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Dear Commons Community,

According to a study by the Center for Civil Rights Remedies at the University of California, Los Angeles, nearly 3.5 million public school students were suspended out of school at least once in 2011-12. 
That is more than one student suspended for every public school teacher in America. This means that more students were suspended in grades K-12 than were enrolled as high school seniors.  As stated in the study, if we ignore the discipline gap, we will be unable to close the achievement gap. Of the 3.5 million students who were suspended in 2011-12, 1.55 million were suspended at least twice. Given that the average suspension is conservatively put at 3.5 days, we estimate that U.S. public school children lost nearly 18 million days of instruction in just one school year because of exclusionary discipline.

Suspension rates typically are three to five times higher at the secondary level than at the elementary level, as illustrated in the figure above. Furthermore, the actual size of the racial gap, such as that between Blacks and Whites, is much greater at the secondary level.

The national summary of suspension rate trends for grades K-12 indicates that these rates increased sharply from the early 1970s to the early 2000s, and then more gradually, until they leveled off in the most recent three-year period. We conclude that in this recent period, no real progress was made in reducing suspension rates for grades K-12.

After many years of widening, the gap in suspension rates between Blacks and Whites and between Latinos and Whites narrowed slightly in the most recent time period—that is, the 2009-10 and 2011- 12 school years. The gap narrowed, however, only because of the increase in the White suspension rate. Specifically, 16% of Blacks and 7% of Latinos were suspended in both years, while rates for Whites rose from 4% to 5%.

Despite the persistence of deeply disturbing disparities, the good news is that we estimate a slight reduction nationally in suspension rates for Blacks, Latinos, and Whites at the secondary level, along with a small narrowing of the racial discipline gap.

The report’s authors analyzed 2011-12 discipline data from every school and district in the country. The U.S. Department of Education’s office for civil rights issued the data last year. In the time period covered, 10.1 percent of secondary students and 2.6 percent of elementary students were suspended, the authors found.

Tony

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vn6uQBDAr_U[/youtube]

Dear Commons Community,

New York City is now the largest school district in the country to recognize two Muslim holidays on its official calendar. Mayor Bill de Blasio announced earlier this week the addition of Eid al-Adha and Eid al-Fitr to the calendar, calling it a “change that respects the diversity of our city.” As reported in The New York Times:

“Hundreds of thousands of Muslim families will no longer have to choose between honoring the most sacred days on their calendar or attending school,” Bill de Blasio said in a statement. “This is a common sense change, and one that recognizes our growing Muslim community and honors its contributions to our City.”

The two holidays will be added to the calendar for the 2015-16 school year, which includes several Jewish and Christian holidays, such as Christmas, Easter, Passover and Rosh Hashanah.

The mayor’s office said schools will close Sept. 24, 2015, for Eid al-Adha, a festival honoring Abraham’s sacrifice of his son to God — a story also found in the Old Testament of the Bible and in the Jewish torah.

Eid al-Fitr, which marks the end of the holy month of Ramadan, will fall over summer break in 2016. The mayor’s office said it will be designated a holiday for students attending summer school.

Wednesday’s announcement fulfills a campaign pledge by de Blasio to include a more diverse set of holidays in the school calendar. The mayor has said he supports adding the Lunar New Year to the calendar, but that he hasn’t made up his mind on adding the Hindu holiday of Diwali.

His predecessor, Mayor Michael Bloomberg, was opposed to including more holidays, saying in 2008 that “when you have a city as diverse as we do, with virtually every religion known to man practiced, if we closed school for every single day there wouldn’t be any school.”

There are 600,000 to 1 million Muslim New Yorkers, according to official estimates, and a 2008 Columbia University study found that roughly 10 percent of the New York City public school students are Muslim.

Linda Sarsour, director of the Arab-American Association of New York, applauded the de Blasio administration on Wednesday.”

