Wednesday, April 8, 2015

Questions of Bias Are Raised About a Teachers’ Exam in New York - NYTimes.com

Questions of Bias Are Raised About a Teachers’ Exam in New York - NYTimes.com:

Questions of Bias Are Raised About a Teachers’ Exam in New York

A federal judge is questioning whether a new exam for aspiring teachers in New York is discriminatory against minorities, a case that could derail the state’s efforts to create a more rigorous set of tests for entry into the profession.

Black and Hispanic applicants have been passing one of the exams, intended to measure reading and writing skills, at lower rates than white candidates, prompting concerns of decreased diversity in the teaching ranks.

The judge, Kimba M. Wood of Federal District Court in Manhattan, has asked the state for extensive documentation on the development of the test, which was first given during the 2013-14 school year.

The request came as part of a long-running case brought in 1996 by black and Hispanic teachers against New York City. In 2012, Judge Wood ruled that an older state-certification test, which was intended to measure teachers’ knowledge of the liberal arts and science, was racially discriminatory.

Although compensation has not yet been awarded, the city is expected to have to pay back wages to several thousand teachers who were demoted to being substitutes from the early 1990s to 2004, or were never hired as full-time teachers because they did not pass the older test.

The lawyer for the plaintiffs, Joshua Sohn, a partner at Mishcon de Reya New York, said that he did not know if the new test, the Academic Literacy Skills Test, was discriminatory. But, he said, given the fact that blacks and Hispanics are passing the test at lower levels than whites, “the court has an obligation to ensure that the historical discrimination is not continuing.”

The State Education Department declined to comment on the judge’s request, citing the pending litigation.

The literacy test is the most challenging of four exams introduced in the 2013-14 school year, as part of an effort to raise the caliber of teachers and teacher training programs. Over all, the number of aspiring teachers passing the four required tests dropped by 20 percent from previous years. Students may retake tests they failed.

Under a provision in the new state budget, any graduate-level teacher training program that has fewer than 50 percent of its students pass each certification exam for three consecutive years will not be able to admit new students.

The earlier test that Judge Wood ruled was discriminatory, the Liberal Arts and Sciences Test, was used until 2004. She said that because the minority candidates were failing that test in greater numbers, the burden was on public officials to prove the test served a valid purpose. In similar rulings, judges around the country have thrown out written exams for firefighters and police officers, ruling they were not relevant to the tasks they would perform.

Judge Wood ruled that officials had not shown that the material on the test “accurately measured the minimum knowledge about the liberal arts and sciences that teachers need to be competent.”

She is also expected to rule soon on whether a replacement test with the same name, which was in use from 2004 to 2013, was also discriminatory. If she decides that it was, thousands of additional people who failed the test during that time and thus were barred from full-time teaching positions could make claims against the city for back pay and other benefits. A testing expert appointed by the court submitted a report in February that concluded the state had not proved the test was relevant.

The new literacy test that is now under scrutiny by Judge Wood “requires the teacher to demonstrate an understanding of evidence found in texts and uses cogent reasoning to analyze and synthesize ideas,” according to the State Education Department. “The teacher produces complex and nuanced writing by choosing words, information, and structure deliberately for a given task, purpose, and audience.”

Sample questions provided by the state include a passage about Gertrude Stein’s life in Paris, followed by questions about the passage, and two Questions of Bias Are Raised About a Teachers’ Exam in New York - NYTimes.com:

Reject Common Core, but Don’t Reject Shared Knowledge - Yahoo Finance

Reject Common Core, but Don’t Reject Shared Knowledge - Yahoo Finance:

Reject Common Core, but Don’t Reject Shared Knowledge

Ted Cruz opposes Common Core, according to his website. He thinks every child deserves a quality education and breezily applauds “school choice.” Rand Paul wants to abolish the Common Core, and wants more variety in education choices. Neither seems to make education a priority.

