Think about that statistic for a second. Roughly seven out of every ten teens are sifting through a combination of Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter and a multitude of other sites. Ninety-two percent of teens browse the internet daily, and 24 percent report they are “online constantly.”
Technology is now the common way of life, especially for teens. With the widespread use of this technology, it should not be surprising teens have adopted an age-old practice to fit into this digital age — bullying.
Cyberbullying as a practice is simple to understand. Teens pick on other teens through the use of technological platforms. And yes, it is a big deal. Almost 43 percent of kids have reported they have been cyberbullied. So, when kids are being harassed through social media or even in person, what is their defense? How can they prevent this? Many think there is only one answer. And that’s to simply not show up to school.
Absenteeism is not a new issue for the education community. One of the educator’s main jobs is to take attendance and make sure their students are showing up to class. If they don’t show up, then it is the educator’s responsibility to notify the administration of an absent child. New studies that look into absenteeism give stunning results that should be raising red flags.
In a study that encompassed over 500 school districts, it was found that 30 percent of students missed at least three weeks of school for the entire year. Three weeks equals out to 15 days of learning and development these kids miss out on. While this statistic is alarming, the question that naturally comes up is what is causing this high percentage of absences. While sickness and family issues are a natural part of the process, ABC News conducted a study on cyberbullying and found some intriguing results.
According to the ABC study, 160,000 students stay home from school every day because of bullying. That means 160,000 students are not getting a proper education because of the presence of bullying in all forms and shapes. It may blow you away, but it’s apparent that bullying is a serious problem in school and should not, under any circumstance, be ignored or thrown to the wayside.
Specifically, cyberbullying is a tough act to stop. While teachers can break up fights and keep students away from each other physically, the online arena is a whole different world. Harassment doesn’t just stop when the kids go home for the day. It follows them.
Facebook posts, insulting tweets and horrific Instagram pictures are all tools for cyberbullies. And then there are the texts, which put down the victim and pummel their mind until they believe what the bully is saying.
With cyberbulling being so prevalent, it’s hard to contain it and stop it. Technology is great in so many respects and is used quite often in the classroom. Chromebooks are employed in many schools on a regular basis for testing and enhancing the students’ learning experience. Built-in projectors that hang on the classroom ceiling allow teachers and students to explore any question they have about a topic as the internet is just a click and keystroke away. Technology isn’t going anywhere and is already becoming a normal method of teaching in the classroom.
The technology in the classroom also allows for a diversity of experiences to be seen, felt and heard. Students who learn better by doing can participate in experiential learning on their laptops while students who listen well can watch examples of their lessons play out on their computers. Technology allows all types of learning to occur, which is the goal of every teacher who cares about their students.
While correlation does not prove causation, technology does open up a new avenue for bullying. As with most things in life, there are good things and bad things associated with it. Taking away technology is not going to solve the problem of cyberbullying and absenteeism. Instead, educators and parents need to come up with a strategy to monitor their students’ and children’s activities online.
According to numerous sources, America is experiencing a nationwide teacher shortage that will undoubtedly escalate to a crisis within the next two years. Recent reports state that there are currently over 30,000 teacher vacancies this year that will increase to 70,000 over the next two years. The reasons for the decline in the number of teachers are correlated to teacher evaluation systems blended with high stakes standardized testing implemented over the past ten years, a shrinking student base in teacher education programs, a lack of respect for the teaching profession, and low salaries and benefits. These variables lead to challenging circumstances for urban, suburban and rural school districts across the country.
Recently, like many Americans, I had the task of choosing a new medical provider as my previous medical plan was no longer offered. While making a decision on the medical provider was relatively simple, once I enrolled in the medical plan I was faced with the daunting task of choosing a primary care physician (PCP). After going through the PCP candidate biographies and photos, I began to ask myself, “Where are the African American male doctors?” As an African American male educator, I understand being underrepresented in a profession as we comprise approximately 2% of the teacher workforce. However, I was disappointed because I did not have the opportunity select an African American male doctor. From that experience, I began to contemplate how not having a diverse workforce could impact the lives of African Americans.