This is a good move and a credit to Mayor de Blasio’s focus on respecting diversity in New York.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The New York City Department of Education announced yesterday that only 12 percent of the new freshmen class for Fall 2015 at New York City specialized high schools will be black or Latino students.  This is practically the same percentage as last year. As reported in the New York Times:

“Of the 5,103 students offered placement in eight specialized high schools, 5 percent were black and 7 percent were Hispanic, the same as last year, while 52 percent were Asian and 28 percent were white, the city said as more than 70,000 eighth-graders learned about their high school acceptances. At Stuyvesant High School, historically the hardest to get into, black students earned 10 of the 953 seats.

In the public school system in recent years, just shy of 30 percent of students have been black and about 40 percent have been Hispanic, and there is widespread agreement that the low numbers of these students in specialized schools is a problem. How to fix it is another matter.

In 2012, a group of education and civil rights organizations filed a complaint with the federal Education Department that said the city’s admission process, which is based on the results of a single test, was a violation of the Civil Rights Act. The department said on Thursday that the case was under investigation.

Mayor Bill de Blasio, whose son is a senior at Brooklyn Technical High School, the largest specialized school, said the schools should more closely resemble the population of the city.

In a statement on Thursday, the city’s schools chancellor, Carmen Fariña, said, “It’s critical that our city’s specialized high schools reflect the diversity of our city.”

“We continue to review a variety of ideas to increase diversity at our specialized high schools,” she added, like trying to increase access to the test, and “offering expanded free test prep”

Only the State Legislature has the power to change that criterion, however, and a bill introduced last year that would have mandated multiple determining measures has stalled.

On Thursday, the Research Alliance for New York City Schools released a report that said admitting students on more varied measures would do little to address the lack of diversity in these schools, and could make the problem even worse. The authors simulated different admissions rules and found that some alternate criteria reduced the proportion of black students admitted to specialized schools.

The only method its authors found that would significantly change the diversity of the schools was to guarantee admission to the highest-performing students in every middle school. But that approach, they warned, would come “at the cost of reducing the average achievement of incoming students”

A solution to this sad state of affairs would be better resolved by the Mayor and the Schools Chancellor than by the officials in Albany.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The U.S. Justice Department announced yesterday that its investigation did not support federal civil rights charges against Darren Wilson, the officer who shot and killed Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. Still, the department found overwhelming evidence of entrenched racism in Ferguson’s police force and what amounted to the habitual use of primitive and clearly unconstitutional law enforcement techniques. The Justice Department recommends that Ferguson must move far more aggressively than it has to correct a dangerous, socially corrosive problem.

The New York Times editorial commented:

“The riots that erupted in Ferguson, Mo., last summer after a white police officer shot and killed an unarmed black teenager named Michael Brown were partly about his death. They were also deeply connected to a lamentable history of abuse suffered by African-American citizens at the hands of local police and court officials…

Over six months, the Justice Department interviewed citizens, city employees and pored over emails containing crude, racist jokes. A more nuanced and pervasive brand of bigotry emerged from painstaking statistical analyses of traffic stops, citations, searches and arrests.

Data from 2012-14, for instance, showed that African-Americans — who made up 67 percent of Ferguson’s population — accounted for 85 percent of vehicle stops, 90 percent of citations and 93 percent of all arrests. African-Americans were more than twice as likely as white drivers to be searched during vehicle stops, and were significantly more likely to be ticketed for speeding.

The police’s use of force showed similar disparities — with nearly 9 of 10 cases involving African-Americans. In every canine bite incident for which racial information was available, the person bitten was black.

The court system displayed the same biases. According to the report: “African-Americans are 68 percent less likely than others to have their cases dismissed by the court, and are more likely to have their cases last longer and result in more required court encounters. African-Americans are at least 50 percent more likely to have their cases lead to an arrest warrant, and accounted for 92 percent of cases in which an arrest warrant was issued by the Ferguson Municipal Court in 2013. Available data show that, of those actually arrested by F.P.D. only because of an outstanding municipal warrant, 96 percent are African-American.”

