WEEKEND QUOTABLES

Cody Hall, Standing Rock camp spokesman

"We're not leaving until we defeat this big black snake."  -- Chicago Tribune

Rahm's spokesman Adam Collins

 “We believe an agreement can be reached since we both agree teachers should get a raise and their pensions should be secured.” -- Tribune's Bill Ruthhart

Bernie Sanders on Clinton's leaked comments

 "What she was saying there is absolutely correct. And that is, you've got millions of young people, many of whom took out loans in order to go to college, hoping to go out and get decent-paying, good jobs. And you know what? They're unable to do that. And yes, they do want a political revolution. They want to transform this society." --  ABC's "This Week."

Judge Steven Teske

“Zero tolerance as a philosophy and approach is contrary to the nature of adolescent cognition,” he told a Senate subcommittee in 2012. For all the arrests, suspensions and expulsions that he had observed, “school safety did not improve,” he said. If anything, “the juvenile crime rate in the community significantly increased.” “These kids lost one of the greatest protective buffers against delinquency — school connectedness." -- New York Times

LeBron James may have just carried Ohio for Clinton

 There’s still a lot of work to be done in Akron, Northeast Ohio, and all across our great country. We need a president who understands our community and will build on the legacy of President Obama. So let’s register to vote, show up to the polls, and vote for Hillary Clinton. -- Business Insider

92,000 arrested in U.S. schools. Chicago leads in filling school-to-jail pipeline.

Rashe France was a 12-year-old seventh-grader in 2012 when he was arrested in Southaven, Miss., charged with disturbing the peace on school property after a minor hallway altercation. His family is concerned the arrest will have repercussions in the future. (STEVE JONES FOR WSJ)

The school-to-jail pipeline is overflowing. Thousands of students, mostly black and Latino, are being arrested in school, many for what are considered minor violations of school discipline codes in white, wealthier schools. The result -- U.S. has the largest prison population in the world and nearly one out of every three American adults now are on the FBI's master criminal database.

Today's WSJ reports:

A generation ago, schoolchildren caught fighting in the corridors, sassing a teacher or skipping class might have ended up in detention. Today, there’s a good chance they will end up in police custody...Over the past 20 years, prompted by changing police tactics and a zero-tolerance attitude toward small crimes, authorities have made more than a quarter of a billion arrests, the Federal Bureau of Investigation estimates. Nearly one out of every three American adults are on file in the FBI’s master criminal database.

 According to the U.S. Education Department’s Office of Civil Rights, 260,000 students were reported, or “referred” in the official language, to law enforcement by schools in 2012, the most-recent available data. The survey also said 92,000 students were subject to school-related arrests. There are no earlier comparable numbers—the Education Department requested the data because it couldn’t find good national research on the topic.

CHICAGO AMONG THE WORST...More so than in other large school districts, Chicago schools are quick to call in police to handle student misbehavior and conflict, according to a Catalyst Chicago analysis of data from the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights for the 2011-2012 school year (the most recent available).  In Chicago, police were called at a rate of nearly 18 cases for every 1,000 students, while New York City’s rate was 8 per 1,000 students and numbers in Los Angeles were 6 per 1,000.

Overall, CPS referred 7,157 students to law enforcement in 2012, of whom 2,418 students were arrested, according to the federal data. As is the case with school discipline in general, black males are disproportionately targeted

Increasingly, issues of classroom management and discipline are being taken out of the hands of educators and turned over to law enforcement. This certainly doesn't bode well for the future of the teaching profession or for our society.

School-to-prison pipeline

Former judge Mark Ciavarella was sentenced to 28 years in federal prison for his involvement in the Kids for Cash scandal;

NEW FILM...Robert May's documentary Kids For Cash, tells the story of the Zero Tolerance scandal that rocked northeast Pennsylvania, and led to the 2011 conviction of former judge Mark Ciavarella for funneling thousands of children into for-profit prisons in exchange for kickbacks. The Nation's Stuart Klawans reviews it here.

MARCH 13th PRESS BRIEFING...A special press briefing for media around the country to discuss some ground-breaking work regarding the "school-to-prison pipeline" and inequality in school discipline.