Although diversifying the medical profession has been discussed in detail, the results are still staggering. According to the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) approximately 3.3% of US physicians are African American. Moreover, in 2014 African Americans account for approximately 2.5% of medical school faculty. When looking at African American males specifically, the AAMC found in their 2015 report titled, Altering the Course: Black Males in Medicine, that in 2014, African American males comprised 37.5% of African American medical school applicants, the lowest of any gender and/or racial group. Given the barriers for African Americans generally and males specifically such as dealing with racism, stereotype threat, and racial discrimination in medical school, residencies, and in the workforce, these numbers are no surprise. However, we must do more to support the matriculation, graduation, and professional development of African American males considering and/or currently in the medical profession.
When seeking to understand the nature of the underrepresentation of African American men in the medical profession it is imperative that researchers and policy makers examine the entire education pipeline (PK-20) as barriers exist at each level that limit the number of African American males in medicine. For instance, the AAMC reports that interests in science, technology engineering, and mathematics (STEM) disciplines is a strong indicator medical colleges use to determine possible medical school applicants. However, K-12 institutions have often created school climates where African American males are led to believe that they are either a “math or science student” or a “humanities student.” The results of this approach are devastating as these negative experiences may lead African American males to not even consider a STEM undergraduate major altogether. While having a STEM degree is not a requirement for admission into medical school, it is paramount that African American men have a strong STEM background to prepare for the Medical College Admission Test.
Although there are numerous barriers that exist for African American men in the medical profession, it is also essential to explore how African American males succeed in medical school and in the profession. In particular, historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) are in position to prepare and train African-American medical doctors. In 2013, Howard University and Xavier University led the country in African American undergraduates who went on to U.S. medical schools. HBCUs have historically served students from underserved communities; thus, these institutions should be an integral part of the conversation on increasing the representation of African American males in medical school.
Unfortunately, the lack of African American physicians negatively impacts African American men. They do not have access to doctors who look like them, share lived experiences, or recognize their struggles. Changing this current trend is important as several studies suggest that patients are more likely to seek support from a doctor of the same race. In addition, African American doctors are more likely to work in communities with higher concentrations of minority patients. Limited access to African American male doctors can also have an impact on African American males’ decision to seek treatment. Given that eight of the top 10 leading causes of death for African Americans according to the Center for Disease Control (CDC) are preventative, African American male doctors are in place to help address healthcare inequities that adversely impact the African American community. Furthermore, as our nation’s population continues to become more racially and ethnically diverse, it is critical to have doctors who reflect this demographic shift.
The 2015 AAMC report on increasing the representation of African American male doctors has opened a conversation that I hope continues and is addressed. We must work collaboratively to increase the amount of African American males not only attending medical school, but graduating from these institutions. Solving this issue will require educational institutions (K-12 and higher education) generally, and medical schools specifically to examine how the school climate and culture negatively impact the socialization of African American males. To support the increase in African American males doctors it is critical to form an African American male medical pipeline that fosters partnerships between practicing African American male physicians, current medical students, African undergraduates considering applying to medical school, and high school and middle school males considering the medical profession. For instance, a collaboration between Howard University’s Department of Psychology and School of Medicine, the Young Doctors DC program provides opportunities for middle and high school African American young men to be mentored and trained by African American physicians and medical students in order to prepare them for a career in healthcare and to make an impact on underserved communities. These types of support structures are critical to ensuring that African American males have a support system throughout their academic and professional careers.
Ramon B. Goings is the Program Coordinator of the Sherman STEM Teacher Scholars Program at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County and a doctoral candidate in Urban Educational Leadership at Morgan State University. He conducts research on Black male student success PK-PhD, nontraditional student success in higher education, and STEM teacher preparation.
As an English teacher in Oklahoma’s Moore Public Schools, I was recruited by some textbook providers to help them create content. It was a lot of fun, and I was happy to make some extra money doing it. But there are so many teachers in our district who are much more talented than I am. If I was developing curriculum materials that school systems across the nation were purchasing, they certainly could be doing this, too.
So when I became a technology integration specialist for the district, one of my long-term goals was to leverage the expertise of our teachers in creating high-quality digital content.
Teachers are already scouring the web for videos, articles, and other free instructional resources, then pulling these together into coherent lessons and adding their own valuable context to help students understand the material or promote deeper lines of inquiry.
My thought was, why don’t we take some of the money we’re hemorrhaging on expensive, print-based textbooks that aren’t interactive and don’t effectively capture students’ imagination—and use it to pay our teachers more money for their efforts instead?