The arrests and fines of blacks were driven to some extent by the fact that Ferguson’s budget relies partly on fines and fees; city officials routinely urged the Police Department to generate more revenue through ticket writing. In 2013, for instance, the city finance director wrote: “Court fees are anticipated to rise about 7.5 percent. I did ask the chief if he thought the P.D. could deliver 10 percent increase. He indicated they could try.”

But budget needs could not explain, let alone justify, the pattern of racism. They merely combined with deep-seated biases throughout Ferguson’s power structure to entrap the city’s black community in a hellish cycle of arrests for minor offenses, fines they could not pay, to crippling financial penalties, loss of drivers licenses, and jail time. All of that meant lost jobs and eviction.

Not surprisingly, Ferguson’s African-Americans do not see the police as neutral enforcers of the law but as agents of exploitation. No municipality can prosper with that kind of hostility, overt or just below the surface, day in and day out. City officials should grasp this opportunity to take corrective steps. If they don’t, the Justice Department would be wholly justified in taking them to court.”

In a companion article, columnist James Blow concluded:

“When people say “Black Lives Matter,” they’re not referring only to the lives lost, but also to those stunted and controlled by a system of power that sees them as pawns.”

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Former U.S. Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, is emerging as the Democratic Party’s chief economic policy strategist for the 2016 presidential election.   In an opinion piece for the New York Times by contributing columnist, Thomas Edsall, Summers ascendance is a reflection of “the abandonment by much of the party establishment of neoliberal thinking, premised on the belief that unregulated markets and global trade would produce growth beneficial to worker and C.E.O. alike.”  Instead:

“Summers’s analysis of current economic conditions suggests that free market capitalism, as now structured, is producing major distortions. These distortions, in his view, have resulted in gains of $1 trillion annually to those at the top of the pyramid, and losses of $1 trillion every year to those in the bottom 80 percent.

At a Feb. 19 panel discussion on the future of work organized by the Hamilton Project, a centrist Democratic think tank, Summers defied economic orthodoxy. He dismissed as “whistling past the graveyard” the widely accepted view that improving education and job training is the most effective way to reduce joblessness.

“The core problem,” according to Summers, is that there aren’t enough jobs, and if you help some people, you can help them get the jobs, but then someone else won’t get the jobs. And unless you’re doing things that are affecting the demand for jobs, you’re helping people win a race to get a finite number of jobs, and there are only so many of them.

He adds that he is “all for” more schooling and job training, but as an answer to the problems of the job marketplace, “it is fundamentally an evasion.”

To counter the weak employment market, Summers called for major growth in government expenditures to fill needs that the private sector is not addressing:

“In our society, whether it is taking care of the young or taking care of the old, or repairing a lot that needs to be repaired, there is a huge amount of very valuable work that needs to be done. It’s much less clear, to use a modern phrase, that there’s a viable business model for getting it done. And I guess the reason why I think there is going to need to be a lot of reflection on the role of government going forward is that, if I’m right, that there’s vitally important work to be done for which there is no standard capital business model that will get it done. That suggests important roles for public policy.”

Earlier this year, Summers co-wrote the Report of the Commission on Inclusive Prosperity, a forceful set of economic proposals released on Jan. 15 by the Center for American Progress.

In order to stem the disproportionate share of income flowing to corporate managers and owners of capital, and to address the declining share going to workers, the report calls for tax and regulatory policies to encourage employee ownership, the strengthening of collective bargaining rights, regulations requiring corporations to provide fringe benefits to employees working for subcontractors, a substantial increase in the minimum wage, sharper overtime pay enforcement, and a huge increase in infrastructure appropriations – for roads, bridges, ports, schools – to spur job creation and tighten the labor market.”

