Policy & Reform

Matthew Lynch published in Education Leadership, Policy & Reform

Why are police inside public schools?

Aaron Kupchik, University of Delaware

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 body of 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.

In 1999, following the Columbine school shooting, when two teens went on a shooting spree, policing practices grew further: Federal funding was increased to have more police officers in schools.

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 potential criminals.

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.

The Conversation

Aaron Kupchik, Professor of Sociology & Criminal Justice, University of Delaware

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

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Matthew Lynch published in Equity, list, Matthew Lynch, Policy & Reform

Top 5 Techniques for Culturally Responsive Teaching

The growing popularity of culturally responsive instruction is slowly causing traditional trends to be reversed. Teachers are increasingly being expected to adapt to the demands of a multicultural classroom. Given the wealth of diversity in our nation’s public schools, it is no wonder that instructional theory is advocating a shift toward a pedagogy that emphasizes a comfortable and academically enriching environment for students of all ethnicities, races, beliefs, and creeds.

Culturally responsive pedagogy is a student-centered approach to teaching in which the students’ unique cultural strengths are identified and nurtured to promote student achievement and a sense of well-being about the student’s cultural place in the world.

Given that a majority of teachers hail from a middle class European-American background, the biggest obstacle to successful culturally responsive instruction for most educators is disposing of their own cultural biases and learning about the backgrounds of the students that they will be teaching. A common side effect of being raised in the dominant European-American culture is the self-perception that “I’m an American; I don’t have a culture.”

Of course this is view is inaccurate; European-American culture simply dominates social and behavioral norms and policies to such an extent that those who grow up immersed in it can be entirely unaware of the realities of other cultures.  A related misconception that many teachers labor under is that they act in a race-blind fashion. However, most teachers greatly overestimate their knowledge about other cultures, which manifests itself in a lack of cultural sensitivity in classroom management and pedagogical techniques.

Here are a few practical techniques to avoid those common pitfalls and become a culturally responsive teacher in an era where this is a necessity:

  1. Get your students’ names right. It may sound simple enough, but a teacher who does not take the time to even know the names of his or her students, exactly as they should be pronounced, shows a basic lack of respect for those students. Teachers should learn the proper pronunciation of student names and express interest in the etymology of interesting and diverse names.
  2. Encourage students to learn about each other. Teachers should have their students research and share information about their ethnic background as a means of fostering a trusting relationship with both fellow classmates.  Students are encouraged to analyze and celebrate differences in traditions, beliefs, and social behaviors.  It is of note that this task helps European-American students realize that their beliefs and traditions constitute a culture as well, which is a necessary breakthrough in the development of a truly culturally responsive classroom.
  3. Give students a voice. Another important requirement for creating a nurturing environment for students is reducing the power differential between the instructor and students.  Students in an authoritarian classroom may sometimes display negative behaviors as a result of a perceived sense of social injustice; in the culturally diverse classroom, the teacher thus acts more like a facilitator than an instructor.  Providing students with questionnaires about what they find to be interesting or important provides them with a measure of power over what they get to learn and provides them with greater intrinsic motivation and connectedness to the material.  Allowing students to bring in their own reading material and present it to the class provides them with an opportunity to both interact with and share stories, thoughts, and ideas that are important to their cultural and social perspective.
  4. Be aware of language constraints. In traditional classrooms, students who are not native English speakers often feel marginalized, lost, and pressured into discarding their original language in favor of English.  In a culturally responsive classroom, diversity of language is celebrated and the level of instructional materials provided to non-native speakers is tailored to their level of English fluency.  Accompanying materials should be provided in the student’s primary language and the student should be encouraged to master English.
  5. Hand out praise accordingly. High expectations for student performance form the core of the motivational techniques used in culturally responsive instruction.  Given that culturally responsive instruction is a student-centered philosophy, it should come as no surprise that expectations for achievement are determined and assigned individually for each student.  Students don’t receive lavish praise for simple tasks but do receive praise in proportion to their accomplishments.  When expectations are not met then encouragement is the primary emotional currency used by the educator.  If a student is not completing her work, then one should engage the student positively and help guide the student toward explaining how to complete the initial steps that need to be done to complete a given assignment or task.  Once the student has successfully performed the initial steps for successful learning it will boost his sense of efficacy and help facilitate future learning attempts.

While popular among educators in traditional classrooms, reward systems should be considered with caution in a culturally responsive setting.  Reward systems can sometimes be useful for convincing unmotivated students to perform tasks in order to get a reward (and hopefully learn something in the process) but they have the undesirable long-term side effect of diminishing intrinsic motivation for learning.  This effect is particularly strong for students who were already intrinsically motivated to learn before shifting their focus toward earning rewards.  Given that one of the prime goals of culturally responsive instruction is to motivate students to become active participants in their learning, caution and forethought should be used before deciding to introduce a reward system into the equation.