For the past three years, a Collaborative of 26 national experts has been quietly working on a massive review of recent research that challenges virtually every notion behind the frequent use of disciplinary policies that remove students from the classroom. Such policies produce huge disparities in the treatment of students by race, gender, disability and sexual orientation and do nothing to improve educational outcomes. The Collaborative will be releasing its findings in the arenas of changing federal, state and local policy; identifying educational approaches that do work, and presenting the state of current research and next steps.

Russ Skiba, Director, The Equity Project at Indiana University
Dan Losen, Director, Center for Civil Rights Remedies, UCLA
Kavitha Mediratta, Children and Youth Program Executive, Atlantic Philanthropies
Karen Webber-Ndour, Executive Director,Office of Student Support and Safety, Baltimore City Public Schools
Ramiro Rubalcaba, Principal, Azuza High School, Azuza Unified School District

1 p.m. EDT, Thursday, March 13, 2014
Telephone call-in. Phone number is 800-747-5150, Access code is 7215631#

Suspensions/expulsions key to building charter school 'culture'

"Charter schools should not be allowed to 'expel' their way to better performance if they are truly public schools." -- Ald. Bob Fioretti

Last month, the U.S. Department of Education and U.S. attorney general's office released national guidelines on student discipline codes, acknowledging many urban school districts' zero-tolerance policies have created school-to-prison pipelines.

Chicago schools CEO Byrd-Bennett claims she wants to reduce expulsions and suspensions that hit hardest on African-American students. She claims that she "inherited a really punitive zero-tolerance code of conduct." But in fact, every district she has led, from Cleveland to Detroit became notorious for black-student expulsions and suspensions.

BBB and Rahm's problem now is, they're both afraid to take on the privately-run charter schools where, according to this morning's Sun-Times, students in Chicago are 11 times more likely to be expelled than students in traditional schools. They've both made their total political investment in the expansion of charter schools, at the expense of publicly-run neighborhood schools but can't move the needle on expulsion/suspension numbers without taking on the powerful charter lobby. Something they won't/can't do.

“I can’t make ’em. But, I can persuade them, show them a different model,” says Rahm. “And we think they’re going to be cooperative and work with us because it’s so promising what we’re seeing at CPS.”

I don't know exactly what the mayor thinks is so "promising" about 15% more elementary school kids being suspended last school year than in 2011-2012. Or about the fact that though black kids make up just 41% of CPS students, 75% of all out-of-school suspensions were handed out to black students.

But charters are 11 times worse. And they expel and suspend in larger numbers, not because their leaders aren't aware of "different models", but because their policies have been successful in boosting their performance numbers. Just listen to Noble Charter Network chief Mike Milke defend his expulsion policies as "heart-breaking" but central to building charter school "culture."

"What we cannot do, however," says Milke, "is compromise the culture and learning environment of the 99 percent of students for the disruptive 1 percent. We must not perversely disincentive our schools from addressing those who compromise the learning environment for the majority of students."

To better understand the kind of punishment culture Milke envisions, just take a look at his history. His Noble Network of Charter Schools charges students at its 10 Chicago high schools $5 for detentions stemming from infractions that include chewing gum and having untied shoelaces. Last school year it collected almost $190,000 in discipline "fees" from low-income parents, from detentions and behavior classes — a policy drawing fire from some parents, advocacy groups and education experts.

Milke previously had gained notoriety when he banned a gay/straight alliance group at his school until a federal law suit forced him to reverse his discriminatory policy.

Andrew Broy, the president of the Illinois Network of Charter Schools, said charters will work with CPS to "address the issue", but adds that stopping expulsions "isn’t a solution."

Maybe not, but it's a good start.

Rahm and Byrd-Bennett lied about shrinking suspension rate. It's worse than ever.

Rahm & Byrd-Bennett claim a 23 percent drop in suspensions. Really?

I didn't think it could get any worse. I thought the Daley/Duncan era of schoolhouse-to-jailhouse, Zero Tolerance and mass suspensions of African-American children in Chicago was drawing to a close. Why did I think that? Because the Mayor and his schools CEO Barbara Byrd-Bennett told us so just yesterday and you know that Rahm and BBB always tell the truth. Right?