It is my opinion that Summers is right on most everything he is saying.  The Democratic Party that embraced neoliberal thinking is losing the enthusiasm of its core constituencies especially the working class and union members.  As an example, look at the runoff mayoral election that is going on in Chicago where the incumbent Democrat, Rahm Emanuel, is in a battle for his political life with the Chicago Teachers Union candidate,  Jesús G. Garcia. The Democratic Party leadership should heed what Summers is proposing and abandon the neoliberal stances taken by the Obama administration and by a number of state governors including Andrew Cuomo here in New York.  It should instead invest in job creation, public works, and support for labor unions both public and private.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

This morning, I had the pleasure of attending the Everyone Reading Conference on Dyslexia and Related Learning Disabilities, being held here at the CUNY Graduate Center.  Carmen Farina, NYC Schools Chancellor gave the keynote address.  She was introduced as a “breath of fresh air” by NYC City Councilman Daniel Dromm, Chair of the NYC Council Education Committee.

Chancellor Farina was in in good form and spoke for thirty minutes on a variety of public education topics including:

1. The importance of Pre-K in diagnosing learning disabilities as early as possible.
2. Phonics and reading comprehension.
3. English Language Learners.
4. Principal/Teacher/Parent Interactions.

I thought her best two lines were “teaching is messy and good teachers need to constantly clean up what they are doing” and “children need social and emotional attention in addition to  instructional attention”.

In sum, it was a pleasure to hear a chancellor who has such deep knowledge about the issues. A breath of fresh air for New York City indeed.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

If it wasn’t bad enough that the chances of the U.S. Congress passing a rewrite of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) are slim,  House Republicans attached language that would financially penalize school districts that allow school-based health centers to provide information about abortion to pregnant high school students. As reported in The Huffington Post:

“The amendment to the Student Success Act, a GOP overhaul of No Child Left Behind, would withhold federal funding from school districts that contract with health centers unless the center certifies that it will not provide abortions or give students any information about abortion, including directions to the nearest abortion provider. (School-based health centers already do not provide abortion services.)

The House Rules Committee slipped the new language into a part of the bill known as the “manager’s amendment,” which is normally reserved for non-controversial fixes to a piece of legislation that are agreed to ahead of time.

“This amendment is a cowardly attack on young people’s access to the full range of information about their reproductive health care,” said Cecile Richards, president of the Planned Parenthood Action Fund. “This provision ties the hands of health care professionals in schools, and would deny teens access to important and basic information about their health care options.”

“Once again, abortion opponents in the House went after women’s health under the dark of night,” Richards continued. “And because they know this attack on abortion is deeply unpopular, [they] won’t take an actual vote on it.”

Rep. Randy Neugebauer (R-Texas), who authored the amendment, did not respond to a request for comment.

Republicans also tried to attach an anti-birth control amendment to the bill, but it was ruled out of order, or irrelevant to the main legislation. That amendment, authored by Rep. Doug Lamborn (R-Colo.), would have prohibited federal funds to any school that provides emergency contraception, or a prescription for it, on the premises of a high school or elementary school. The “morning-after pill” is an example of such contraception.

The bill as presently worded would strip the federal government of much of its current power to lift up struggling schools in low-income districts, instead giving the states the authority to make such decisions.

The White House has said President Barack Obama will veto the bill if it passes, arguing that it “abdicates the historic federal role in elementary and secondary education of ensuring the educational progress of all of America’s students, including students from low-income families, students with disabilities, English learners, and students of color.”

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The airwaves in New Jersey have been awash with ads decrying the latest set of standardized tests being promoted by the state education department.  A well-organized coalition of administrators, teachers, parents, and students are mounting the campaign to opt out of the new Common Core testing program developed by a number of states and Pearson.  Education officials say the new tests, which require more writing and critical thinking, as opposed to filling in bubbles on an answer sheet, are a vast improvement over previous exams. And the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC)  exam will give detailed, individual feedback to children in New Jersey for the first time. But in virtually every state, the tests will be tougher than the old ones, stoking fears that scores will plummet, as they did when New York began using its new exams last year.  The new batch of tests in New Jersey, created by PARCC, is facing increasing opposition in a state where students generally perform well on standardized tests compared to the rest of the country. As reported in the New York Times:

“A new wave of standardized exams, designed to assess whether students are learning in step with the Common Core standards, is sweeping the country, arriving this week in classrooms in several states and entering the cross hairs of various political movements. In New Jersey and elsewhere, the arrival has been marked with well-organized opposition, a spate of television attack ads and a cascade of parental anxiety.