A culturally response, student-centered classroom should never alienate any one student, but should bring all the different backgrounds together in a blended format. Teachers should develop their own strategies, as well as take cues from their students to make a culturally responsive classroom succeed.

References

Culturally responsive teaching is a theory of instruction that was developed by Dr. Gloria Ladson-Billings and has been written about by many other scholars since then. To read more of her work on culturally responsive teaching and other topics, click here to visit her Amazon.com page.

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Matthew Lynch published in list, Matthew Lynch, Policy & Reform

5 Facts Everyone Needs to Know About the School-to-Prison Pipeline

Our nation’s public schools play an integral role in fostering talents. They also play a role in building our children’s internal worth. It is therefore not surprising that our schools can assist in reducing our nation’s prison population as well. Here are five facts everyone should know about the school-to-prison pipeline, and how to end it:

  1. An increased prison population costs us all money. Those of us who fall outside the group of perceived misfits who make our nation’s prison population may wonder why the school-to-prison pipeline should matter. Aside from caring about the quality of life for other individuals, there are more tangible issues that arise from this. Each federal prisoner costs taxpayers $28,284 per year, which is about $77 per day.

And that’s just the measurable cost. What isn’t measurable is the indirect impact those incarcerations have on the economy in terms of those prisoners not contributing to the work force.

  1. There is a link between dropping out of high school and going to prison. Sadly, over half of black young men who attend urban high schools do not earn a diploma. Of the dropouts, nearly 60 percent will go to prison at some point. There are also some eerily similar statistics for young Latino men.

In his piece “A Broken Windows Approach to Education Reform,” Forbes writer James Marshall Crotty makes a direct connection between drop-out and crime rates. He argues that if educators will simply take a highly organized approach to keeping kids in school, it will make a difference in the crime statistics of the future. He says:

“Most importantly, instead of merely insisting on Common Core Standards of excellence, we must provide serious sticks for non-compliance. And not just docking teacher and administrative pay. The real change needs to happen on the student and parent level. ”

He cites the effectiveness of states not extending driving privileges to high school dropouts or not allowing athletic activities for students who fail a class. With higher stakes associated with academic success, students will have more to lose if they walk away from their K-12 education. And the higher the education level, the lower the risk of criminal activity, statistically speaking.

  1. Black and Latino men get the short end of the stick as far as this phenomenon is concerned. Aside from the dropout statistics mentioned before, an estimated 40 percent of all students that are expelled from U.S. schools are black. This leaves black students over three times more likely to face suspension than their white peers. When you add in Latino numbers, 70 percent of all in-school arrests are black or Latino students.

If you want to see the correlation between these school-age statistics and lifetime numbers, consider this: 61 percent of the incarcerated population are black or Latino – despite the fact that these groups only represent 30 percent of the U.S. population. Nearly 68 percent of all men in federal prison never earned a high school diploma. The fact that the U.S. has the highest incarceration rate in the world is no surprise and the road to lockup starts in the school systems.

  1. Expectations influence student achievement and behavior. Though all people have genetic predispositions, it is ultimately the environment that encompasses the formative years that shapes lives.

In a blog post by Sally Powalski, a 10-year employee of juvenile facility in the State of Indiana, she addresses what she sees every day: young men with no expectations of improvement and therefore no motivation.

Sally says this of the young men who come through her counselor’s office:

“They have been given the message for several years that they are not allowed in regular school programs, are not considered appropriate for sports teams, and have had their backs turned on them because everyone is just tired of their behavior… Why should they strive for more than a life of crime?”

Sally hits the nail on the head with her observations. Children are just as much a product of their environments as the expectations placed on them. Parents on a first-name basis with law enforcement officials certainly influence the behavior of their children, but school authorities with preconceived negative associations create an expectation of failure too. Increasingly, educators are learning how to recognize the signs of textbook learning disabilities like ADHD or dyslexia. But what about the indirect impact that factors like poverty, abuse, neglect or simply living in the wrong neighborhood have on a student’s ability to learn? Where are the intervention programs that keep these students on academic track without removing them from the school setting?

  1. The current way of dealing with “problem” students is not working. When one student is causing a classroom disruption, the traditional way to address the issue has been removal – whether the removal is for five minutes, five days or permanently. Separating the “good” students and the “bad” ones has always seemed the fair, judicious approach. On an individual level this form of discipline may seem necessary to preserve the educational experience for others.