Byrd-Bennett claimed a 23 percent drop in suspensions districtwide over three years, from 46,803 in the 2010-11 school year to 36,046 last year. This school year, through January, suspensions are down 36 percent from three years ago, according to CPS.

It didn't take Catalyst's Sarah Karp long to deconstruct that B.S. She got hold of some confidential data which paints a totally different picture than the one being spun by CPS leaders.

Writes Karp:

The statistic that officials are playing up is a 23 percent decline in high school suspensions, from 46,000 in the 2010-2011 school year to 36,000 in the 2012-2013 school year. But the drop occurred at the same time that enrollment in traditional, district-run high schools has fallen by more than 6,000 students.

The enrollment decline in traditional school is a critical factor because of the simultaneous increase in students at charter schools--where CPS does not collect information on suspensions. Charter schools do not have to adhere to the CPS discipline code and often have tougher discipline than in traditional schools.

When asked about the current disparities at Tuesday's press conference at Wells, Byrd-Bennett said district officials have yet to analyze last year’s data and that she would not comment until she has “accurate” information.

Figures don't lie, but liars sure can figure...

According to the secret report, things are in many ways, worse than ever:

-- Among pre-kindergarten and kindergarten students, suspensions increased 48 percent between school year 2012 and school year 2013, even though the Student Code of Conduct does not allow the use of either in-school or out-of-school suspension among young children.

--Every elementary grade level posted an increase in suspensions.

--Areas with predominantly black elementary schools saw the biggest year-to-year increases, while areas with white and Latino student populations stayed about the same or experienced a decline. The Englewood-Gresham, Burnham Park and Austin-North Lawndale areas posted steep jumps in elementary suspensions.

--Among elementary school students who were suspended, 80 percent were black in 2012-2013, compared to 76 percent in 2010-2011. In comparison, just 40 percent of students in CPS are black.

--Among high school students, 71 percent of those suspended last year were black, up from 66 percent in 2010-2011, according to state and CPS data.

Yes, you read it right. 80% of suspended elementary students were black. 

WEEKEND QUOTABLES

Roger Ailes (NYT)

Fox News Chief Exec. Roger Ailes 

“I’m walking around, and I feel just all this anger. I can’t figure out where it’s coming from.” -- NYT Sunday Book Review 

Eric Holder 

“A routine school disciplinary infraction should land a student in the principal’s office, not in a police precinct.” -- New York Times

Mark Anderson 

 Remind me again: Isn't Pat Quinn supposed to be a man of the people who chose Vallas because he had a “servant’s heart”? -- Ward Room

Historian Eric Foner 

 I'm certainly against this testing mania that's going on now where you can judge whether someone really understands history by their performance on a multiple-choice test. -- The Atlantic

Wendy Katten, director of Raise Your Hand 

What Chicago parents are lacking is the choice to send their child to a well-resourced neighborhood school with funding to provide a well-rounded education that their child can walk to without worrying about traveling unsafe distances. That choice is slipping away as the district aggressively disinvests in neighborhood schools. -- Crain's Chicago Business

James Merriman, N.Y. Charter School chief 

Said that while some charters were “not getting the job done” for special education students, the district schools’ attrition numbers were also “no great shakes.” [80% of children with special needs left charter schools within 3 years-M.K.]  -- New York Times

WEEKEND QUOTABLES

"Hobnobbing with masters of the universe has its limits..." --  Crain's

Greg Hinz

The prototype for the Emanuel mayoralty was Michael Bloomberg's New York: rich guys, bicycle lanes, central control, the whole schmear. Mr. Bloomberg's popularity waned dramatically after his first two terms and his successor, Bill de Blasio, is a liberal who has good relations with unions and minorities. The message to Mr. Emanuel is clear: Hobnobbing with masters of the universe has its limits, however good their advice seems. Running a city takes a wider reach. -- Crain's Chicago Business

Times Editorial

Studies have shown that suspensions and expulsions do nothing to improve the school climate, while increasing the risk that children will experience long-term social and academic problems. Federal data also indicates that minority students are disproportionately singled out for harsh disciplinary measures. -- Zero Tolerance, Reconsidered

Bill de Blasio

 “We start with our values. We start with the positions we took and made public throughout the last year. We will drop the appeal on the stop-and-frisk case, because we think the judge was right about the reforms that we need to make. We will settle the Central Park Five case because a huge injustice was done.” -- N.Y. Times

Carmen Fariña 

“Once I was about to visit a principal who told me, ‘You’re going to love coming here because you can hear a pin drop.’ I said, ‘I better not come because that isn’t going to make me happy.’ ” -- N.Y. Times

The view from sunny Florida

Here's how things look in Broward County where I'm trying to escape the Chicago frost for a few days. American Prospect has the story of the district's attempt to reverse the school-to-prison pipeline.

