CDF's Marian Wright Edelman: Zero tolerance policies are a failing idea

In her "Child Watch" column, Marian Wright Edelman of the Children's Defense Fund draws attention to an exceptionally timely topic -- the over-reliance on counterproductive zero tolerance policies and the resulting school-to-prison pipeline. In addition to Edelman's column, we encourage you to learn more about this issue by visiting the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice's "Redirecting the School to Prison Pipeline" project.


Marian Wright Edelman's Child Watch® Column: 
Zero Tolerance Discipline Policies: A Failing Idea
Release Date: August 5, 2011

Many school children in America are on summer break right now, but here’s a pop quiz about discipline policies in our nation’s schools that’s just for grownups:

Would you suspend a student from school for four months for sharpening his pencil without permission and giving the teacher a “threatening” look when asked to sit down?

Would you expel a student from school for the rest of a school year for poking another student with a ballpoint pen during an exam?

Would you expel a student from school permanently because her possession of an antibiotic violated your school’s zero-tolerance drug policy?

Would you call the police, handcuff, and then expel a student who started a snowball fight on school grounds?

If you answered ‘no’ to any of these questions because they sounded too unfair to be the result of an actual policy, give yourself a failing grade. All four are real examples of zero tolerance school discipline policies in Massachusetts—and there are thousands of stories like these throughout that state and across the country. Suspended and expelled students are at greater risk of dropping out of school and dropping into the prison pipeline, and using automatic suspensions and expulsions for minor infractions often has a major negative effect on a child’s entire future.

Read the rest of Edelman's column here.

When you get what you pay for

It is often said, in certain circles, that “money doesn’t matter in education.”  But, as that well-known social commentator, Deep Throat, observed, to understand what’s going on, we need to “follow the money.”

 

This chart shows the dramatic per pupil spending differences between some of our nation’s largest school districts, a sample of wealthy public school districts and three of our most prestigious private schools.

The three schools on the far right are well-regarded private schools, the American equivalents of Eton and Harrow.  They are boarding schools, so the typical boarding charges ($12,000 annually) have been deducted from these figures.  The remainder, the per student expenditure, averages $62,000.  Some of this is from tuition, some from the school’s endowment and other sources. 

The middle three columns represent the per student expenditures of school districts in upper-middle-class communities well-known for the quality of their schools. Their per student expenditure averages just under $20,000, less than a third of what the private schools spend.

Chicago, Los Angeles and Baltimore are large urban districts with all the challenges that go with that.  They spend, on average, $12,000 per student, less than one-fifth what private schools spend.

Phillips Exeter, St. Paul’s and Deerfield Academy have classes that average 11 students (remember this when you hear someone say,  “class size doesn’t matter”); student-to-teacher ratios of 5:1, and send their students to Harvard, Columbia, Georgetown, University of Pennsylvania, Yale, Dartmouth, Stanford, Brown, Middlebury, Princeton, Tufts and Amherst.

Presumably, the parents of the children sent to Phillips Exeter, St. Paul’s and Deerfield Academy know that investing in their children’s futures is worth the price. 

So it should be for all children in this increasingly inequitable society.

VOYCE: The high price of zero-tolerance policies

Today’s guest blogger, Stephanie Mayo, is a student leader with Voices of Youth in Chicago Education, an organizing collaborative for education justice led by students of color from seven communities throughout the city of Chicago. Feeling powerless to make positive changes at her middle school, she joined VOYCE two years ago because she saw the group as a force for including the student voice in local education reform. Through VOYCE, she is working to make sure that students have a say in the education policies that affect their lives.

By Stephanie Mayo

VOYCE Student Leader

Albany Park Neighborhood Council

Every day, we students experience overly harsh school discipline measures in action, and see the effect that this approach – known as zero tolerance – has on us and our school culture. Because zero tolerance relies on multi-day suspensions, expulsions, and arrests for even minor or first-time offenses, it is a barrier to building the trusting relationships with school staff that we students need to succeed.

We are glad that school administrators across the nation are finally realizing that zero tolerance does not work, especially in light of the results of the recent study from Texas that examined the impact zero tolerance policies are having on student success.

With research showing proof that being suspended and/or expelled increases a student’s chance of dropping out and being incarcerated, it’s time to stop using suspensions and expulsions to address inappropriate behavior and instead support more effective ways to prevent and respond to misconduct. We don’t need to be arrested, pushed out onto the street, and watched every day by police cameras. We need college counseling, restorative justice, peer and adult mentorship, and mental health supports.

Truly serious problems with school safety, like bringing a gun to school, happen only when young people fall through the cracks of our education system. Zero tolerance doesn’t close the cracks in the system — it just makes them wider by pushing young people onto the streets and into prisons.

In addition to being ineffective, zero tolerance is also expensive.