Note to Ted Cruz, Rand Paul and other conservative candidates: voters want to hear how you are going to fix our public schools. You’ve told us what’s wrong with Common Core, but you have failed to offer an alternative. This is vital because promising better schools might help attract Hispanic voters, and also because improved education is essential for our country’s growth and health. You cannot claim to be fiscally responsible while ignoring the failure of our schools to deliver capable graduates.

Today, a tragedy is unfolding. The country has become so convulsed over the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) that the education reform movement risks losing momentum. Conservatives are especially furious about Common Core. They see the proposed establishment of the fact-based education standards as tantamount to a federal takeover of our schools. Never mind that CCSS was developed by the Council of Chief State School Officers and the National Governors Association.

Never mind that the feds are not allowed by law to create curriculum, and that the CCSS leaves that chore to local communities. The Obama White House unwittingly muddied the water by tying Race to the Top money to adoption of CCSS in a small way, fueling the “Washington-takeover” narrative, and the opposition took off.

We now have a remarkable coalition between the far right and the far left that may well torpedo the Common Core. Though nearly all states adopted the standards beginning in 2010, some, like Oklahoma and South Carolina, have more recently withdrawn from using the CCSS. More will likely follow.

The antipathy from the right is philosophical; they dislike Big Government and Big Business, and see both trying to influence local schools. In addition to the Obama administration, the Chamber of Commerce has backed the CCSS, responding to employers worried about a scarcity of educated workers.

The pushback from the left also reflects hostility towards the meddling of wealthy business tycoonslike Bill Gates, whose foundation has been the principle funder of the standards More important, left-leaning critics of CC line up behind those predictably opposed to data-driven measurements of student achievement. In this column put teachers’ unions, who do not like evaluations, because not every teacher will pass muster. In a 2014 survey, only 46% of teachers supported CC, down from 76 percent the year before.

Critics on both sides of the political spectrum note little evidence that standards actually raise performance, a reasonable concern. Parents are caught up in the debate, hoping their kids will emerge with better skills and knowledge, but they’re unhappy with what many view as excessive testing that has shown students underachieving. Also, some of the teaching methods introduced by states incorporating CCSS are downright whacky.

The Left’s persistent remedy for our education shortcomings is to throw more money into our schools, even though we spend more than any nation on earth, and see little result.

Conservatives have not yet offered up a solution, save talk of school choice, which is like being in favor of a secure border. Both appeal, but the roadmap is invisible. Voters should demand more from conservatives. Those on the right celebrate self-sufficiency and the freedoms that allow individual success. But, the economic and social mobility that has been a hallmark of our country’s past Reject Common Core, but Don’t Reject Shared Knowledge - Yahoo Finance:

Federal After-School Program Not Restored in Bipartisan ESEA Bill - Time and Learning - Education Week

Federal After-School Program Not Restored in Bipartisan ESEA Bill - Time and Learning - Education Week:

Federal After-School Program Not Restored in Bipartisan ESEA Bill

The $1.15 billion federal after-school funding program was not restored in the widely anticipated bipartisan agreement to reauthorize the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) released Tuesday afternoon.

As written, the compromise bill, known as the Every Child Achieves Act of 2015, eliminates the21st Century Community Learning Centers (CCLC) program—the only federal funding source dedicated to after-school programs—and rolls it into a single block grant along with all other non-academic programs and services in Title IV of ESEA.

CCLC provides funding for more than 1.6 million students in about 11,000 after-school programs across the country.

Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., the chairman of the Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions, which oversees ESEA reauthorization, proposed the block grant earlier this year, saying that states should get to decide how to spend their federal education funds. You can read more about that here in Education Week.

Erik Peterson, vice president of policy for the Washington-based Afterschool Alliance, a nonprofit organization that advocates for after-school programming, said CCLC suporters weren't suprised.

"That's more or less what we expected," said Peterson, adding that it was their understanding that the compromise bill would focus on disagreements in Title I and Title IX of the education bill and not address the other sections.

"[Sen. Alexander's] preference is to use the markup process next week to have senators" bring amendments forward to restore the program, Peterson said.

He said that effort is being led by two HELP committee members, Senators Bernie Sanders, I-Vermont, and Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska.