The new superintendent [former Chicago administrator Robert Runcie] released the data and acknowledged that the problem had a racial dynamic. “It’s a problem all over the country,” Runcie says, “and Broward is no exception.”

The story was also picked up by NYT:

The Florida district, the sixth largest in the nation, was far from an outlier. In the past two decades, schools around the country have seen suspensions, expulsions and arrests for minor nonviolent offenses climb together with the number of police officers stationed at schools.

And then again by the Valley News in sunny New Hampshire where it's -18 deg.

“A knee-jerk reaction for minor offenses, suspending and expelling students, this is not the business we should be in,” Broward Superintendent Robert W. Runcie told the Times. “We are not accepting that we need to have hundreds of students getting arrested and getting records that impact their lifelong chances to get a job, go into the military, get financial aid.”

No Tolerance for Zero Tolerance

Finally, it appears that school districts are rethinking their Zero Tolerance policies. Many of us have been arguing for years that ZT does little to reduce school violence and does great harm to the culture and content of schools. Now, according to the New York Times, cities and school districts around the country are rethinking their approach to minor offenses.

Broward Supt. Runcie

Rather than push children out of school, districts like Broward Cty, Florida, are now doing the opposite: choosing to keep lawbreaking students in school, away from trouble on the streets, and offering them counseling and other assistance aimed at changing behavior. Broward previously had the distinction of   having more students arrested on school campuses here than in any other state district, the vast majority for misdemeanors like possessing marijuana or spraying graffiti.

     “A knee-jerk reaction for minor offenses, suspending and expelling students, this is not the business we should be in,” said Robert W. Runcie, the Broward County Schools superintendent, who took the job in late 2011. “We are not accepting that we need to have hundreds of students getting arrested and getting records that impact their lifelong chances to get a job, go into the military, get financial aid.”

In Broward County, the shift has shown immediate results. School-based arrests have dropped by 41 percent, and suspensions, which in 2011 added up to 87,000 out of 258,000 students, are down 66 percent from the same period in 2012, school data shows.

Nationwide, more than 70 percent of students involved in arrests or referrals to court are black or Hispanic, according to federal data.

Suspended learning

What's the point?

Crazy suspension and expulsion stories have become almost commonplace in this era of zero tolerance, especially in the wake of the Sandy Hook shootings. The Washington Post ran a story last week about a 6-year-old boy being suspended in Montgomery County, Md. for pointing his finger at another student and saying "pow."

Then there's the story of Courtni Webb, the 17-year old San Francisco high school student, suspended for a poem she wrote about Sandy Hook.

But these incidents, often an ill-considered, bureaucratic response to the real fears of gun violence, mask the bigger story buried deeper in the WaPo piece.

Across the Washington region, school systems have suspended thousands of students in the early grades, according to a 2012 Washington Post analysis that showed kindergartners and first-graders had been ousted for disciplinary offenses in nearly every local school system.

Enlarge

Suspensions and expulsions have become the main currency of behavior-modification educational practices as teachers become increasingly dis-empowered when it comes to treating classroom behavioral issues. Decisions about the treatment of behavioral infractions have become removed from the classroom and the local school and are mainly driven by laws such as No Child Left Behind and arbitrary rulings by state and district bureaucrats with an eye on potential litigation.

About 3 million students each year are booted from schools, with black and Latino students as well as students with disabilities, being suspended at about three times the rate of white and abled students often for similar infractions. If you want to learn more about the growing suspension wave and the racial discipline gap, read "Suspended Education" (2010), an important study done by Russell Skiba and Daniel Losen for the Souther Poverty Law Center. They reveal the connection between suspension from middle school and the potential from dropping out and even future incarceration. Another good, more recent study was done by Gary Orfield and the Civil Rights Project at UCLA, "Opportunities Suspended: The Disparate Impact of Disciplinary Exclusion from School."

