California Attorney General Kamala Harris on the Economic Impact of Growing Truancy in Schools - The Atlantic

California Attorney General Kamala Harris on the Economic Impact of Growing Truancy in Schools - The Atlantic:

The Economic Cost of Truancy

It doesn’t matter how good a school is if students don’t show up to class.

In 2012, about 7.5 million students were chronically absent from schools nationwide. According to a report from the Center for American Progress, truancy, defined as unexcused absence from school, is a growing problem.

The consequences of truancy aren’t limited to a few missed lessons, either—there is a litany of long-term side effects that affect not just the children, but also theircommunities and the nation’s economic health as a whole.

The children who are most likely to miss class are perhaps the children who need it most. Studies suggest that students of color, who make up a growing share of the nation’s students, and those living in poverty are more likely to be absent than their white or more affluent peers. These children are less likely to have access to educational resources outside of the classroom and at home. They have higher dropout rates and are less likely to go to college and to be employed as adults. These students are also more likely to end up in prison.

As California Attorney General Kamala Harris said during a press call to discuss the report Tuesday, “This issue of truancy is a public safety issue, it is an economic issue, and I think we can solve it.”

Harris commissioned a study in the mid-2000s that found that nearly 85 percent of elementary-school students in her state who missed at least 10 percent of the school year unexcused came from low-income families. Her team’s research also suggested that nearly four in 10 African American students sampled were truant.

Up until the 1960s and ‘70s, truancy cases were handled by the juvenile justice system. Now, there is more discretion, and students and their families can be enrolled in mentoring programs or parenting classes. Still, CAP found that between 1995 and 2007, the number of petitioned truancy cases tried in courts California Attorney General Kamala Harris on the Economic Impact of Growing Truancy in Schools - The Atlantic:

As Common Core Results Trickle in, Initial Goals Unfulfilled - ABC News

As Common Core Results Trickle in, Initial Goals Unfulfilled - ABC News:

As Common Core Results Trickle in, Initial Goals Unfulfilled

Results for some of the states that participated in Common Core-aligned testing for the first time this spring are out, with overall scores higher than expected though still below what many parents may be accustomed to seeing.

Full or preliminary scores have been released for Connecticut, Idaho, Missouri, Oregon, Vermont, Washington and West Virginia. They all participated in the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium, one of two groups of states awarded $330 million by the U.S. Department of Education in 2010 to develop exams to test students on the Common Core state standards in math and English language arts.

Scores in four other states that developed their own exams tied to the standards have been released. The second testing group, the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers, is still setting benchmarks for each performance level and has not released any results.

Even when all the results are available, it will not be possible to compare student performance across a majority of states, one of Common Core's fundamental goals.

What began as an effort to increase transparency and allow parents and school leaders to assess performance nationwide has largely unraveled, chiefly because states are dropping out of the two testing groups and creating their own exams.

U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan told state leaders in 2010 that the new tests would "help put an end to the insidious practice of establishing 50 different goal posts for educational success."

"In the years ahead, a child in Mississippi will be measured against the same standard of success as a child in Massachusetts," Duncan said.

Massachusetts and Mississippi students did take the PARCC exam this year. But Mississippi's Board of Education has voted to withdraw from the consortium for all future exams.

"The whole idea of Common Core was to bring students and schools under a common definition of what success is," said Tom Loveless, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. "And Common Core is not going to have that. One of its fundamental arguments has been knocked out from under it."

No Child Left Behind, President George W. Bush's signature education law, requires states to test students each year in math and reading in grades three to eight and again in high school. Congress has been debating ways to overhaul the law. The House and Senate have approved As Common Core Results Trickle in, Initial Goals Unfulfilled - ABC News:

POLICY BRIEF: Should Louisiana and the Recovery School District receive accolades for being last and nearly last? – The Network For Public Education

POLICY BRIEF: Should Louisiana and the Recovery School District receive accolades for being last and nearly last? – The Network For Public Education:

POLICY BRIEF: Should Louisiana and the Recovery School District receive accolades for being last and nearly last?

INTRODUCTION

In 2003, the Louisiana legislature created the Recovery School District (RSD). With this law, schools that did not meet “minimum academic standards” were to be taken over by the state.[ii]

Then came Hurricane Katrina.