For example, in 2011 Chicago Public Schools spent $51.4 million on security guards but only $3.5 million on college coaches. And even while they are claiming to have a $600 million budget shortfall, CPS is also considering signing a $100 million, three-year contract to place police in our schools. Spending more and more money on the school-based police officers, metal detectors, and surveillance cameras needed to enforce zero tolerance only prevents the system from investing money on social services that would actually benefit the mental health and engagement of students in schools.

The impact of this uneven spending is that all the students in my school know the security guards and police officers, but we have no idea if our school even has a social worker.

At my school, there is only one college counselor to serve a class of more than 300 seniors, which prevented me and my friends from getting the individual attention we need. The lack of college counselors also results in a huge number of students not applying to college at all.
If our public schools devoted more funding to improving the relationships students have with their teachers and school staff, our students would do better in school. Safe spaces, challenging coursework, strong relationships, high expectations, and relevance to students’ lives are the keys to creating an encouraging environment that promotes academic excellence.

Colorado’s school funding case goes to trial

Molly A. Hunter, Esq.

Director, Education Justice

Education Law Center

[Yesterday], the Lobato v. Colorado educational opportunity case began with opening arguments in the state District Court in Denver. The trial is scheduled for a content- and witness-packed five weeks. View videos from [yesterday’s] press conference.

Follow the trial on Twitter or the blog.

Plaintiffs say they will prove that the State is not providing the resources necessary for a "thorough and uniform system" of public education, as guaranteed by the Colorado Constitution. Instead, the lack of resources guarantees failure, plaintiffs said. They will ask the court to order the legislative and executive branches to remedy the problem.

Defendants will argue that the finance system is OK and ask the court to refrain from issuing an order.

Plaintiffs are students and their parents and 119 Colorado school districts. Defendants are the State, the state board of education, the education commissioner, and the governor. The attorney general represents the state defendants.

A combination of pro bono attorneys and law firms represent the original plaintiffs. Kathleen Gebhardt of Children's Voices, Kenzo Kanawabe of Davis Graham & Stubbs, and Alex Halpern of Alexander Halpern are lead counsel for plaintiffs, and lawyers from DGS, Faegre & Benson, Greenburg Traurig, The Harris Law Firm, Holland & Hart, Perkins Coie, Reilly Pozner, and Snell & Wilmer will handle various aspects of the case. 

MALDEF (Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund) represents plaintiff intervenors, who are additional students and parents concerned about opportunities and missing resources for low-wealth students and students learning English.

For more background, see: Lawsuits in Other States, Denver Post, and One of 119 Plaintiff School Districts, Craig Daily Press.

Education Justice Press Contact: Molly A. Hunter, Esq. Director, Education Justice email: mhunter@edlawcenter.org www.edlawcenter.org

Save Our Schools March: United, we stood for all children’s right to a high-quality public education

By Jan Resseger

Minister for Public Education and Witness

The United Church of Christ Justice & Witness Ministries

The United Church of Christ Justice & Witness Ministries proudly carried our banner at the Saturday, July 30, at the Save Our Schools (SOS) rally near the White House. Boy, was it a hot afternoon!

The planners brought in serious academic prophets of educational equity – NYU’s education sociologist, Pedro Noguera; Deborah Meier, New York small-schools founder and education guru;  Linda Darling-Hammond, the Stanford Professor who almost became Secretary of Education until pushed aside by a campaign by corporate reformers; Angela Valenzuela, professor of cultural studies at the University of Texas; Jonathan Kozol, the writer of a whole shelf of books about inequity and injustice for children and in public schools – beginning with Death at an Early Age in the 1960s; and Diane Ravitch, NYU education historian who donated the Moynihan Prize money she was recently awarded by the American Academy of Political and Social Science to help pay for the rally. 

The event got press coverage, a lot of it devoted to celebrities like actor Matt Damon, who contributed financially to the rally and the video clip sent from Jon Stewart. 

Speakers decried corporate-style school reform that has culminated in Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act and Obama’s Race to the Top.  They affirmed the importance of a strong system of public schools that provides an opportunity to learn for all children with a variety of needs, not a race that creates a few winners and the rest who lose out. 

And they spoke up for school teachers and against those who claim teachers need merit pay incentives to do their jobs well.  Again and again speakers pointed out that the dedication of teachers is not motivated by financial gain.  After Ravitch’s speech, teachers chanted, “Thank you!” “Thank you!” “Thank you!”

Delegations from places where public education has been under attack were particularly visible – Chicago, Wisconsin, and New Orleans.  Ohioans wore buttons decrying Senate Bill 5, the anti-collective bargaining law that will go on the ballot for possible repeal in November.   While unionized teachers were present in matched T-shirts from many places, the rally was a grass roots affair originally growing from several bloggers who are Nationally Board Certified teachers. 