One other stunning bit of news on this topic comes from Saturday's WaPo, "D.C. charter schools expel students at far higher rates than traditional public schools." Emma Brown writes:

D.C. charter schools expelled 676 students in the past three years, while the city’s traditional public schools expelled 24, according to a Washington Post review of school data. During the 2011-12 school year, when charters enrolled 41 percent of the city’s students, they removed 227 children for discipline violations and had an expulsion rate of 72 per 10,000 students; the District school system removed three and had an expulsion rate of less than 1 per 10,000 students.

Privately-run, but publicly-funded charter schools have long abandoned their original public school mission of serving all children and increasingly base their marketing and recruitment policies on their ability to exclude and drive-out students with behavioral issues, English-language learners or students with lower test scores.

Possible solutions to suspended education lie in the consideration by schools and districts of alternative discipline approaches, like Chicago's restorative justice and others that directly involve students and teachers. Charter schools should be made to enroll and maintain their student population in the same fashion as neighborhood public schools, which are now seen in many districts as dumping grounds for problem students.

More on this to come in future posts.

QUOTABLES

'It's about relationships...'

Jay Steele, Nashville's high school superintendent, believes that smaller learning communities are the key to high school reform.

It's about relationships. Being a band teacher, you form relationships with kids that go beyond the classroom. You form relationships with the community — you're working with large groups of kids and parents, and you're providing experiences that will last a lifetime for a group of kids. It's the same concept in redesigning high schools. High school redesign is about creating positive experiences for kids that enrich their lives and establish relationships with nurturing adults. Once you have that in place, attendance increases; discipline problems decrease. The kids see relevance in why they're going to school. Then it's easy to raise the rigor of what's being taught. (Tennessean.com)

The Zero-Tolerance gap

The causes of over-disciplining reside at the intersection of family poverty, under-funded schools, inadequate teacher training and deeply-rooted cultural biases in the way administrators and students of color respond to each other. It explains why some students get a slap on the wrist for fighting while others get a ride to the police station (David Thigpen, "Rethinking School Discipline" at Huffington).

View from right field

Conservative Mike Petrilli has some valid points to make in his critique of "anti-intellectualism" embedded in Arne Duncan's Race To The Top reforms and a curriculum that focuses almost exclusively on easily testable reading and math. Of course all this didn't begin with the Obama regime and Petrilli's alternative seems just as bad to me--E.D. Hirsch's list of what every smart person should know. When you've run through the list, voila! You're smart.

Democratic reformers had better be careful. An obsessive focus on nothing but basic skills in reading and math, which can be chopped into little bits of data with which we can make all manner of decisions, will result in a generation of students who will make Palin sound like Socrates. (The Gadfly)

The War on Kids

“They [surveillance cameras] don’t really prevent anything; they just take pictures of it,” says Jessica Botcher, a student at Columbine High School.

I haven't seen The War on Kids. But this New York Times reviewer says it, "likens our public school system to prison and its disciplinary methods to fascism." Either the reviewer or the film maker has never done time or been to Guantanamo or they wouldn't use such broad-brush hyperbole. Not that there aren't prison-like public schools or fascist-minded enforcers manning many of them.

The real targets here are Zero Tolerance policies and the militarization of our schools, ie. loading them up with spy cameras, metal detectors and highly-visible security guards. If this approach worked, prisons would be the safest places on earth. They aren't.

But there are hundreds of public schools, especially smaller learning communities, that have rejected ZT and rely on community-building tactics and good teaching to keep schools safe.

New Haven's teacher contract

Seen as a reform model

“This is an incredibly progressive contract,” said Joan Devlin, a senior associate director in the American Federation of Teachers’ educational-issues department. “It addresses teacher voice, and it gives the district the flexibility to make the changes they need to make [these reforms] work.”

Why are this these two 8th-grade girls treated so differently by Portland Public Schools?

According to this story in Willamette Week, it's all part of former Supt. Vicki Phillips' botched reform initiative, left behind in the wake of her rapid departure to the Gates Foundation.