Striking the coast on August 29, 2005, Katrina destroyed not only New Orleans, but also much of the Mississippi Gulf Coast. Soon after, in November 2005, the Louisiana legislature passed Act 35.[iii] The new law lowered the academic criteria that made a school eligible for takeover and empowered the state to takeover 100 plus “low performing” schools. The RSD was given the vast majority of New Orleans public schools, leaving just a few high-performing schools to be run by the Orleans Parish School Board.[iv]

In 2010, U.S. Secretary of Education and education reformer Arne Duncan infamously referred to Hurricane Katrina as “the best thing to happen to the education system of New Orleans.”[v]Repeatedly, the RSD has been acclaimed as a positive “game changer for New Orleans”[vi] and has been held up as a model for school reform by various education reformers, politicians, foundations, think tanks, and lobbyists in states across the nation. More recently, the education reformers have parlayed a single research study as demonstration of success in the RSD.[vii]

For the 10th anniversary of Katrina, this brief seeks to provide an overview of Louisiana and RSD data ten years after the implementation of widespread “education reform” in New Orleans.

---

The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP)

The NAEP is the largest nationally representative and continuing assessment of what America’s students know and can do in various subject areas.[viii] This analysis will focus on the 8th grade 2013 NAEP Reading and Math— currently the most recent NAEP data available. For a pre- and post- Katrina comparison, 2003 8th grade NAEP is included.

Bottom US States: 2003 NAEP Math 8th[ix]

	2003 Scale Score	2003 Rank		2013 Scale Score		2013 Rank
Louisiana	266	47th	Louisiana	273		47th
New Mexico	263	48th	New Mexico	273		48th
Alabama	262	49th	Mississippi	271		49th
Mississippi	261	50th	Alabama	269		50th
District of Columbia	243	51st	District of Columbia	265		51st

In math, Louisiana increased its scale score 7 points, reflecting longer term rising NAEP scores across the nation. However, relative to all states, it remained ranked at 47th in the nation.

Bottom US States: 2003 NAEP Reading 8th[x]

	2003 Scale Score	2003 Rank			2013 Scale Score	2013 Rank
Louisiana	253	46th	Louisiana		257	47th
Nevada	252	47th	West Virginia		257	48th
New Mexico	252	48th	New Mexico		256	49th
California	251	49th	Mississippi		253	50th
Hawaii	251	50th	District of Columbia		248	51st
District of Columbia	239	51st

In reading, Louisiana also increased the average NAEP scale score. However, its ranking relative to POLICY BRIEF: Should Louisiana and the Recovery School District receive accolades for being last and nearly last? – The Network For Public Education:

Teachers Offer to Work for Free to Save Their School | gadflyonthewallblog

Teachers Offer to Work for Free to Save Their School | gadflyonthewallblog:

Teachers Offer to Work for Free to Save Their School

Lawmakers have failed Chester Upland School District.

And now it’s up to teachers and professional staff to save the day.

For two decades, the Pennsylvania legislature hasn’t fulfilled its duty to equitably fund the public school district. Neither has the federal government. Instead, they left the impoverished school just 20 miles west of Philadelphia to survive on the drip of local property taxes from residents who, themselves, don’t have two pennies to rub together.

Moreover, our lawmakers not only permitted but encouraged three privately run charter schools to come to Delaware County and suck away whatever funds they could from the district while shortchanging student services at their privatized facilities.

And even worse, our elected officials drew up legislation allowing these charters to gobble up more funding from the district than the public school is allowed to spend on its own students.

Surprise! It didn’t work!

So the state put the school in receivership, taking away control from local tax payers so unelected bureaucrats could fix all the problems.

Surprise! That didn’t work, either!

And now state and local officials say there isn’t enough money left in the district’s piggy bank to make payroll by the time the school’s 3,300 students are scheduled to arrive on Wednesday.

In such situations, there’s only one thing to do: close the school. Bus the kids to neighboring districts and any charter or cyber schools willing to take them.

No more Chester Uplands. Another neighborhood school bites the dust.

But the district’s more than 300 employees refused to let that happen.

The dreaded teachers union held a meeting and decided to what? Hold a strike? Demand more pay?