Almost every state has an “opt out” movement. Its true size is hard to gauge, but the protests on Facebook, at school board meetings and in more creative venues — including screenings of anti-testing documentaries — have caught the attention of education officials.

…“There are forces united against it on the left side of the aisle and the right of the aisle,” said James Crisfield, a former superintendent of the school district in Millburn, N.J. “We’re also talking about things that are happening to one’s child. You mix that all up into a caldron and it does create some really high levels of interest, high levels of passion — and, shall we say, enthusiasm.”

New Jersey’s teachers’ union, the New Jersey Education Association, is in the midst of a six-week run of advertisements against the partnership, one of which features an emotional parent describing his overworked first grader, and another talking about the elimination of science classes to make way for test preparation. (Testing begins in third grade, but the union contends that schools begin grooming students for it earlier.)

…Some of the loudest objections to the tests, which are also being used by 10 other states and Washington, D.C., are coming from parents.

Several groups in New Jersey, at least one working closely with the teachers’ union, have organized events where parents can take the exam for themselves or watch movies about the dangers of too much standardized testing. One such event was scheduled for Sunday for parents to gather at a Montclair firehouse to nibble light refreshments while watching “The Other Parcc: Parents Advocating Refusal on High Stakes Testing.”

One of the organizers, Christine McGoey, has two children in the local school system, and both will be sitting out the tests.

“I’m refusing because we’re taking a stand against this deeply flawed policy,” Ms. McGoey said. Parents who object to the tests have been communicating their concerns to local officials, she said, “but they’re just not listening.”

“I feel like the only thing left to do is just say no,” she said.

The Common Core curriculum has a lot to offer but education officials and policymakers at the federal and state levels have undermined its credibility with poorly planned implementations and assessments.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

An estimated 15,000 teachers and their supporters rallied in downtown Los Angeles last Thursday, threatening to strike should union and school district representatives fail to reach an agreement to reduce class sizes, raise teacher pay, increase support staff,  and eliminate the existing system for evaluating educators.  According to the Associated Press:

“Dressed in red and raising signs into the air, thousands of teachers filled a downtown Los Angeles park on Thursday in demand of higher wages and smaller class sizes amid stalled contract negotiations.

“Everybody in this country is watching this struggle,” said Joshua Pechthalt, president of the California Federation of Teachers. “It’s a fight about the nature of public education. What is public education going to look like?”

The rally was the largest action yet amid an escalating standoff between union and Los Angeles Unified district leaders: United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA)  is demanding an 8.5 percent salary increase, a demand interim Superintendent Ramon Cortines contends the district cannot meet without significant layoffs.

The union declared an impasse in February and is set to meet with the district and mediators in March. If a resolution is still not reached, a fact finding panel will convene.

Though still several steps away, union officials say they are prepared to strike if needed.

UTLA President Alex Caputo-Pearl and other union leaders have visited hundreds of schools in recent months, talking to teachers and handing out commitment cards. The cards ask teachers to pledge support for a variety of actions, from leafleting to a strike. About half have been returned so far.

“The vast majority of our members have checked off, ‘Are you willing to strike?’ with a, ‘Yes I am willing to strike,'” Caputo-Pearl said to applause and cheers at the rally.

The last major urban district to strike was Chicago Public Schools in 2012. That contract dispute centered largely on the role of student test scores in teacher evaluations.

In contrast, the Los Angeles contract standoff has focused mostly on teacher salaries, class sizes and increasing the number of support staff members like nurses and counselors. The union notes that teachers have gone eight years without a salary increase or cost of living adjustment.”

Good luck to the UTLA!

Tony