The new bipartisan agreement is scheduled to be taken up by the committee on Tuesday, April 14.Federal After-School Program Not Restored in Bipartisan ESEA Bill - Time and Learning - Education Week:

The education model that fell apart | Capital New York

The education model that fell apart | Capital New York:

The education model that fell apart

ALBANY—A few blocks from the Capitol, a cluster of vacant buildings testifies to the rapid rise and quick retreat of Albany’s charter school sector.

Once heralded as a new beginning for children living in grinding poverty and stuck in a long-troubled school district, Albany’s charter system has so far failed to live up to that promise. Five of the 12 charter schools that opened in the last decade have already closed, and others are being skeptically eyed by state officials.

The failures of Albany’s charter sector reflect some of the significant questions that surround Governor Andrew Cuomo’s push to expand the state’s charter sector in this year’s budget.

Charters were designed to rattle a public school system that graduates far less than half its student body in most of the state’s major cities and that has proven remarkably resistant to major change. Cuomo has offered a full-throated endorsement of charter schools, appearing at a massive rally last year and enacting new protections for the sector in last year’s state’s budget. This year, Cuomo wants to expand the sector even more, over the objections of Democrats in the state Assembly and their traditional allies in the state teachers’ union.

In Albany, all of the charter schools currently operating were supported by the Brighter Choice Foundation, created by Pataki-era officials who helped write the state’s charter laws. Once considered a gold standard of charter operations, two Brighter Choice middle schools were closed by the state’s Charter Schools Institute after just five years in operation, because 80 percent of the students were not proficient in English and math. Other charter schools in Albany, including an all-girls high school with a graduation rate of 51 percent, could be shuttered in the near future for poor performance.

In total, Albany taxpayers have spent more than $300 million on the city’s charter schools in the last decade, Albany school district spokesman Ron Lesko said. Many of those schools have now been closed.

“We didn’t need to spend scores of millions of dollars to find out that the work our teachers and staff do and the staff in Rochester, Syracuse, Buffalo and New York City, and every city in poor communities in America is doing is hard work,” he said. “There is no quick and easy fix and privatizing education is no answer and that’s been proven here.”

The failure in Albany has shown the disruption that charters can cause to public school systems and surrounding neighborhoods. The Brighter Choice middle schools set to close were built just a few years ago, near the foundation’s headquarters. Half of a city block was leveled and residents were displaced from their homes.

The closure of those schools has created an administrative nightmare for the Albany city school district, which must now establish an entirely new middle school in the next six months to handle the almost 400 charter school students who were enrolled in the failed The education model that fell apart | Capital New York:

Silent no more: Boston's ‘unwanted’ educators rip school administrators | Boston Herald

Silent no more: Boston's ‘unwanted’ educators rip school administrators | Boston Herald:

Silent no more: Boston's ‘unwanted’ educators rip school administrators

Kids lose on bottom line

EDUCATION AS BUSINESS’: Aytul Farquharson, left, a 15-year music teacher with degrees from Harvard and Berklee, and Andrea Devine, right, a 14-year ESL teacher, say they’ve been shunted aside in Boston Public Schools for younger teachers with smaller salaries.

Boston teachers who are unwanted by principals or in limbo because of budget cuts say they’ve been cast aside just to save money,  and to make way for  cheaper, more malleable newcomers.

“If you see education as a business, this is the right route to go. But if you  see this as the future of  our children, it is dead wrong,” Aytul Farquharson, a 15-year music teacher with degrees from Harvard and Berklee, said yesterday in an exclusive interview with the Herald.

“They’re looking at, ‘OK, I can get a $48,000 first-year teacher, I don’t need the teacher to be from Harvard, Berklee,’” said Farquharson, who was cut from her school last year and  relegated to “co-teacher” duties in another classroom.

The Herald sat down with three teachers from the controversial unwanted pool. They are among the 72 teachers, totaling some $6 million in salaries, who lost their positions due to budget cuts or school closings or when principals had broad discretion over who to keep and who to scrap. They are now assigned as co-teachers in other people’s classrooms.