No. The 200 members voted unanimously to work without pay as the school year 

Flood of Lies: Education reform crescendo at #Katrina10 | Cloaking Inequity

Flood of Lies: Education reform crescendo at #Katrina10 | Cloaking Inequity:

Flood of Lies: Education reform crescendo at #Katrina10

Has the flood of lies about education reform has reached a crescendo 10 years post Katrina? The news media (and President Obama) has mostly spun a narrative of “improvement” and “real progress” post Katrina. However, there are several notable stories out this week that are providing counternarrative. I will begin with a look at the national and national comparative data for Louisiana and the RSD in my new policy brief that I collated primarily from Louisiana voices and was released by the the Network for Public Education. I will then conclude with a roundup of the lessons learned from the aforementioned counternarrative.

In 2003, the Louisiana legislature created the Recovery School District (RSD). With this law, schools that did not meet “minimum academic standards” were to be taken over by the state.[ii]

Then came Hurricane Katrina.

Striking the coast on August 29, 2005, Katrina destroyed not only New Orleans, but also much of the Mississippi Gulf Coast. Soon after, in November 2005, the Louisiana legislature passed Act 35.[iii] The new law lowered the academic criteria that made a school eligible for takeover and empowered the state to takeover 100 plus “low performing” schools. The RSD was given the vast majority of New Orleans public schools, leaving just a few high-performing schools to be run by the Orleans Parish School Board.[iv]

In 2010, U.S. Secretary of Education and education reformer Arne Duncan infamously referred to Hurricane Katrina as “the best thing to happen to the education system of New Orleans.”[v]Repeatedly, the RSD has been acclaimed as a positive “game changer for New Orleans”[vi] and has been held up as a model for school reform by various education reformers, politicians, foundations, think tanks, and lobbyists in states across the nation. More recently, the education reformers have parlayed a single research study as demonstration of success in the RSD.[vii]

For the 10th anniversary of Katrina, this brief seeks to provide an overview of Louisiana and RSD data ten years after the implementation of widespread “education reform” in New Orleans.

The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP)

The NAEP is the largest nationally representative and continuing assessment of what America’s students know and can do in various subject Flood of Lies: Education reform crescendo at #Katrina10 | Cloaking Inequity:

George W. Bush, Visiting New Orleans, Praises School Progress Since Katrina - The New York Times

George W. Bush, Visiting New Orleans, Praises School Progress Since Katrina - The New York Times:

George W. Bush, Visiting New Orleans, Praises School Progress Since Katrina

NEW ORLEANS — Returning here Friday 10 years after this city was inundated, former President George W. Bush painted a rosy picture of the recovery since Hurricane Katrina, saying that the devastation had “sparked a decade of reform” in public schools and declaring, “New Orleans is back, and better than ever.”

Visiting one of the schools that became a charter in those early years after the storm, Mr. Bush focused on education, citing the failings of the city’s public schools before Hurricane Katrina, and the marked improvement since. “Isn’t it amazing? The storm nearly destroyed New Orleans and yet, now, New Orleans is the beacon for school reform,” he said.

Mr. Bush did not address what made the flooding a rich target for critics of his administration: the weakness of the initial response to the disaster, when federal, state and city agencies were widely seen as doing far too little to help the stranded and displaced, and doing it much too slowly.

Many New Orleans residents make the distinction between those horrific first days and what was eventually a robust federal rebuilding effort — a difference Mr. Bush himself noted in his memoir, “Decision Points.” “I should have recognized the deficiencies sooner and intervened faster,” he wrote.

Continue reading the main story

10 Years After Katrina

The New Orleans of 2015 has been altered, and not just by nature. In some ways, it is booming as never before. In others, it is returning to pre-Katrina realities of poverty and violence, but with a new sense of dislocation for many, too.

“All of us who are old enough to remember will never forget the images of our fellow Americans amid a sea of misery and ruin,” Mr. Bush said Friday. But twice, he said, “I hope you remember what I remember,” citing the work of military personnel, law enforcement and thousands of volunteers in rescuing, feeding, sheltering and rebuilding.

“In spite of the devastation, we have many fond memories,” he added, recalling sitting with Russel L. Honoré, the retired Army lieutenant general who coordinated the military response to the storm, “on top of one of those big ships, strategizing.”

Mr. Bush received an enthusiastic response from several hundred dignitaries, students and school staff members in the auditorium ofWarren Easton Charter High School, on Canal Street, a former city school that was flooded and battered 10 years ago and reopened the next year as a charter.

But in the city at large, where signs of recovery are just blocks away from neighborhoods where little progress can be seen, bitter memories of the George W. Bush, Visiting New Orleans, Praises School Progress Since Katrina - The New York Times: