Thinking and Linking by Joanne Jacobs
Linking federal student aid to college graduation rates or other success measures could shake up higher education. Open-access colleges and universities enroll many low-income students who qualify for Pell Grants. Graduation rates are low.
Federal civil rights investigators are expanding their scope, including an investigation of whether low graduation rates at a community college violates students’ rights.
It’s not quite the lion lying down the lamb, but Rick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute and Linda Darling-Hammond, a Stanford ed professor who served on Obama’s transition team, have co-written a New York Times op-ed, How to Rescue Education Reform. They disagree on some key issues, but agree that the federal government should stick to what it alone can do and avoid trying to micromanage schools.
The first federal role is transparency: No Child Left Behind required states to measure and report achievement, so parents, voters and taxpayers could “hold schools and public officials accountable.” However, states were allowed to set their own, low standards.
Instead of the vague mandate of “adequate yearly progress,” federal financing should be conditioned on truth in advertising — on reliably describing achievement (or lack thereof) and spending. To track achievement, states should be required to link their assessments to the (or to adopt a similar multistate assessment). To shed light on equity and cost-effectiveness, states should be required to report school- and district-level spending; the resources students receive should be disclosed, not only their achievement.
The second federal role is “enforcing civil rights laws and ensuring that dollars intended for low-income students and students with disabilities are spent accordingly.”
Third is supporting basic research in fields such as “brain science, language acquisition or the impact of computer-assisted tutoring.”
Competitive federal grants can support innovation, they conclude. However, the “Obama administration’s $4.35 billion Race to the Top competition . . . ended up demanding that winning states hire consultants to comply with a 19-point federal agenda, rather than truly innovate.”
The feds should stop trying to improve schools by order from above, write Hess and Darling-Hammond. “The federal government can make states, localities and schools do things — but not necessarily do them well.”
Schizophrenic, responds RiShawn Biddle.
The odd couple call adequate yearly progress a “vague mandate,” but elsewhere complain it’s too prescriptive, writes Andrew Rotherham. The left and right are uniting to kill education reform, he adds in Time.
Adequate Yearly Progress bites the dust in Democratic Sen. Tom Harkin’s bill to rewrite No Child Left Behind, now out in draft form. Instead, students would have to make “continuous improvement,” reports Ed Week.
There would be no specific achievement targets, either for entire groups of students, or for particular subgroups, such as minority students, English-language learners, or students with disabilities. In the vast majority of cases, states would decide how—and whether—to intervene in schools.
Harkin worked with Republican Sen. Mike Enzi on the bill.
Where’s the teeth? ask critics.
. . . Democrats for Education Reform already likened the draft’s “continuous improvement” standard to saying you’re losing weight without ever getting on the scale.
Advocates for poor, minority and disabled students complained the bill has “no meaningful mechanism” to hold schools, districts or states accountable in a letter to Harkin and Enzi. The groups included the National Council of La Raza, the Education Trust, the National Center for Learning Disabilities, The Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, and the Center for American Progress Action Fund.
The lack of goals is “a total deal breaker,” said Amy Wilkins, the vice president for government affairs and communications at the Education Trust.
Educators criticized — and defended — the use of “disparate impact” in school discipline cases in a hearing before the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, reports Ed Week.
Obama administration officials announced last spring that they’ll question discipline policies disproportionately affect blacks, Hispanics or some other subgroups, even if there’s no intent to discriminate. However, discipline policies would be “out of compliance only if an equally sound policy would have less of a disparate impact.”
At the Feb. 11 briefing, Ricardo Soto, the deputy assistant secretary for the Education Department’s office for civil rights, said, “there is no universal, one-size-fits-all approach to discipline that will be right for every school or all students.” However, the department will release new federal guidance on school discipline this year.
Commissioner Todd F. Gaziano told Soto the new approach puts “an extremely heavy burden on the school to justify any disparity.” Educators might avoid imposing warranted discipline to avoid overrepresentation, Gaziano said.