Our vision is to create a central repository of exemplary digital content that is developed and curated by teachers, for teachers in our district. All teachers would have access to these shared instructional materials. Not all teachers would be required to contribute, but those who do could receive a stipend for their work if it’s approved as a district-vetted lesson or unit.
This would allow us to use our most powerful assets—our teachers—to their fullest potential, while also recognizing and giving value to teachers for the lesson planning and content creation they already do so well.
That’s important, because in Oklahoma, our teachers are among the lowest paid in the nation—and many leave the profession after only a few years. Honoring their talents and contributions could help stop this mass exodus of young teachers as well as veteran content experts and keep them in our schools.
To realize this vision, we needed to have a technology platform that would support teachers in creating and sharing digital lessons. We found this platform in Ogment, which helped us create curriculum by making it easier to grab digital content, including what we found on the web, and turn that into useable lessons for our classrooms.
Part of the problem is not the lack of resources, but rather the overabundance of resources. Every teacher knows how much great content exists online—but managing it all can be a nightmare. Ogment has let our teachers clip videos, articles, games, and other internet resources and put them into lessons or presentations with a simple drag-and-drop process. Then, they can embed questions within a lesson to check for students’ understanding or prompt further discussion—and they can easily share their lessons with other teachers.
Our teachers have used the service to “flip” their classrooms and even personalize instruction. For instance, Tiffany Truesdell, a math teacher at Westmoore High School, says she has used Ogment to make customized lessons for her students.
“I can assign a lesson that presents all the material, and as students go through the lesson, I can have questions that check for their understanding just as if I were presenting the material in class. I can pull videos from any website to enhance the lesson, and if I only want a small section of the video, Ogment lets me assign just that portion of the video in my lesson,” she says.
“Ogment also allows me to differentiate a lesson. For example, if I have a student on an IEP who needs multiple choice, but I want the other students to have a free response question, I can create the lesson once but with differentiated questions. When the questions come up, it will give the IEP student the multiple choice question instead.”
Mrs. Truesdell’s example shows that with the right technology, our district can build a shared repository of lessons that is truly usable. More importantly, a system like this allows our teachers to apply their talents and reignite their passion for creating great content.
We are working toward a model in which we pay teachers extra for the content they create and share through this tool. We’re not there yet; we’re still trying to free up the funding to be able to do this.
But when we come up with the funding to realize our vision, we’ll be able to pay our teachers extra for creating and sharing top-notch lessons—rewarding teachers for their work and restoring professionalism to the field.
Brandon Wilmarth is a technology integration specialist for Moore Public Schools in Oklahoma.
This article is a part of The Conversation’s series on summer learning loss. For other articles in this series, read here and here.
My children spent summers reading Harry Potter, playing chess, swimming and hiking the Adirondack high peaks in upstate New York.
As a single parent with a career as a social worker and academic, I wasn’t rich. But I had enough to make sure that my children had what they needed to excel in education and enrichment outside of school.
While middle-class homes can often provide for summer enrichment activities, studies show a different reality for children from low-income families. These children and youth often lose months of reading and math skills over the summer, widening the achievement gap between the classes.
What can schools do to address this learning loss?
Summer slide
The learning loss for youth in low-income communities adds up dramatically over the years. By ninth grade, about two-thirds of the academic achievement gap between disadvantaged youth and their more advantaged peers can be explained by how they spend their elementary school summers.
What makes this of concern is that a majority of U.S. students in public schools are now from low-income families. A 2013 study found that for the first time in U.S. history, a majority (51 percent) of public school students in the United States were eligible for a free or subsidized school lunch, indicating that they fell below the government’s low-income cutoff.
The majority of these students lack quality summer activities.
Furthermore, these issues do not exist in isolation. Children from low-income communities who often experience summer learning loss also often face multiple related challenges that impact their ability to attend school or focus when they’re there. These challenges include insufficient access to health care, poor nutrition, community violence and lack of adult supervision, among others.
Partnerships between schools and communities can help students’ academic success. The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), which replaced the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law in December 2015, addresses the achievement gap between children from low- and middle-income families.
Title IV of the ESSA under the program, “Community Supports for Success,” calls for a range of partnerships between schools and communities so students (especially those from low-income families) can gain access to services they need for academic achievement (e.g., physical and mental health care, adequate nutrition, supervision and access to healthy activities beyond school hours).