In perhaps the day’s most moving speech, a school superintendent from Texas declared his unwavering commitment to educating all children. I paraphrase here as closely as possible what he said: 

“The schools in my district are failing schools.  You want to know why?  Eighty percent of my children do not speak English when they come to us and they can’t pass the tests after only one year in our schools.  I wear my scarlet letter proudly, because it means that we serve the children who come to us; we do not push those children out of our schools.  It is our job to welcome them and to teach them.  We seek to be the Good Samaritan and not pass by on the other side of the road.  In these terrible times of attack on educators and public schools, I take heart, knowing that our children’s lives will be touched by what we do for them while they are with us.”

Voucher programs fail to deliver promised academic gains, national research review finds

The National Opportunity to Learn Campaign applauds the Center on Education Policy for its initiative and diligence in conducting a national review of a decade of research that, among other key findings, concludes that publicly funded voucher programs have failed to produce promised academic gains for thousands of students. 

After all these years of diverting taxpayer funds from public education, the research shows that low-income students who switched schools using a voucher program are not experiencing academic progress that is any more substantial than their public school peers, according to the CEP’s report, “Keeping Informed about School Vouchers: A Review of Major Developments and Research.” 

CEP reviewers found that students receiving vouchers in Milwaukee, Cleveland and Washington, D.C., showed no significance difference in reading and math achievement.

The CEP report confirms what those who oppose vouchers have been saying for a long time: Voucher programs are inherently flawed in that they siphon off precious public school dollars and don’t improve students’ educational experiences.

“Vouchers have never been the answer,” says Tina Dove, National Director for the Opportunity to Learn Campaign. “Instead, our state and federal leaders should be focusing on systemic solutions that invest in public education and work toward ensuring all children are guaranteed a fair and substantive opportunity to learn as a civil right.”

The privatization of public education through vouchers means that public dollars are used to support private schools, which often discriminate against students with physical and learning disabilities and English language learners, some of our most vulnerable students.

Other key findings in the CEP report include:

•  In the absence of evidence that voucher students do any better than their public school peers, advocates have shifted their rhetoric to focus more on the value of parent choice and overall parent satisfaction. 
  
• Initially created to aid low-income students in low-performing urban school districts, some newer voucher programs – such as those in Indiana, Wisconsin and Douglas County, Colo. – are open to middle-income and suburban families.
  
• Greater scrutiny of voucher research is necessary to help ensure that studies are not biased.
  

The National Opportunity to Learn Campaign, which is focused on eliminating the opportunity gap that is fueling a persistent achievement gap, aims to hold state and federal leaders accountable for ensuring that all children, regardless of where they live, have equitable access to an opportunity to learn. Competitive programs that benefit limited numbers of children are not the answer. We must, instead, make sure all children have access to the four building blocks research has proven are needed for academic success: high-quality early childhood education; highly prepared and effective teachers; rigorous college-prep curriculum; and equitable instructional materials and policies.

To read the entire CEP report, download it here: www.otlcampaign.org/resources/keeping-informed-about-school-vouchers-review-major-developments-and-research.

Valerie Strauss: "Why Save Our Schools March is happening Saturday"

As hundreds of education advocates, parents, teachers and students prepare to bring their demands for substantive education reform to our nation's capitol tomorrow, Washington Post blogger Valerie Strauss writes about her interview with organizers of the Save Our Schools March taking place in Washington, D.C.



In her blog -- originally posted on washingtonpost.com -- read remarks from march organizers Anthony Cody is a veteran California science teacher who has a blog called Living in Dialogue for Education Week Teacher and Rita Solnet is a Florida businesswoman, parent and education activist, and co-founder of the nonprofit Parents Across America.



By Valerie Strauss

I long wondered why public school teachers sat quietly during the decade-long No Child Left Behind era watching high-stakes standardized test-based reform take hold, leading to a host of damaging unintended consequences (narrowed curriculum and teaching to the test, just to name a few).

This Saturday, teachers, along with principals, parents and other activists, quiet no longer, are scheduled to take their concerns to Washington, D.C., with a march intended to let the Obama administration know that they are unhappy with corporate-based school reform that is obsessed with test-based “accountability,” the expansion of charter schools and other measures.

I recently asked two march organizers why, now, after all these years, they were speaking out. Here, in a repost, is what they said:

Read the full post here.

How much a family earns shouldn’t determine how much a child learns

Do Americans today believe it is fair for children from wealthy families to have greater opportunities to learn than children from poorer families?  Few would say so.  Most of us would say, most of us believe, that children at every income level should have an equal opportunity to learn.

But this chart of 8^th grade reading data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress — “The Nation’s Report Card” — shows an enormous gap in student reading proficiency based on family income.

After eight years in school, students from low-income families – those that are eligible to receive free and reduced-priced meals through the National School Lunch Program – have between one-third and a half the likelihood of reading at or above Proficient as those from families with higher incomes.  This holds true for Black, Hispanic, White and Asian students.

Our public education system was founded to create a level playing field,  so that all children would have an equal opportunity to learn, prosper and thrive.  How have we reached the point where the quality of the education a child receives is determined by the quantity of income available to his or her parents?

It is time to return to the vision of the Founders:  a first-class public education system for all children.