Allen Zollman, a teacher of English as a second language at an urban middle school in Pennsylvania that he did not name, said he . . . is opposed to having to give “a thought to disparate impact” if he needs to remove a disruptive student from class, saying he views it as a constraint on effective discipline.
Should his school require such a policy, Mr. Zollman said, he would respond in one of three ways: disregard it and continue to refer whatever students he sees fit for disciplinary action, do nothing and tolerate chaos in his classroom, or take an early retirement from teaching.
Jamie Frank, who said she has been a teacher for 11 years in the suburban Washington area, said she worked in a district that stopped failing students who cut class because the policy was disproportionately affecting some groups of students. Teachers were required to reteach and retest students who’d missed class and give them time to make up work, she said.
Some district administrators supported the administration’s new policy.
For example, Hertica Y. Martin, the executive director of elementary and secondary education for Minnesota’s Rochester public schools, reported that from the 2007-08 to 2009-10 school years, the district reduced an overrepresentation of expelled African-American males. She credited a disciplinary approach gaining traction in schools nationwide, called Positive Behavioral Interventions and Support, with helping to support fairer disciplinary action. She also emphasized the importance of classes about racial and ethnic diversity that the school district has provided to teachers, with titles such as The Role of Whiteness and The Culturally Relevant Classroom.
It’s possible expulsions fell because the discipline model worked well. Or teachers got the message to go easy on black male students.
Chicago’s policy of flunking third-, sixth- and eighth-grade students who do poorly on state exams disproportionately harms black and Latino students, charges Parents United for Responsible Education (PURE) which has filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights.
Students who are held back get discouraged and drop out, said Julie Woestehoff, executive director of PURE.
The threat of retention has pushed low-achieving students to work harder to raise achievement, said Elaine Allensworth, chief research officer at the University of Chicago‘s Consortium on Chicago School Research. But there is a down side.
“We saw and still see students held back two or three years and entering high school really old,” she said. “They have no chance of graduating by 18, and so there’s no way they are going to stay in school.”
Students may be required to attend summer school for scoring below the 24th percentile in reading and math, earning D’s or F’s in reading and math or having more than nine unexcused absences. Those who fail summer school must repeat the grade.
Retaining students cost up to $100 million in 2008, PURE estimates. The group wants students who are falling behind to get help before third grade. Nobody objects to that, but it leaves the problem of what to do about students who aren’t prepared to move on to the next level.
If schools discipline more blacks or Hispanics than white students, federal officials warn they’ll use “disparate impact analysis” to charge civil rights violations, reports Education Week.
Under “disparate impact,” schools can be in violation if discipline policies affect one racial group more than others, even if there’s no evidence of unequal treatment for the same offense or an intent to discriminate. An education agency would be found out of compliance if an equally sound policy would have less of a disparate impact, Russlyn Ali,an Education Department official, told Ed Week.
U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said at a conference he was “deeply troubled by rising discipline rates and disparities in discipline” in the nation’s schools. The department has launched compliance reviews in the Christina School District in Wilmington, Del.; the Salamanca City (N.Y.) Central School District; Winston-Salem/Forsyth (N.C.) County Schools; San Juan (Utah) School District; and Rochester (Minn.) Public Schools. All involve both different-treatment and disparate-impact analyses.
Roger Clegg, president of Center for Equal Opportunity, warned the policy could push schools to manipulate the data rather than enforce rules fairly.
“In education, with respect to discipline, my concern would be that school districts are afraid they will be hauled before a court or some administration agency and threatened with a loss of federal funding whenever they have a racial imbalance of one kind or another,” he said. He explained that educators might become hypersensitive to students’ race or ethnicity in discipline decisions, resulting in disciplining some students who shouldn’t be and not disciplining others who deserve it.
In most districts, suspension rates are much higher for black and Hispanic students. Denver Public Schools changed its policies in response to complaints from a local community group, says Allegra “Happy” Haynes, the chief community-engagement officer.
The district implemented a “discipline ladder,” for example, that spelled out the level of the disciplinary action students would receive for specific kinds of infractions, such as chewing gum in class or talking back to teachers. The policy emphasized that students should receive out-of-school suspensions or be referred to police only for serious misconduct, such as causing harm to someone in a fight.
The result was that referrals to law-enforcement officers dropped by 63 percent and out-of-school suspensions declined by 43 percent in the district from the 2008-09 school year to the 2009-10 school year, she said.
Denver’s policy seems to make sense: Why kick kids out of school or call in the police, unless it’s necessary to maintain safety? But it doesn’t make Hispanics as likely to be suspended as Asian-Americans or whites. For that matter, boys are far more likely to get in trouble than girls. Should the rules be changed to tolerate boy-typical misbehavior?
The “different treatment” rule, used in the Bush administration, is simple: The black kid who curses the teacher shouldn’t get a harsher punishment than the white kid who curses the teacher. It doesn’t matter if blacks are more likely to curse and therefore to get in trouble.
When student misbehavior is tolerated, it’s harder for teachers to teach and for students to learn. The wild kid who gets away with it pays in the long run because he doesn’t learn self-control, a critical life skill. All the high-achieving, high-poverty schools teach students to follow the rules so they can learn in a safe, orderly atmosphere.
Do competitive grants encourage inequality in education? A coalition of civil rights groups claimed last week that Race to the Top and other competitive grants will “leave behind” low-income and minority children. They proposed an “opportunity to learn” framework. (Latino groups didn’t join in and there’s some confusion among those who did, notes Politics K-12.)
National Journal’s Education Experts discuss competition and equality.
“Competition does not lead to equity, but to a few winners and many, many losers,” writes Diane Ravitch.
Spreading money like peanut butter will give us more of the same, responds Tom Vander Ark.
We’ve done that for 40 years and all we have is a more expensive version of a deeply inequitable system.
Competitive government grants spur innovation, “the most rapid and efficient path to equity and excellence,” he writes.
Are charter schools a civil rights failure? No way, say National Journal’s Education Experts in response to the UCLA Civil Rights Project report, which complained that charters are more likely to be nearly all black than district-run public schools. The report also said Western charters are disproportionately white.
“Equity” is not the same as “integration,” says Ross Wiener, executive director of the Education and Society Program at the Aspen Institute.
The report’s blithe embrace of integration as the paramount concern is oblivious to serious inequities often found in integrated schools. And it’s dismissive of the priorities of black parents – 80% of whom told Public Agenda that raising academic achievement is their top priority for schools, compared with 8% of whom list integration and 11% who want to prioritize both.
You can’t win for trying, says Education Sector’s Kevin Carey.
“This report is almost too ridiculous to comment on,” says Tom Vander Ark, former Gates Foundation education director and now an education consultant.
From Democrats for Education Reform: “The UCLA Civil Rights Project seemingly wants to block minority parents from choosing to enroll their children in better schools simply because it feels those schools aren’t white enough. What’s up with that?”
Update: Charter schools run by education management organizations are “substantially more segregated by race, wealth, disabling condition, and language” than the districts in which they’re located concludes a study by the Education and the Public Interest Center and the Education Policy Research Unit. Privately run charters tend to serve very low-income students or very high-income students, the report said.
At Educated Guess, my former colleague John Fensterwald suspects that some of the mostly white charters are umbrellas for homeschoolers. He notes that San Jose Unified rejected a proposed charter on grounds in the heavily Hispanic downtown on grounds it “would further racial segregation.” The county board of education approved Rocketship Mateo Sheedy Elementary, which is now 91 percent Hispanic, 84 percent low income and 73 percent English Learners — and outscoring most of San Jose Unified’s elementary schools.