Suspension, expulsions on the rise nationally. But why?

Not as Safe as You Think, a report from "free-market" think-tank PRI, finds that in spite of declining statewide enrollment, combined student suspensions and expulsions relating to school safety violations increased 7 percent, from 788,000 during the 2004-05 school to 845,000 during the 2007-08 school year.

But what isn't clear is whether it's the incidents of violence that have risen, or is it just the rates of suspensions and expulsions? We also don't know what so many kids are being expelled for, or if rule violations committed by white students and students of color are handled in the same manner and at comparable suspension/expulsion rates?

Report: 'Schools are safer without metal detectors'

The NYCLU, the Annenberg Institute for School Reform at Brown University, and Make the Road New York have released a report arguing that schools can create a safer environment without metal detectors and harsh discipline. (Gothamist)

Included in the report, this factoid:

The police force in New York City schools is now the fifth largest police force in the country—there are more police in New York City schools than there are on the streets of cities such as Baltimore, Las Vegas, Boston and Washington D.C.

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PURE does some good reporting on the "turnarounds" in Chicago including this on turnaround "model" AUSL. It also turns out that Julie at PURE had beaten me to the punch on the suppression of the SRI report. She noted back in May that the critical report on Renaissance 2010 had been "purposely delayed."

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Minneapolis charter advocate Joe Nathan doesn't like the "false choice" between charters and district schools. He says research shows both district and charter schools vary enormously in their effectiveness. So lumping them together makes little sense, and doesn't help improve any classrooms.

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This week's stupid headline award goes to Chicago Public Radio (WBEZ). Since when is firing every teacher in a school, a "radical school reform?" What's next, firing all the surgeons in a hospital for some radical health care reform?

Zero Tolerance pot is bubbling

My January 5th post, "Schoolhouse to Jailhouse" has stirred up the pot around the Zero Tolerance issue. Some interpret my call on Obama/Duncan to push for a shift away from ZT and mass arrests in school, as a call for classroom anarchy and open season for bullies. What do you think?

Check out the comments section and feel free to weigh in.

Schoolhouse to jailhouse

If you read SmallTalk regularly, you know that one of my biggest beefs with Arne Duncan has been Chicago's zero-tolerance policies and the district's approach to school security, an approach which has led to approximately 9,000 school arrests each year, according to the Schoolhouse to Jailhouse report. This includes nearly 1,000 arrests of kids 12-years-old or younger. About 75% of those students taken to jail from CPS classrooms are African-American.

Of course, Chicago isn't the only district carrying out such policies. An editorial in yesterday's NYT, "The Principal's Office First," takes off from an ACLU study of school arrests in Connecticut which found similar practices.

It found that in West Hartford and East Hartford, minorities were far more likely to be arrested than white students who committed the same infraction. In Hartford’s overwhelmingly minority school system, police arrested students at disturbingly young ages: 86 primary grade children in a two-year period, including 13 in grades three or below.

The long-term fallout, including increased dropout rates and recidivism, from this ineffective and discriminatory zero-tolerance and mass-arrests approach to school discipline is almost too horrible to contemplate. I'm hoping that the new administration (yes, with Duncan as its educational leader) will see the light on this and help put an end to these barbaric school district policies, policies which were encouraged and institutionalized under the Bush administration.

Can they still call it the Wall Street Journal?

The Journal may have to change its name now that the street they represent has been so discredited. But that doesn’t stop them from running more Ayers/Obama/Annenberg swift-boating slime in this morning’s edition. They’ve dragged out wing-nut think-tanker Stanley Kurtz again to do the sliming.

Russo picks it up, but the best he can offer us is that “nothing radical came of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge.”

Too bad. Chicago's school system could have used some radical change.

JD2718 makes a good point.

There was a tendency all spring to overplay the differences between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Now, why are some trying to underplay the differences between Obama and McCain?Linda Darling-Hammond’s piece (on edwize) is a good place to start.

Zero Tolerance for Zero Tolerance

For more than a year, she has worn it around her neck at Seagoville High School, but this week Dallas school officials told the 16-year-old to remove it or conceal it under her shirt because a rosary is considered a gang symbol.

That’s right-- the Rosary. Not the AIG logo.