How can schools implement these partnerships?
Earlier this year, New York State Governor Andrew Cuomo announced a US$175 million plan that demonstrates a way to enable such partnerships. Cuomo’s plan aims to convert schools with the lowest test scores and graduation rates across the state into “community schools.”
Providing comprehensive services
So, what are community schools? And how do they help with student learning?
Community schools pursue a unique learning model whereby they supplement classroom-based instruction with out-of-school (before school, after school and summer) learning. They provide support to students whose families do not have access to academic support beyond the classroom. Their support is not limited to the school term, but continues all through the year.
The idea behind this learning model goes back to the late 19th century. The first set of school-linked services (precursors to community schools) can be traced back to the 1890s. Back then, they were developed in response to the massive changes being brought about as a result of immigration and industrialization.
As teachers struggled with new sets of challenges in their classrooms, this model provided additional support. For example, in 1894, doctors visited Boston schools on a daily basis – a practice that helped bring down rates of communicable diseases.
The amount of school-linked services and their gold standard – community schools in the U.S. – have ebbed and flowed over the years. In the last few decades, there has been a marked increase in the number of community schools.
Many individual schools, several counties and an array of cities have incorporated the community school model to reduce the achievement gap between students from low- and middle-income homes. These include Multnomah County (Portland, Oregon), Broome County (upstate New York), Cincinnati, Chicago, Hartford, Tulsa and more recently, New York City, among others.
What’s the impact?
The community school model has shown numerous successes.
For example, Oyler School in Cincinnati had fewer than 20 percent of its students reaching 10th grade in the late 1990s. After implementing a community school model in 2010, 82 percent of students graduated high school.
Many of these schools provide extra outreach efforts to involve families that may be hard to reach in the education of their children – a critical component of the partnership. A recent study of the impact of family engagement in elementary and secondary schools found positive correlations between engaged families and improved academic achievement.
School-based health centers are another frequent component of community schools. Studies indicate when there are school-based health centers, lost class time as a result of sickness reduces by as much as three times.
Summer programs are often part of community schools. These programs provide enriched summer activities for students, such as music, dance, crafts, athletics and academics. This enables teachers in high-poverty neighborhoods to begin teaching new content at the start of the school year, without losing months backtracking over content forgotten from the previous year.
Why we need community schools
The community school model has been so successful that universities too are making this a focus of college students’ civic engagement efforts.
An example is the Moelis Access Science program where UPenn faculty and students provide STEM (science, technology, math and engineering) professional development to teachers serving students in West Philadelphia neighorhoods, which are marked by extreme poverty, violence and low educational attainment.
In an increasingly diverse society facing more complex social problems, the traditional model where education occurs completely within the school building, provided solely by teachers from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. and from September to June, needs reviewing.
That calendar was designed long ago to leave youth free to work in their families’ fields in the summer. Since farming is no longer a major role for the vast majority of students, time outside the classroom can either enhance academic year learning or diminish it.
Do community schools that offer year-round programming and supplemental services cost money? Of course they do. But they have also been shown to save health care costs. They can also save funds that are now being spent on residential treatment facilities for youth, prison and remediation.
With too many youth dropping out of school, the jobs and workforce necessary to compete in a global economy are at risk. Community schools make sense in a country that is committed to opportunities for educational success for any and all students, irrespective of their family income or their zip code.
According to research, schools that make a positive difference in the learning levels are led by principals who make a positive contribution to staff effectiveness and students under their charge. In the 1980s, instructional leadership was often depicted as “hands-on” leadership in classroom matters. The majority of recent studies report that the involvement of principals in classroom instruction are indirect, and carried out through building a school culture and leading by example.
However, most scholars now find that a principal’s impact on student learning is small, but has an important place in statistical data. Even marginal impact is vital to acheiving desired outcomes, because policy makers still use these findings to justify their emphasis on the selection and training of school leaders as a strategy for school improvement. The role of the principal in shaping the school’s vision and mission is described as the most influential “avenue of effects.”
School context has been found to have a significant effect on the success of a principal’s instructional leadership. Instructional leadership effectiveness should be viewed as an independent effort, but also as dependent on the learning environment.