They fear they’ve been branded subpar through no fault of their own and have seen their professional prospects damaged.

“They’re not looking at your performance as a great teacher, they’re looking at the dollars beside your name,” said Denise, a 20-plus-year visual arts teacher who asked that her last name not be used. As a co-teacher, she works on writing and reading skills with students who speak foreign languages.

Andrea Devine, a 14-year  ESL instructor, said she is convinced money was a motive after her former school was declared a “turnaround school,” mean- ing all of its 25 or so teachers were laid off.

“(The principal) kept four teachers, all of them very young, and didn’t rehire any of the rest of us,” Devine said. “The whole experience really made me feel very broken and crushed.”

The three teachers stressed they do not have issues with principals in the schools they are currently assigned to.

Records obtained by the Herald show more than 75 percent of the teachers in the pool are 50 or older, with an average age of 54. Union officials say the teachers are also among the highest earners in the district because of their experience and advanced  degrees; all three teachers who spoke to the Herald make in the $100,000  range.

A Boston Public Schools spokeswoman said the claims about financial motives are “absolutely not true,” and that the aim of the new hiring system is to let principals hire who they want and let teachers pick their schools.

As of last year, teachers no longer need seniority to interview for job openings.

Teachers who aren’t picked up but have three years’ experience are guaranteed a classroom under state Silent no more: Boston's ‘unwanted’ educators rip school administrators | Boston Herald:

Hispanic, Black Parents More Likely to Approve Common Core State Standards: Poll : Latin Life & Culture : Latin Post

Hispanic, Black Parents More Likely to Approve Common Core State Standards: Poll : Latin Life & Culture : Latin Post:

Hispanic, Black Parents More Likely to Approve Common Core State Standards: Poll

Black and Hispanic parents are more likely to approve of the Common Core, according to a recent poll.

Common Core State Standards, a set of high-quality academic standards in mathematics and English language arts/literacy, have met opposition in cities across the nation, including Portland, Oregon, New York City and St. Tammany Parish, Louisiana. While those cities are wildly diverse, the protestors these cities boast are fairly homogeneous, meaning that they're overwhelmingly white.

The Pearson-sponsored NBC News State of Parenting Poll found that 50 percent of parents approved of Common Core and 38 percent are opposed to grade level expectations in math and English. Seventy-three percent of Hispanic parents and 56 percent of black parents indicated that they favor the Common Core, according to the poll. At the same time, 49 percent of those in opposition are white parents.

Common Core's agenda is to implement college--and career-ready standards and tests into schools. For many non-white parents, any form of standardized education is better than the substandard education that's historically been given to underserved communities. However, many whites see the standards as a political overreach by the Obama administration, which has trifled with federal education funding.

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What Will Be the Legacy of Today's School 'Reforms'? | Vicki Cobb

What Will Be the Legacy of Today's School 'Reforms'? | Vicki Cobb:

What Will Be the Legacy of Today's School 'Reforms'?

The other day I was doing a program for a group of 4th-6th graders at a local public library. I introduced myself to them by telling them how I had LOVED school so much when I was a kid that I basically recreate it for myself everyday as I write my books. The kids' reaction to my confession was a unanimous, vociferous, vocal expression of how much they disliked school. I was startled. After all, I've told this to children many times before at school visits. Was this because the venue was not in school and they felt freer to express themselves? Or has something changed to make school more onerous? These were privileged kids from an affluent public school district. Could it be because they had just finished a month of standardized testing? What's going on here?

This is just the latest piece of evidence that something is rotten in American education. It seems that many people in a position of power believe that education is too important to allow professional educators do their jobs because they have failed to produce a consistently excellent product of people who are college and career ready after twelve years of schooling. They believe the way to excellence is to first write a law decreeing "No Child Left Behind" or "All Children College and Career Ready" to set a policy, without consulting anyone who actually teaches children. And then to test, test, test, to see if these impossible standards have been met. Meanwhile, they are creating a population of quietly submissive students and teachers who narrow the curriculum to what they hope will be on the test while administrators are cutting art, music, physical education programs and librarians to pour more of their limited financial resources into test prep and test grading. I could go on and on but the person who has done that the best is Diane Ravitch. She has brilliantly connected the dots between history and the misguided public policies that have brought us to this abysmal state in this recent piece in the New York Review of Books "The Lost Purpose of School Reform."

Since I have autonomy and freedom as a free-lance writer, I can spend time followingDiane Ravitch. She keeps coming and coming, tirelessly pointing out the failures of education policy in myriad ways, aggregating other voices, who also speak powerfully. There are also many popular uprisings, particularly from parents, who see the toll their kids are paying for high-stakes testing. Yet, the NY state legislature just passed Cuomo's new budget plan with such a punitive and draconian assessment plan for teachers that it will effectively decimate the profession. What will it take to for politicians to get the message that all of this is just plain wrong? Diane just reported that Merryl Tisch, Chancellor of NYS Board of Regents has suggested that high performing districts, like the one where I was speaking, be exempt from Cuomo's fear-mongering teacher assessment program, thus creating a two-tiered system where the rich (educationally speaking) get richer. Where is it written in our hallowed Constitution that Liberty and Justice is NOT for all? The politicians who voted with "heavy hearts" for Cuomo's plan are all too timid to stick it to the lobbyists in whose pockets they reside.

Let me take this opportunity to remind us that human beings, from the moment they appear on this earth, are born to learn. A baby is as smart as s/he will ever be. What Will Be the Legacy of Today's School 'Reforms'? | Vicki Cobb:

Senate Plan to Revise No Child Left Behind Law Would Not Measure Teachers by Test Scores - NYTimes.com

Senate Plan to Revise No Child Left Behind Law Would Not Measure Teachers by Test Scores - NYTimes.com:

Senate Plan to Revise No Child Left Behind Law Would Not Measure Teachers by Test Scores

A bipartisan Senate bill revising the No Child Left Behind law, and eliminating many of its most punitive elements, was announced on Tuesday.

The bill retains the requirement for yearly tests in math and reading for every student in third through eighth grade, and once in high school, and requires that the scores, broken down by race and income, be made public.

But it ends the framework under which almost all public schools were found to be failing, and could defuse what has become an all-out campaign by teachers, joined by many parents, to prevent having their job performances measured by students’ test scores.

The proposed legislation was negotiated by Senators Lamar Alexander, Republican of Tennessee, and Patty Murray, Democrat of Washington. Earlier this year, a House bill was abruptly pulled, mid-debate, when it became clear that it would not muster enough Republican support to pass.

The Senate proposal requires that states adopt “challenging” academic standards in reading, math and science that would enable students to fulfill state vocational guidelines or to enter public universities in the state without having to take remedial classes. But the bill specifically deprives the secretary of education of the power to approve these standards.

Opposition to standardized testing has boiled over in recent years as the Obama administration used financial incentives and relief from the most onerous provisions of the No Child Left Behind law to require that states tether teachers’ job performance ratings to student test scores. The new Senate bill makes clear that states are not required to formally evaluate teachers or to use test scores if they do.

Also, under the proposal, the federal government would no longer prescribe how the states must handle schools with continuously poor scores.

“This is a big deal,” said Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers. “It goes back to the original intent of the law, to level the playing field for at-risk kids.”

She added, “The decreased emphasis on testing and the stakes that go along with it will help create some oxygen, so the attention is on instruction and the joy of learning.”

Lily Eskelsen Garcia, president of the National Education Association, the country’s largest teachers union, however, expressed disappointment that the new bill retained annual testing requirements.

“Are you going to give that third grader some relief from test and punish?” she said. “Under this proposal, they still have to take just as many tests.”

The No Child Left Behind law, passed in 2001, was the signature education achievement of the George W. Bush administration and created an elaborate set of cascading punishments for schools that failed to make “adequate yearly progress” on test scores. It expired in 2007, but Congress has repeatedly failed to reauthorize the legislation, formally known as the Elementary and Secondary Education Act.

