NEWS
- DC schools may be too quick to expel and suspend students
- Why civil rights groups say parents who opt out of tests are hurting kids
DC schools may be too quick to expel and suspend students
Greater Greater Washington
By Natalie Wexler
May 5, 2015
School leaders in DC generally agree that suspensions and expulsions should be used as a last resort when disciplining students. Still, many schools are too quick to invoke those measures, according to a recent report.
During the 2012-13 school year, 13% of DC students—about 10,000—were suspended at least once. African-American students were almost six times as likely to be disciplined as white students. Hispanic students were more than twice as likely.
Those racial disparities mirror national trends, which have led to concerns about equity and what is known as the school-to-prison pipeline. Students who are suspended or expelled are more likely to drop out and end up incarcerated.
Last year the federal government issued guidelines urging "strong due process protections" for all students before suspending or expelling them. And a recent report by a DC-based organization argues that traditional public and charter schools here don't always provide those protections.
The report, produced by the Council for Court Excellence, found that almost all school administrators interviewed believed that exclusions from school should be a last resort. At the same time, most charter schools provide that certain offenses, including some non-violent ones, will result in automatic expulsion.
The report recommends that students facing expulsions or suspensions of over ten days have the right to a hearing before an impartial officer, to have counsel representation, and to appeal the decision. Students who are suspended for even a short time should be able to keep up with the instruction their classmates are getting, the report says.
DC Public Schools has a disciplinary code that provides for these protections, but some say it's not clear schools routinely abide by it. For example, the report cites evidence that DCPS has been evading the rules by invoking emergency procedures when a case isn't really an emergency.
Charter disciplinary codes vary
Each charter school in DC has its own disciplinary code, and the report says many don't provide adequate protections for students. Only 37%, for example, provide for a hearing by an impartial officer rather than someone affiliated with the school.
One charter failed to provide any hearing at all for a student who was expelled for a non-violent offense, according to Rochanda Hiligh-Thomas, director of legal services at Advocates for Justice and Education, a group that represents students in disciplinary proceedings. The school provided a hearing only after AJE got involved, by which point the student had missed five months of instruction.
At the hearing, the school gave the student's mother, who didn't understand English, a document in Spanish that mistakenly said the student had been suspended rather than expelled. Ultimately, the school reversed its decision.
Despite reports that charter schools have been expelling fewer students recently, Hiligh-Thomas says her organization continues to see quite a few such cases. "I wouldn't put a whole lot of weight on self-reporting of charter schools," she said.
Alternative schools
When DCPS imposes an expulsion or long-term suspension, it can send the student to an alternative school called CHOICE Academy if the student is in sixth grade or above. There's no equivalent school available to charters, and students who are expelled or suspended often end up in the DCPS system. The report recommends establishing an alternative school for the charter sector.
In fact, the DC Association of Chartered Public Schools is trying to bring a school like that to DC. Dr. Ramona Edelin, executive director of DCACPS and a member of the committee that produced the CCE report, said the group has identified a charter operator that would be "a wonderful fit." The challenge at this point is finding the money to fund the school's start-up.
But to be a solution to the discipline problem, an alternative school needs to be well-run. Parents have complained that DCPS's CHOICE Academy isn't safe and doesn't offer rehabilitation or even actual instruction. One parent described it as a "holding cell," according to a report by DC's school ombudsman.
Reform advocates want a restorative justice approach
Ultimately, the authors of the CCE report and other reform advocates want schools to adopt methods of disciplining students that don't involve excluding them from school. One such method is restorative justice, which uses techniques like "restorative circles" to bring together perpetrators and victims of misbehavior, and sometimes their families as well.
The idea is to get kids to think about the underlying causes of their behavior, and to impose consequences for misconduct that allow students to remain in school while prompting them to change their ways.
Some school systems have apparently had good results with restorative justice, and DCACPS offers training in the approach to charter administrators in DC.
But some charter leaders are skeptical. Eva Moskowitz, the outspoken leader of New York's Success Academies charter network, recently scoffed at the introduction of "restorative circles" into the city's traditional public schools, dismissing the term as "edu-babble."
"Suspensions convey the critical message to students and parents that certain behavior is inconsistent with being a member of the school community," Moskowitz wrote in the Wall Street Journal.
She argued that suspensions are necessary to ensure the orderly environment that allows students to learn. And they prepare students for the real world, she said. There, "when you assault your co-worker or curse out your boss, you don't get a 'restorative circle,' you get fired."
Hiligh-Thomas, on the other hand, compares schools to families. "We don't have the right to kick our kids out of our home when they're not compliant with our rules," she says. "We have to teach them discipline with love."
Schools do have a legitimate interest in keeping disruptive students from interfering with the education of others. But disruptive students also have a right to an education, and excluding them from school makes it unlikely they're going to get it.
And suspension doesn't seem to change kids' behavior. Teachers and administrators have told me the same kids get suspended over and over again.
Restorative justice and other alternative techniques are worth trying, as long as they don't amount to a free pass for kids who violate the rules. But the question is whether harried school administrators will voluntarily move from the quick fix of excluding disruptive students to methods that involve more time, effort, and patience.
Why civil rights groups say parents who opt out of tests are hurting kids
The Washington Post
By Emma Brown
May 5, 2015
A dozen civil rights groups issued a statement Tuesday criticizing the growing movement of parents who refuse to allow their children to take standardized tests, saying the anti-test push “would sabotage important data and rob us of the right to know how our students are faring.”
By removing an increasing number of students from the testing pool, the so-called opt-out movement skews test score data, the groups argued, making it impossible to gauge whether persistent achievement gaps are narrowing.
“We cannot fix what we cannot measure. And abolishing the tests or sabotaging the validity of their results only makes it harder to identify and fix the deep-seated problems in our schools,” the statement said.
The groups that signed the statement included the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, the NAACP, the National Council of La Raza, the National Disability Rights Network and the National Urban League.
Students who refuse tests are still a tiny minority of all test-takers nationwide, but their numbers are growing. The resistance has grown this spring as most states have rolled out new tests aligned to the Common Core academic standards.
Many parents who are refusing to allow their children to test consider it an act of civil disobedience meant to protest what they say is a destructive emphasis on testing that has warped public schools.
In their joint statement Tuesday, the civil rights groups said they recognize that standardized tests have been “misused over time to deny opportunity and undermine the educational purpose of schools, actions we have never supported and will never condone.”
But they said that they rely on the data from those tests to advocate for poor and minority children, who face worse outcomes on every measure, academically and otherwise, than their white and affluent peers.
“For the civil rights community, data provide the power to advocate for greater equality under the law,” they wrote. “Until federal law insisted that our children be included in these assessments, schools would try to sweep disparities under the rug by sending our children home or to another room while other students took the test. Hiding the achievement gaps meant that schools would not have to allocate time, effort, and resources to close them. Our communities had to fight for this simple right to be counted, and we are standing by it.”
Earlier this year, about twice as many civil rights groups signed onto a joint statement asking Congress to maintain annual standardized tests in the next version of No Child Left Behind, the main federal education law.
Federal law requires schools and school districts to ensure that at least 95 percent of students take annual standardized tests. The rule is meant to keep administrators from quietly discouraging low performers to stay home on exam day, something that could skew performance upward and hide racial or socioeconomic inequities.
In some pockets of the country — including in school districts in New York, New Jersey, New Mexico and Ohio — the proportion refusing tests far exceeds 5 percent.
Some superintendents in New York have reported that more than 60 percent of eligible test-takers have refused tests this year, according to the Associated Press. At one Seattle high school, the entire junior class refused to show up for a standardized test last month.
Federal money can be withheld from school districts with low participation rates, but that has not happened in the past and is not yet clear how or whether officials might actually sanction schools and school districts with low participation rates this year.
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