Successful instructional leaders work with other stakeholders to shape the school to fit its mission. Instructional leaders directly influence the quality of school outcomes by aligning the school’s academic standards, timetables, and curriculum, with the school’s mission. Leaders are more effective when they are clear about missions, and manage activities that fall in line with practices needed for effectiveness.
The lack of clarity of the role of the principal in instructional leadership has been a problem. Instructional leadership has rarely defined practices and behaviors that the principal should model, making it hard to determine what needs to be considered for effective instructional leadership. Assigning clear duties to principals will help to ensure instructional leadership is carried out properly. Once principals and school leaders understand their roles, they can begin the task of leading their schools toward higher success.
This political season, citizens will be determining who will represent them in the government. This, of course, includes deciding who will be the next president, but also who will serve in thousands of less prominent positions.
But is voting the only job of a citizen? And if there are others, what are they? Who decides who will do the other jobs – and how they should be done?
The concept of “civic intelligence” tries to address such questions.
I’ve been researching and teaching the concept of “civic intelligence” for over 15 years. Civic intelligence can help us understand how decisions in democratic societies are made now and, more importantly, how they could be made in the future.
For example, my students and I used civic intelligence as the focus for comparing colleges and universities. We wanted to see how well schools helped educate their students for civic engagement and social innovation and how well the schools themselves supported this work within the broader community.
So what is civic intelligence? And why does it matter?
Understanding civic intelligence
Civic intelligence describes what happens when people work together to address problems efficiently and equitably. It’s a wide-ranging concept that shows how positive change happens. It can be applied anywhere – from the local to the global – and could take many forms.
For example, civic intelligence was seen in practice when representatives of the world’s governments created and unanimously approved a global action plan last year in Paris. While climate change remains an immense threat, this global cooperation involving years of dedicated debate and discussion produced a common framework for action for worldwide reduction of greenhouse gases.
Civic intelligence describes when people work together to address problems. Takver, CC BY-SA
Another example is that of mayors around the world establishing networks such as the Global Parliament of Mayors to bring elected officials together on a regular basis to discuss issues facing cities, such as housing, transportation and air quality. One of these networks, the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group, was launched when representatives of the world’s 40 largest cities wanted to collaborate to address climate change.
Similarly, millions of researchers, teachers, artists, other individuals and NGOs worldwide are working to improve their cities and communities. These efforts are amazingly diverse.
In one such case, groups of church members and others from the community in Olympia, Washington, worked for several years with homeless people and families to develop affordable housing solutions. And in Brooklyn, a group of young people started an experimental School of the Future to develop their ideas on what schools could or should be.
What’s the history?
The term “civic intelligence” was first used in English in 1898 by an American clergyman Josiah Strong in his book “The Twentieth Century City” when he wrote of a “dawning social self-consciousness.”
Untold numbers of people have been thinking and practicing civic intelligence without using the term. A brief look at some notable efforts reveals some historic approaches to its broader vision. Let’s take a few:
John Dewey, the prominent social scientist, educator and public intellectual, was absorbed for much of his long professional life with understanding how people pool their knowledge to address the issues facing them.
The American activist and reformer Jane Addams, who in 1889 cofounded the Hull House in Chicago, which housed recent immigrants from Europe, pioneered scores of civically intelligent efforts. These included free lectures on current events, Chicago’s first public playground and a wide range of cultural, political and community research activities.
Civic intelligence today
There are more contemporary approaches as well. These include:
With a slightly different lens, researcher Jason Corburn has examined how “ordinary” people in economically underprivileged neighborhoods have used “Street Science” to understand and reduce disease and environmental degradation in their communities.
Elinor Ostrom, recently awarded the Nobel Prize in economics, has studied how groups of people from various times and places managed resources such as fishing grounds, woodlots and pastures by working together collectively to preserve the livelihoods’ sources for future generations.
Making use of civic intelligence
Civic intelligence is generally an attribute of groups. It’s a collective capability to think and work together.
Advocates and practitioners of civic intelligence (as well as many others) note that the risks of the 21st century, which include climate change, environmental destruction and overpopulation, are quantitatively and qualitatively unlike the risks of prior times. They hypothesize that these risks are unlikely to be addressed satisfactorily by government and other leaders without substantial citizen engagement.