At its heart, the battle over the reauthorization reflects disagreement about how large a role the federal government should play in public schools. Democrats often argue that the most vulnerable children need the protection of the federal government. Republicans make the case that education is traditionally a state function and that the federal government has overstepped its bounds in recent years.

At a time when new, widely adopted academic standards known as the Common Core have led to bruising political battles, the Senate proposal prohibits the Education Department from pushing states to adopt any specific curriculum guidelines.

Robert Schaeffer, the public education director at FairTest, a watchdog group concerned with standardized testing, said he hoped that when the bill came up for debate, the amendment process would lead to “grade span” testing, in which children would be assessed in reading, math and science once in elementary school, once in middle school and once in high school, reducing the number of required tests to nine from 17.

Throughout the long negotiations over reauthorizing the law, civil rights Senate Plan to Revise No Child Left Behind Law Would Not Measure Teachers by Test Scores - NYTimes.com:

America is criminalizing Black teachers: Atlanta’s cheating scandal and the racist underbelly of education reform - Salon.com

America is criminalizing Black teachers: Atlanta’s cheating scandal and the racist underbelly of education reform - Salon.com:

America is criminalizing Black teachers: Atlanta’s cheating scandal and the racist underbelly of education reform

Our educational system stacks the deck against Black children -- now we're throwing their teachers in jail

Former Atlanta Public Schools school research team director Tamara Cotman, center, is led to a holding cell after a jury found her guilty in the Atlanta Public Schools test-cheating trial, Wednesday, April 1, 2015, in Atlanta. (Credit: AP/Kent D. Johnson)

Last week, an Atlanta jury convicted 11 teachers and school administrators of racketeering in a system-wide cheating scandal. Yes, you read that correctly. Teachers and administrators inflating student scores on standardized tests is now considered “organized crime” in this country, and is punishable by more 20 years in prison, in these cases.

I am an educator. I am a Black woman who may someday mother a Black child. I have taught other Black mothers’ children. Much of my educational success in elementary school is directly attributable to high performance on standardized tests that caused my white teachers to notice me and intervene on my behalf to get me “tracked” into higher-achieving classrooms. I believe all children deserve access to a good, high-quality,public education.

Therefore, I don’t have to condone cheating in any form (and I don’t) to assert that what has happened in Atlanta to these teachers is a travesty. The pictures that emerged last week of handcuffed Black schoolteachers being led out of Southern courtrooms in one of the country’s largest urban Black school systems were absolutely heartbreaking.

Scapegoating Black teachers for failing in a system that is designed for Black children, in particular, not to succeed is the real corruption here. Since the early 1990s, we have watched the deprofessionalization of teaching, achieved through the proliferation of “teacher fellow” programs and the massive conservative-led effort to defund public education in major urban areas throughout the country. There is no longer a consensus that a good public education — a hallmark of American democracy — should be considered a public good.

Black children have for generations been the primary victims of this continuing social mendacity about the national value of education. More than 51 percent of children who attend public schools live in poverty. In Georgia, the percentage of Black children living in poverty hovers right around 39 percent. For Latino children, the number is consistently over 40 percent. Nationally, the number for Black children is 39 percent, according to most recent data, and 33 percent for Latino youth.

Eighty percent of children in Atlanta Public Schools are Black. Eleven percent are white and 3 percent are Latino. However, only 50 percent of children in Atlanta’s Gifted and Talented programs are Black, whereas 40 percent are white. More disturbingly, 98 percent of all students expelled from Atlanta public schools during the 2009-2010 academic school year were Black.

These numbers taken together paint an abysmal picture of students who are disproportionately poor, over-disciplined, and systematically “tracked” out of high-performing classrooms. And yet we expect teachers to work magic in conditions that are set up for failure.

Lest you think this is merely an Atlanta problem, over at the Crunk Feminist Collective, Susana Morris tells a similar story of attending a predominantly Black high school in Florida with advanced classes that were overwhelmingly white.

Her story mirrors my own. In Louisiana in the 1980s and 1990s, students took two standardized tests. One (the LEAP test) measured basic proficiency and the other (the California Achievement Test) measured more advanced proficiencies. In the third grade, I scored 100 percent on the LEAP test, the only student in my overwhelmingly white class to do so. The teacher Mrs. Callender called me up to the front of the room and bragged about me to all the other students. That same year, on the CAT Test, I scored in the 89 percent percentile.

Meanwhile, I noticed one day during class that several of my white classmates, among them my best friend Amanda, were all mysteriously led out of class and then returned later, with no explanation. When I asked Amanda where she’d been, she said school officials had made her take a test, but she wasn’t clear what for. She never mentioned it again.

The next year, fourth grade, I walked into a classroom and met Beatrice Gaulden, one of only three Black academic teachers I would ever have. With her neon green and yellow Hammer-pants, her penchant for drinking eight tall glasses of water a day, and her strict instructions each morning – we were not to approach her desk, but rather to wait until she moved to a stool in the front of the room for open discussion time — she was a wonder. Mrs. Gaulden is a character in most of my childhood stories of transformation because she was so pivotal to my own sense of self-worth as an outspoken, bossy, loquacious, bespectacled, ponytailed Black girl in a predominantly white classroom.

Because of Mrs. Gaulden’s instruction, my test scores leaped from the 89th percentile to America is criminalizing Black teachers: Atlanta’s cheating scandal and the racist underbelly of education reform - Salon.com:

Why Are Kids Suspended? | Margaret Crotty

Why Are Kids Suspended? | Margaret Crotty:

Why Are Kids Suspended?

Mayor de Blasio's recent announcement that the New York City Department of Education would seek to reduce the number of student suspensions has sparked a conversation about the effectiveness -- and fairness -- of suspensions as a disciplinary tool. The Department of Education reported that in the 2013-2014 school year there were 53,504 suspensions in NYC. We debated this as a society for decades, and it is time to talk about what triggers the behaviors that result in thousands of suspensions, and how schools could better address them.

Under the Mayor's new proposal, there will be an increase in principal accountability of suspensions and in the use of restorative justice and peer mediation programs -- community approaches to handle offenses. The goal is to create a safer school climate that ensures the social-emotional and behavioral success as well as the educational success of all students. Like many working in the public school community, I applaud this direction. When a suspension deprives a student of the support system a school could provide, it massively increases that student's likelihood of dropping out of school, being at risk for court involvement, or future unemployment. Suspensions may not be directly responsible for these larger issues, but they are, according to The Civil Rights Project, one of the greatest indicators of whether a child will drop out. A 2011 report from the National Education Policy Center found that 95 percent of suspensions are for disruptive behavior. So the question is why are some children more likely to engage in this type of behavior and are suspensions -- often a predictor of future entanglements with the law -- really the answer?

Childhood trauma is a primary contributor to disruptive behavior in the classroom. Traumatic events for children include abuse (emotional, physical, sexual); neglect (emotional, physical); and growing up in households with domestic violence, and drug or alcohol abuse. Child Trends, a nonprofit research center, reports that poor children are more than twice as likely as their more affluent peers to experience multiple Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs), and the probability of severe childhood trauma decreases as family income increases. They found that 14 percent of children living at the poverty level or below had three or more adverse experiences, compared with only six percent among children living at more than twice the poverty level.

The stress of living in poverty and the deep-rooted trauma from ACEs often manifests in the classroom as "problem" behaviors. Students living in poverty face enormous external challenges--including community and housing instability, food insecurity, neglect and neighborhood violence. How can an eight-year-old understand healthy interpersonal interactions when he is hungry, scared or worried about his parents? Too often, behavioral issues are symptoms of stress--stress that stems from chronic trauma.

At Partnership with Children (PWC), we work with schools to identify the child's specific needs and provide the appropriate mental health interventions and a supportive environment. Oftentimes when we start working with schools, we find teachers who are overwhelmed and schools feel they have no choice but to remove the child from the classroom and the school. These punitive approaches end up unfairly targeting the very children who need support services most.

PWC social workers are in schools in some of New York City's highest-need Why Are Kids Suspended? | Margaret Crotty: