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When poor kids grow up

September 11, 2012 by

Jonathan Kozol’s Fire in the Ashes asks: What happens to desperately poor children when they grow up? He follows up on children featured in his earlier books. Kozol, now 76, tells grim stories, but doesn’t analyze why some kids overcome their circumstances and others don’t, writes Emily Bazelon in Slate.

“Eric” (all names are changed) lived in New York’s shelter hotels for four years in the 1980s, beginning when he was 11, with his mother, Vicky, and sister, Lisette. Kozol met the family  in 1993, when the city had moved them to a poor section of the Bronx, Mott Haven. “Eric . . .  had an element of likability and even of good humor,” Kozol writes.

One day in 1996, Kozol got a call from a doctor in Montana who’d read Amazing Grace and was part of a church that wanted to help a Mott Haven family resettle in their small town. . . . The social experiment went well for Lisette, who makes it to college and is about to become a paralegal when Kozol catches up with her at 26, but badly for Eric. Wary and suspicious of the adults who reached out to him, he dropped out of school, got a local girl pregnant, ran into trouble with the cops, and probably dealt drugs. When Vicky was evicted in 2000 from the home the church helped provide, the doctor blamed Eric for breaking into her house when she was working at night and blasting music with his friends. Vicky started drinking heavily, and then in 2001, she called Kozol with devastating news: Eric was dead, shot in the head, an apparent suicide.

Christopher , who also grew up in the shelter hotels and moved to Mott Haven as a teenager, became part of a group that threw a boy onto the train tracks. He was convicted of attempted murder.

Asked to write a letter to support Christopher’s bid to reduce his sentence, Kozol did so once, reluctantly, but refused to a second time, because “there was no indication that he felt remorseful or responsible for what he’d done.” It’s not surprising when Christopher dies of a heroin overdose after he’s released from prison. In fact, to be cold about it—in a way that Kozol would never be—Christopher’s death comes as something of a relief, because he has become a terrible drain on his much more functional younger sister, Miranda.

Girls overcome when boys cannot? Kozol writes that he sees “parallels” but not “patterns.”

In the second half of the book, Kozol tells happier stories about children who in young adulthood have pulled themselves into stability, because they had especially devoted parents or with a major assist from a local priest and a private school education, paid for by a small foundation Kozol created for this purpose.

When he wonders if anything has changed, a girl named Pineapple tells Kozol to think positive.

. . .  she and her sister are determined to go back to the neighborhood with their college degrees and “you know? Make little changes that we can? … Picking battles that we have a chance to win?”

“Over his career Kozol has wrought many small changes and won many individual battles,” writes Bazelon.

Filed Under: Children, Education Tagged With: , , , , ,

Charters educate high-need students

December 21, 2010 by

The federal role in charter education is a “haphazard collection of laws, rules, funding preferences and rhetoric that lacks coherence at the policy or action level,” concludes the Brown Center on Education Policy at Brookings. Its experts recommend:

a) collecting and using more and better data on the performance of charter schools for purposes of authorizing, research, and informed parental choice; b) requiring states to provide equitable funding for charter schools relative to traditional public schools—including support for facilities; c) supporting higher standards for authorizing; d) revising rules and definitions that unintentionally disadvantage charter schools; e) promoting the growth as well as quality control of virtual charter schools; and f) finally and most importantly articulating and following through on a coherent policy with respect to charter schools.

Some 1.6 million children attend 4,900 charter schools in 39 states, the study notes. The best-known chains “create highly structured routines with uniforms, strict rules, and numerous drills.”

But charters take many other forms, including single sex schools, schools for the performing arts, schools for science and technology, bilingual schools, schools for the disabled, schools for drop-outs, and virtual schools where learning takes place online.

Charters attract a disproportionate number of low-income and minority students, especially blacks.  “Initial test scores of students at charter schools are usually well below those of the average public school student in the state in which the charter school is located,” the report finds.

Of five randomized studies, four found charter schools improved student achievement while one found no impact, Brookings concludes. The four positive studies involved urban schools serving minority students. The no-impact study found “students from poor, minority, urban backgrounds did better in charter schools in contrast to students from middle-class, suburban backgrounds, who did worse.”

Thus all the randomized trials are consistent in pointing to the success of charter schools in large urban areas.

In addition to looking at reading and math scores, a study of charter high schools in Chicago and Florida found positive effects on both high school completion and college attendance.

Milwaukee’s charter students do as well in reading and may do slightly better in math compared to students in district-run public schools after one year, concludes a preliminary study by John F. Witte of the University of Wisconsin and Patrick J. Wolf of the University of Arkansas.

Students in independent charter schools that were converted from private schools outperformed Milwaukee Public Schools student in both math and reading after controlling for factors such as student characteristics and school switching.

Charters are schools of choice often located in minority neighborhoods, writes Nelson Smith. That’s not segregation.

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Success without whites: Is this a problem?

September 10, 2010 by

Albany’s charter students (85 percent poor, 96 percent black or Latino) are outperforming students in district-run schools (68 percent poor, 80 percent black or Latino), reports the Albany Times Union. But those poor, little, high-performing charter kids are racially isolated, the Times Union charges in a front-page story. There aren’t enough white students in their classes.

That’s because the Brighter Choice Foundation, which runs all of Albany’s charters, opened schools in the neediest neighborhoods, writes Jason Brooks of Foundation for Education Reform and Accountability.

After nearly a decade accusing Brighter Choice schools of “creaming” the best students, it takes chutzpah to accuse the schools of segregation, writes Peter Meyer, who wrote an Ed Next story on Brighter Choice’s success.

Now that nearly a quarter of Albany’s public school kids, the ones local teacher unions and Albany Public School administrators said were uneducable (because they were poor and black) – now that the creaming issue is off the table and those same kids are beating the socks off even their white counterparts on academic achievement tests, we get S-E-G-R-E-G-A-T-I-O-N.

Can’t poor black kids catch a break here?

Albany’s public schools aren’t models of integration, the Times Union concedes.

An independent auditor recently found that advanced classes at Albany High School were highly segregated with few minority students. Superintendent Raymond Colucciello said the district is now working to reduce that racial isolation at the high school as well as at magnet schools, but that charter schools lack the same sort of oversight. He said that flies in the face of the Brown decision.

Advanced classes at the charter schools have nearly all minority students. Would oversight fix that?

Charters receive 13 percent of district funding, the newspaper complains. But charter students make up 23 percent of public school enrollment.

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'Acting white' is no myth

June 28, 2010 by

Stuart Buck’s Acting White gets a rave review from John McWhorter in The New Republic.

It was the demise of segregation, of all things, that helped pave the way for the “acting white” charge. With the closing of black schools after desegregation orders, black students began going to school with white students in larger numbers than ever before. White students were often openly hostile, and white teachers only somewhat less so. Black teachers and administrators from the old black schools often lost their jobs. Unsurprisingly, black students started modeling themselves against white ones as a form of self-protection. This dovetailed nicely with the new open-ended wariness of whites that was the bedrock of “Black Power” identity.

. . . The tendency to reject the “acting white” charge as a myth is based on what we might call compassionate denial. It may seem to many that the problem is so subject to misinterpretation by whites that it would be better to pretend it doesn’t exist.

Solutions? Not so easy. McWhorter points to high-quality “all-black charter schools, as well as public ones turned around by dynamic principals,” where students have no excuse for failure.

Filed Under: Education Tagged With: , ,

Charter schools and segregation

April 27, 2010 by

Charter schools aren’t much more segregated than nearby schools students otherwise would attend, concludes an analysis by a team lead by Gary Ritter, a University of Arkansas education policy professor, in Education Next.

That contradicts the UCLA-based Civil Rights Project’s Choice without Equity: Charter School Segregation and the Need for Civil Rights Standards. That’s because the Civil Rights Project compared charter schools, often located in high-minority urban neighborhoods, with all traditional public schools, which are located in much more diverse areas. In inner cities, students in both charters and traditional public schools “attend school in intensely segregated settings,” write the Arkansas team.

Their findings jibe with a 2009 report by RAND, which followed students in five cities who moved from traditional public schools into charter schools: RAND found transfers have “surprisingly little effect on racial distributions across the sites.”

The Civil Rights Project’s report also complained of nearly all-white charter schools.

In some cases, like Idaho, charter school students across all races attend schools of white isolation: majorities of students of all races are in 90–100% white charter schools.

“No kidding!” responds the Arkansas team. “The state of Idaho is nearly 95 percent white.”

Public schools are segregation academies because students are forced to go to school where they live, writes Greg Forster (with Whitney Tilson quotes), looking at New York City.

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Are charter schools too black?

February 5, 2010 by

Seventy percent of black charter school students have few white classmates, estimates a study by the Civil Rights Project at UCLA. From the Washington Post:

To the authors of the study, the findings point to a civil rights issue: “As the country continues moving steadily toward greater segregation and inequality of education for students of color in schools with lower achievement and graduation rates,” the study concludes, “the rapid growth of charter schools has been expanding a sector that is even more segregated than the public schools.”

Racially segregated schools tend to be inferior, says UCLA Education Professor Gary Orfield, who oversaw the study. “The study recommended that federal and state governments push for racial diversification of charter schools,” reports the Post.

Should black students be denied a charter alternative unless enough whites want to attend the same inner-city school?

“We actually are very proud of the fact that charter schools enroll more low-income kids and more kids of color than do other public schools,” said Nelson Smith, president and chief executive of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, based in Washington. “The real civil rights issue for many of these kids is being trapped in dysfunctional schools.”

For all the complaints about skimming, charter schools disproportionately enroll the lowest-scoring students, inner-city African-Americans. Their parents have decided that a nearly all-black charter school is a better choice than the neighborhood school, which may be marginally more integrated (probably with Hispanics).  Whose civil rights are violated by letting parents make that choice?

“Urban parents don’t care about so-called civil rights activists who work in ivory towers, live in suburbs, release reports on ‘segregation’ just in time for Black History Month (wink, nudge), and avoid the worst American public education offers,” writes Rishawn Biddle of Dropout Nation.

The study also complains that charters in Western states enroll somewhat more whites and fewer Hispanics than state averages. If one group, such as immigrant parents, is less likely to choose charters then other groups will form a larger percentage of enrollment.

The charter high school in my book, Our School, is now 96 percent Mexican-American, up from 83 percent (if memory serves) in the first year. Downtown College Prep has focused on educating the children of poorly educated, Spanish-speaking immigrants and, increasingly, that’s who chooses the school. I don’t see that as a problem.

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Boys and girls together in Alabama

March 26, 2009 by

Unwilling to fight the ACLU, Mobile County, Alabama schools have agreed to end mandatory single-sex classes. According to the civil liberties group, the sex segregation included a ban on boys and girls talking in the hallways or at lunch.

. . . at Hankins Middle School this year, teachers had been instructed to treat boys and girls differently. At a teacher training, teachers were informed that boys should be taught about “heroic behavior” but that girls should learn “good character.” Teachers were told that male hormone levels directly relate to success at “traditional male tasks” but that when stress levels rise in an adolescent girl’s brain, “other things shut down.”

A story in the Mobile Press-Register reported that a language arts exercise for sixth grade girls involved asking the girls to use as many descriptive words as possible to describe their dream wedding cake, while the boys were asked to brainstorm action verbs used in sports.

According to Mark Jones, whose son Jacob attends Hankins Middle School, the school principal told him that the changes at Hankins were necessary because boys’ and girls’ brains are so different that they needed different curriculums.

If true, that’s sounds awfully extreme. I wonder if the crackpot “Crockus” is involved.

While the Press-Register bemoans the loss of the single-sex program, the solution seems simple: Let parents choose single-sex or coed classes for their children and study the results.

Update: Education Gadfly flags a report on how to do single-sex education effectively.

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