Angie Sullivan: Restorative Justice Requires Funding to Help Kids | Diane Ravitch's blog

Angie Sullivan: Restorative Justice Requires Funding to Help Kids | Diane Ravitch's blog

Angie Sullivan: Restorative Justice Requires Funding to Help Kids

Angie Sullivan teaches impoverished children in Las Vegas. She believes that restorative justice could help them, but only if it is funded.

How do you kill a bill without voting against it?
You take something important like restorative justice – which should be wraparound services and not give any funding. Wraparound services make a huge difference for students. This program is just buzzwords without the services and supplies. Restorative Justice requires money.
Folks need to talk about the wraparound services part of restorative justice.
364 campuses – one teacher to practice and train others = $29 million.
Double that for the basic need supplies you will need to stock up the pantries. Another $29 million
Many teachers keep snacks, bathroom supplies, deodorant, clothing etc in our classrooms for kids. This forces us to take from our own family money and time to address basic needs of students in our path. Nevada Legislators have zero problem demanding that of us and then everyone can complain because we did not give CONTINUE READING: Angie Sullivan: Restorative Justice Requires Funding to Help Kids | Diane Ravitch's blog

The Crumbling Facade of “No Excuses” and Educational Racism – radical eyes for equity

The Crumbling Facade of “No Excuses” and Educational Racism – radical eyes for equity

The Crumbling Facade of “No Excuses” and Educational Racism

Sarah Karp offers a long overdue and somewhat surprising opening lede for WBEZ Chicago, home to a number of charter school chains:

Chicago’s largest charter school network sent a letter to alumni this week admitting that its past discipline and promotion policies were racist and apologizing for them. The apology is notable not just as an acknowledgment of misguided policies, but as a repudiation of the “no-excuses” philosophy adopted by many charter schools during the 2000s.

 TOP CHICAGO CHARTER SCHOOL NETWORK ADMITS A RACIST PAST

“No excuses” ideologies and practices have been a foundational staple of charter schools disproportionately serving Black students, Hispanic students, and poor students well back into the 1990s but blossoming in the 2000s since both political parties jumped on the charter school bandwagon. By the late 2000s, mainstream media and the Obama administration were all-in on charter schools as “miracles.”

There were always two problems with the charter school mania and propaganda—data never supported the “miracle” claims (see my “Miracle School Myth” chapter), and worse of all, “no excuses” ideology has always been racist, shifting the blame and gaze onto students and teachers in order to ignore systemic inequity and racism.

“No excuses” schools always began with the assumption that Black, Hispanic, and poor students are fundamentally “broken” and must be “fixed”—an ugly and racist version of deficit thinking.

Almost a decade ago, I spoke at the University of Arkansas after the publication of my book on poverty and education; in that work and talk, I CONTINUE READING: The Crumbling Facade of “No Excuses” and Educational Racism – radical eyes for equity

Weighing a Transformative Model for Youth Justice - LA Progressive

Weighing a Transformative Model for Youth Justice - LA Progressive

Weighing a Transformative Model for Youth Justice

Last year, Los Angeles County supervisors called on a panel of judges, prosecutors, public defenders and youth advocates to reimagine a juvenile justice system and report back. 

Now, the results are in, and the 150-member group is calling for an entirely new approach: Instead of surveillance and incarceration, teams of counselors, mediators and community members would help respond to crises and guide youth who commit crimes toward restorative justice and job opportunities.

Under the plan expected to be heard by the Board of Supervisors in the next month, the county’s two remaining juvenile halls and its six detention camps would be shut down, with most young people instead housed in “Safe and Secure Healing Centers.” Only those found to have committed the most serious and violent offenses would be held in locked facilities, but they would be reconstructed with a less prison-like and more therapeutic design.

As a result, the juvenile probation department would end its troubled tenure overseeing thousands of young people, replaced by a system driven by a “care first, jail last” philosophy local leaders have said they are committed to enacting.

Kent Mendoza of the Anti-Recidivism Coalition. Image courtesy of the Division of Youth Diversion and Development.

At an initial cost of $75 million, a new youth development department would be charged with diverting many more youth out of the justice system altogether and would oversee community-led “Youth Engagement and Support” teams to provide crisis response and community supervision. 

Should the plan proceed, the jobs of more than 3,400 probation employees who now oversee roughly 530 young people ages 12 to 17 in the county’s juvenile detention facilities and another 4,600 who live at home under department supervision CONTINUE READING: Weighing a Transformative Model for Youth Justice - LA Progressive