Civic intelligence reminds us that citizens assume responsibility. Gonzale, CC BY-NC
They argue that with or without formal invitations, the citizen must assume more responsibility for the state of the world, especially since in some cases the leaders themselves are part of the problem.
“Ordinary” people could bring many civic skills to the public sphere, such as innovation, compassion and heroism that are indispensable to the decision-making processes.
The civics classes that are required in the public schools mostly focus on conventional political processes. They might teach about governance in a more conventional way, such as how many senators there are (100) or how long their terms are (six years). But self-governance needs more than that.
At a basic level, “governance” happens when neighborhood groups, nonprofit organizations or a few friends come together to help address a shared concern.
Their work can take many forms, including writing, developing websites, organizing events or demonstrations, petitioning, starting organizations and, even, performing tasks that are usually thought of as “jobs for the government.”
As a discipline, civic intelligence provides a broad focus that incorporates ideas and findings from many fields of study. It involves people from all walks of life, different cultures and circumstances.
A focus on civic intelligence could lead directly to social engagement. I believe understanding civic intelligence could help address the challenges we must face today and tomorrow.
Children across the U.S. have now returned to school. Many of these children are going to schools with sworn police officers patrolling the hallways. These officers, usually called school resource officers, are placed in schools across the country to help maintain school safety.
According to the most recent data reported by the Department of Education, police or security guards were present in 76.4 percent of U.S. public high schools in the 2009-2010 school year.
In many of these schools, police officers are being asked to deal with a range of issues that are very different from traditional policing duties, such as being a mental health counselor for a traumatized child. This is an unfair request.
Days after the recent tragedy in Dallas, for example, as he grieved for the five slain officers, Dallas Police Chief David Brown referred to this problem when he said,
“We’re asking cops to do too much in this country… Every societal failure, we put it off on the cops to solve. Not enough mental health funding, let the cops handle it. … Schools fail, let’s give it to the cops. … ”
For the past decade I have been studying how we police schools and punish students. My recent book, “The Real School Safety Problem,” and a growing bodyof other studies point to the fact that, indeed, schools ask police to do too much in schools.
Not only is it unfair to the police, it can be harmful for children.
Policing schools
Though there are no national data collected on exactly how many police officers are in schools, estimates suggest that the practice became popular in the early 1990s, as society began to rethink policing and punishment in the community outside of schools. That resulted in more rigorous policing practices and expansion of our prison system.
However, for over 20 years, school crime has been plummeting. Between 1993 and 2010 the number of students who reportedly became victims of a violent crime at school decreased by 82 percent. Since most schools are now safe places, officers in them aren’t needed to respond to many crimes.
So they are being asked to do many other tasks.
Most schools are safe places, so officers are asked to do other tasks. Eduardo Munoz/Reuters
There are no national data on what officers do while at schools. But studies in specific schools find that officers are being asked to deal with mental health problems, family crises, self-injurious behavior and manifestation of childhood trauma. They also mentor students and teach law-related courses.
Every jurisdiction makes its own decision about what officers should do in schools, and the training that they should receive to work in schools. The National Association of School Resource Officers does offer a week-long basic training course. That training does include a component on counseling and mentoring youth, but it is not clear how comprehensive the sessions are. Moreover, not all officers are required to take the course.
But students’ mental health and other problems are, not surprisingly, often beyond the skills gained from a week-long course. Even if they are trained, police officers are not mental health professionals whose years of training and practice teach them how to calm youth down, assess mental health needs and address the underlying causes of student misbehavior.
What are the consequences?
I have found in my prior research that the presence of officers can change the school environment in subtle ways – from one that focuses on children’s social, emotional and academic needs to one focusing on policing potentialcriminals.
For example, in one school I observed what happened when a student overdosed on multiple bottles of cough syrup. Rather than the school seeing this as a mental health issue or suicide attempt, the school turned to its “go to” person for handling difficult student issues: the officer.
After dealing with the initial emergency and ensuring the child went to the hospital, the officer’s (and thus the school’s) only response was to investigate what crime the child could be charged with, not what help he needed.
Other research, too, shows that the presence of police in schools can result in increased arrests of students for minor behaviors. For example, a 2013 study by criminologists Chongmin Na and Denise C. Gottfredson found that schools that added police officers subsequently saw more weapons and drug crimes, and a larger number of minor offenses reported to the police.
