline. The NYC Department of Education discipline code includes a description of the restorative practices that should be employed in city schools, explaining how practices such as peer mediation can be used to resolve student conflicts and disputes before they escalate into violence. But Moskowitz ignores this authoritative information.
3 New York City public schools distinguish between “Principal” suspensions, used for less serious misconduct and limited to no more than five days of suspension, and “Superintendent” suspensions, used for more serious misconduct and extending for as long as a year. As the name suggests, it is in the authority of the Principal to issue a Principal suspension, but a Superintendent suspension requires the approval of the Superintendent and a more formal and quasi-legal due process hearing conducted by the NYC Department of Education. Under Bloomberg, the NYC Department of Education appears to have been reporting only Superintendent suspensions, which accounted for only 19 percent of all suspensions. Since the U.S. Education Department category is “out of school suspensions,” which would cover any loss of school days, there would not appear to be a plausible reason for reporting only Superintendent suspensions.
4 There were seven Success Academy charter schools which had been in existence long enough to report data to the U.S Education Department for its 2011-12 report: five Harlem Success Academies and two Bronx Success Academies. There is an anomaly in the corresponding New York State Report Card for Bronx Success Academy 2, which is missing data for attendance and suspensions. I therefore calculated the overall figures for Success Academy using the six schools with data. In the next year of the New York State Report Card, which includes data for all seven of the original Success Academy schools and an additional two new schools, the overall suspension rate rose to 19 percent.
5 In the years of the Bloomberg administration, Moskowitz had a close ally on student discipline and other issues leading the NYC Department of Education. Over the course of the decade ending in 2011-12, suspensions in the Bloomberg-run NYC public schools more than doubled. So long as the disciplinary policies of the New York City public schools were increasingly punitive, Success Academy had cover for its own policies. But, with changes in student discipline policies arising under the de Blasio administration and the new leadership at the NYC Department of Education, the Success Academy’s record has become increasingly vulnerable.
6 For the 2013-14 student registers in New York City public schools, I have used the numbers from the Department of Education’s public portal.
7 In her Wall Street Journal op-ed, Eva Moskowitz states that there is an 11 percent suspension rate in Success Academy charter schools, as opposed to a four percent suspension rate in New York City public schools, but does not provide a source for these numbers.
8 There are two missing data points that, if they had been provided, would make the comparison more complete. While the NYSED demographics do include students with disabilities, it does not distinguish between those students with minimal disabilities and those students who have more serious disabilities. And while the NYSED demographics do include a measure of economic disadvantage which is more sophisticated than the crude free and reduced lunch status measure that is often used as a proxy for poverty, it does not break out homelessness, which is the most severe form of economic disadvantage. 
9 What is particularly striking about the lower levels of need in the Success Academy student population is that their charter schools have been sited in the historically highest need communities of New York City – Harlem, the South Bronx, and Northern and Central Brooklyn – which should have led to higher, not lower, levels of need. These results would give credence to the claims that Success Academy charter schools have been “creaming” these communities, enrolling a disproportionate number of students that have low levels of need.
10 A more precise estimate would be possible if city, state and federal education authorities required all schools and districts to report their suspensions by grade level. This is a needed policy adjustment.

Thursday, March 19, 2009

The Perimeter Exposes the Grand Takeover in Oakland...

...and coming to a poor urban school district near you

Stopping by
The Perimeter Primate, Oakland mom and Ed activist supreme, is like sitting down for a 10 course banquet with one delicious nugget after another. Add a fine wine and it is quite a dining experience. Here are a few chewy morsels.

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I haven’t yet researched who exactly those “private philanthropic funders” might be, but looking at the NLNS Board of Director members list reveals the usual edu-philanthro-manipulate-preneur billionaires and company:

Read it all: The National Scene on a Local Scale
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I had known that, since the state takeover, the school district had been run by Broad-trained people, but the Trib's description wouldn't fit them. It instantly irked me that a group of people – who the editorial would not even name – seemed to be having considerable influence on the direction of Oakland’s public schools. I posted my concern on a local community listserv.

Later that day I received a private response, and two follow-ups, from an Oakland resident who was very involved with the city at the time.

There is a group of Oakland business people led by [A, a wealthy local businessman] who are strong Eli Broad supporters, and charter school supporters and think that the downfall of the school system is the teachers and the unions.... The whole time Randy was talking about his plan to close and reopen all the schools so that teachers have to re-apply for their jobs at lower salaries.

Read it all: Is it Fiction, or Not? Not.

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Dear Perimeter Primate,
What I don't understand about the hatred leveled toward Michelle Rhee, TFA, Broad, the Gates Foundation, etc. is that I really don't think they would be working this hard to destroy schools. Everyone I know who does this work in low-income public schools works like a dog because they want to help kids achieve. The people I know are light years away from "caring less about" public education. They are simply trying to think hard and work hard to fix the system and improve the lives of children."

The PP responds:
"Has anyone else noticed that our nation's schools are only "failing" in districts which the middle class abandoned long ago? Has anyone else noticed that a small set of extraordinarily powerful people, namely the billionaires Gates, Bloomberg, Broad and the Walton family, and a few assorted millionaires, have now gained control of school districts primarily filled with poor kids?"

Read her response in full at Wishing I Was a Fly


Friday, January 9, 2009

F i x i n g t h e S c h o o l s , i n F i v e E a s y S t e p s !


Ah, the wisdom of an experienced teacher. Here is the face of reform that would work from Accountable Talk. I love Step 5. As I commented on AT's post, on the few occasions where all our admins were out, the teachers and secretaries (NEVER UNDERESTIMATE THE ABILITY OF GOOD SCHOOL SECRETARIES TO RUN A SCHOOL) sort of just took over and the place ran better than ever. Ed Notes has always stood for the principle of election of principals.

And make sure to check out AT's great suggestion to throw shoes at pictures of Bloomberg. Maybe start all faculty conferences that way. I bet the supevisors join in - if we haven't fired them yet.

S t e p O n e - - S t o p t h e G i m m i c k s

S t e p T w o - - E n f o r c e D i s c i p l i n e

S t e p T h r e e - - R e d u c e C l a s s S i z e

S t e p F o u r - - A t t r a c t i n g a n d K e e p i n g t h e B e s t T e a c h e r s

S t e p F i v e - - F i r e A l l A d m i n i s t r a t o r s