A 2016 study by University of Florida law professor Jason P. Nance found that the presence of a police officer predicted greater likelihood that student misbehaviors would result in an arrest.
Who gets hurt?
Childhood trauma is often a cause of serious childhood misconduct. Black and Latino students are at a greater risk than white students of having experienced childhood trauma. Youth of color are also more likely than white youth to attend schools with police officers. This means that students of color, who may have greater need for mental health care than white youth, are instead dealt with by police officers who are untrained or insufficiently trained in responding to trauma.
African-American boys are arrested at school more often than other students. North Charleston, CC BY-SA
It is therefore not surprising that recent research from the University of Chicago Consortium found that the arrest rate in Chicago for African-American boys was twice as high as that for students in the school district, overall.
Policing can be counterproductive
Police officers in schools often serve as mentors and role models. For example, the officer I described above – who looked to charge a potentially suicidal student with a crime – had volunteered to work in a school because of his desire to help kids. He took time to advise youth and be a positive influence in the lives of many. Often students would come to his office to ask for advice, and just “check in.” He would respond with care and compassion.
Though there is no sound evidence that police officers in schools prevent crime, it would be reasonable in my view to place officers in those few schools where there is violence. Despite steep declines in school violence, nationally, there are some schools where teachers and students face frequent threats of violence.
Having said that, the cost of the daily presence of police outweighs the benefit in the majority of schools. For example, the officer I describe above as a caring counselor and role model switched roles dramatically when he thought a crime might have been committed.
Then he would act like any traditional officer focused only on law and order. In those moments, he failed to address the underlying cause of the problem. By relying on him as the primary responder to student problems, the school replaced a focus on social issues and mental health with a focus on law enforcement.
The result is that children do not receive the help they need, and officers are placed in a no-win position by being asked to respond to students’ needs as if they had the same training as a mental health professional.
The fact is, policing alone cannot solve all societal problems.
I’ve recently delved into The Death and Life of the Great American School by Diane Ravitch. It has been on my reading list for some time now and I finally decided it was time to really give it the attention it deserves. I consider myself an education reformer, and an advocate for reforming the current public school system, so Ravitch’s works speak to me, even if I’m not always completely in the same school of thought.
In educational discourse, Ravitch is an interesting figure. She served as the assistant secretary of Education under George H.W. Bush, though she has never been a Republican and is an Independent today. She was once a supporter of the No Child Left Behind Act and even the formation of charter schools, but in recent years has spoken out against these initiatives, saying that she is now disillusioned with them. In her eyes, and those of her supporters, the idea of standardized testing as a measure of a school’s worth and competition as a way to improve public education are not valid avenues to reform, and will indeed lead to an education system more flawed than the current one.
Ravitch discusses the many ways that school districts that include public, private and charter schools within their realms game the system to reach standardized testing and other accountability benchmarks. She talks in depth about the transformation of New York City public school district 2, an area that has undergone reform with support from deep pockets, like those belonging to billionaire Michael Bloomberg. In this particular instance, New York City schools are under mayoral control for all intents and purposes – and as such, have accountability standards that read more like a white paper on business efficiency than suggestions for actually teaching human beings.
The problem with these standards, of course, is that with stringent, subjective targets for learning, schools are able to game the system to make it work in their favor. In other words, these schools are looking for ways to meet a specific, narrow goal – think of it like a salesperson closing a deal – and then they are rewarded for that piece of shallow success. The flip side of this is that the schools that do not manage to meet these standards are then punished, in true NCLB style, even if the details of their teaching methods actually have some merit. Teachers and administrators at schools that are deemed “failures” or even just mediocre by the established system then must bow to the pressure in order to stay relevant and away from the target range when it comes to adding “competitive” school choices.
Places like New York City are not the first to bring in sweeping reform ideas intended to aid student success – they are simply re-debuting ideas that have already existed in other parts of the country. It is fair to note that by many accounts, areas with public charter and magnet school choice do not fare any better (and are sometimes worse) than the traditional neighborhood schools in the area. Yet, sometimes these schools DO work – at least on paper. I’ve mused before about how my home state of Mississippi would look if there were to be more choice in the state when it comes to P-12 education. As it stands now, student achievement gets a failing grade consistently in Mississippi and the public schools are not improving under the current system. Based on the success of choice programs in other areas, is it worth a try? Or will those schools be developed in ways that “game the system” and take away the true measure of learning: well-rounded, educated students?
On Friday, I’ll take a look at the idea of superstar teachers tackled in the book and if they really are the cure for all educational reform ailments – or if they even exist.
Have you read The Death and Life of the Great American School? What are your thoughts?
As the focus on the improvement of learning becomes more central, what educational leaders are expected to do and accomplish through the allocation of resources has changed. Historically, supporters of education were more concerned with the dollar amount allocated per pupil, and they spent much of their political capital advocating for increases from one year to the next.
Educational leaders were responsible for creating balanced budgets with the dollars they had available and accounting for expenditures in a responsible manner– a complex task in large school districts. Little attention was paid to how resources were related to performance or what type of performance was expected. The standards-based reform movement of the past several decades changed the situation fundamentally, by prompting new questions about what the learning standards should be and how educators should be held accountable for improved performance.
In response, educators have become more focused on results, while taking the stance that higher performance cannot be accomplished without adequate resources. Thus, a sea change has occurred, prompting educational leaders to consider how resource allocation is related to building high-performing systems that work for all students. As they take seriously the charge to become more learning-focused, leaders critically examine the equity, efficiency, and effectiveness of existing resource allocation policies and practices and make decisions regarding ways in which resources might be reallocated in more productive ways.
This resource reallocation challenge is as important in the present era of standards-driven reform and accountability for results. Given the considerable variation in the needs, capacities, and contexts of schools, it is striking– though not surprising– that for the most part, resource allocation patterns in K–12 education are relatively uniform.
The uniformity of leaders’ responses to these varying needs may simply signal a safe course: the most easily defended set of decisions in a context of competition for scarce resources. Beneath the surface of this course of action, however, conflicting expectations, tensions, and barriers may be impeding leaders’ ability to think more creatively about how to organize and allocate limited resources and act strategically. These barriers exist at all levels of the educational policy system.
In such a situation, leaders might wish for definitive understanding about the impact of particular investments on student learning, yet the state of knowledge here is incomplete. The highly contextual nature of schools, the variations with which any particular improvement strategy is implemented, the motivational conditions that are present, and the need to adapt strategies to fit specific circumstances all interact with the resources brought to bear on learning improvement goals.
For districts wishing to commence anew with student-weighted allocation systems (whereby funds are allocated on the basis of student types), offering clear-cut guidance on what increments should be assigned to each student type is a crucial first step. However, a definitive response plainly cannot exist in the current state of fiscal allocation policy. The difficulty here is that currently there is no efficient resource allocation system whereby an answer can be reliably extrapolated.
Policymakers are consequently forced into determining fiscal policy without information relating to expenditure on student types. They are forced to do so with no understanding of the workings of allocation policies at different levels (federal, state, and local) either together or in conflict. Policymakers have little clarity on expenditure for different student types at the school level, nor awareness of the types of policies that would be more effective in guaranteeing that dollars reach students in the proposed ways.
School finance today works in opposition to the focused and effective utilization of resources that promote improved education of students. Just as an archaic computer can no longer function properly in a technological environment inundated with the latest software, this nation’s school finance system frozen by a combination of unrelated expenditure policies and administrative plans can no longer serve the needs of an educational system calling for reform. A new model is required, to do one thing– ensure that every child receives instruction for his or her needs in order to become an involved citizen having total participation in this modern economy.
Current school finance systems fund programs, uphold institutions, and offer resources and staff employment so the school and district administrators can fully execute the multitude of laws and regulations that have become part of public education. However, the methods employed by today’s school finance systems– deploying expenditure levels based on habit and not need, covering up funds’ actual allocations, supporting institutions whether they are viable or not, hypocritically addressing equity, spending resources flippantly, attempting to make adults accountable by compliance and not by results– confuses the links between resources and academic aims that make finance relevant to student performance.
The school finance system evolved in a era in which programs were funded, and students passed or failed without much regard paid to the role of funding in student performance. This pattern was sustainable then, as jobs were available for people with low skills, and the vast majority of workers were not required to be well educated in order to maintain a healthy economy. Unfortunately, that legacy has proven unworkable in today’s highly technological, information-based economy, where low-skilled workers cannot rise above the poverty level and overseas workers are able to compete effectively in the market for skilled jobs, once available solely to Americans.