If all children came from homes that implemented a cause-and-effect approach to discipline, this might be the right answer. Unfortunately, an increasing number of students come from broken homes, or ones where parents have not the desire or time to discipline. For these students, removal from education is simply another form of abandonment and leads to the phenomenon called the “school-to-prison pipeline.”

So what’s the solution? Keeping close tabs on drop-out risks is certainly a step in the right direction when it comes to closing the school to prison pipeline. Better academic tracking, in order to notice areas of potential problems early on, and more mentorship intervention when it comes to discipline issues are also important.

Students who are at risk of dropping out of high school or turning to crime need more than a good report card.  They need alternative suggestions on living a life that rises above their current circumstances. For a young person to truly have a shot at an honest life, he or she has to believe in the value of an education and its impact on good citizenship. That belief system has to come from direct conversations about making smart choices with trusted adults and peers.

What do you think K-12 schools can put in place to increase academic success and close the school to prison pipeline?

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Matthew Lynch published in Education Leadership, Policy & Reform

Accountability versus Gaming the P-12 System

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?

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Matthew Lynch published in Policy & Reform

Why Education Reformers Shouldn’t Dismiss the Idea of Year-Round Schooling

When it comes to propositions for educational reform, the suggestion that the U.S. adopt a year-round schooling model is one of the most drastic – at least within the eyes of the American public. Summer vacation has a long, nostalgia-draped history among American school children. Still, the idea of year-round schooling isn’t one that came out of nowhere.

Our education system began at a time when most students were expected to have primary schooling and then work in the family business or manufacturing, or work in other ways to contribute to the family’s economic well-being. During this time, only about 20% of children were actually being groomed to attend college. Today, however, things are very different. The family is no longer a cohesive economic unit that requires the work of children to help with the family’s income. We have also moved beyond the point where in a majority of homes, one parent (most often the mother) was home to attend to children. The traditional family unit of a working father and stay-at-home mother is no longer the norm. Rather, 32% of children are raised in single-family households where the parent presumably has to work full time. Similarly, over 60% of school-aged children in two-parent families live in a home where both parents work outside the home.

Changes are also apparent in our economy; our information-age society will result in a reduction of jobs requiring minimal levels of education. Many jobs today require a college education and/or the ability to acquire and adapt skills for high-performance workplaces of the 21st century. We must make changes in our education system to better prepare our children for the jobs of today and the jobs of the future. To increase the reach of and improve the public education system, it is necessary to increase the amount of time used for schooling, as well as to improve the efficiency with which we use the time allotted for educational endeavors.

Proponents of a year-round school year suggest that a shift in the time designated for teaching and learning will help students achieve more by minimizing summer learning loss, allowing for innovation and implementation of creative programs, and providing the time needed to assist children who need extra help. Many school districts around the country are in fact working toward increasing both the hours in each school day and the number of days schools are in session. Many education leaders are open to the idea of increasing the number of days per school year by up to an additional month, and some go so far as to support year-round school programming. Some leaders have suggested an extended school day and/or school year for schools that are failing to perform well. This suggestion seems to have some foundation in research, because data show that certain groups (including students from low socioeconomic backgrounds) seem to be negatively impacted by the traditional summer hiatus. The proponents of year-round schooling claim that with extended time to teach, teachers will be able to help all students attain better performance results.

It’s easy to understand why education reformers put so much emphasis on time spent teaching and learning. Research shows that time may be the most essential resource of the education system. But it’s important to recognize that merely increasing the amount of time students are in school is not a panacea for improving student performance. It’s necessary to use the available time in the best possible manner. If teachers fail to convert the available time to quality teaching and learning time, the increased school hours will not improve student performance.

Parents often have a stake in school hours as well. Some parents are already highly concerned with their child’s academic progress. Many parents prefer to employ additional educational services for their children that may offer better afterschool educational opportunities, and others may prefer to spend some of their own time educating their children after school. Those parents, and parents of students from affluent backgrounds, may not support increasing school day hours, and for those students, it may not be necessary. Nonetheless, by increasing high-quality education time, schools can certainly provide help for students who can’t afford learning opportunities outside of school.

Although a longer school day or year has many positives, there are also a number of concerns, including cost. Increasing the number of hours and days in school can prove expensive, making it necessary to put more emphasis on increasing the utility of available school time. Some education leaders suggest that instead of increasing the hours and days in a school calendar year, it would be better to spread out the available number of school days in such a manner that the school services may remain available for the students throughout the year. This might mean offering three short breaks rather than one long summer vacation, or simply offering various classes or tutoring programs during the summer downtime. Either approach would increase costs in facility usage and likely increase staff costs as well.

Is it time to turn the U.S. K-12 school calendar completely on its head by abolishing summers-off schedules and adding time in the classroom? Would such actions make a significant positive impact on student performance, particularly in STEM topics?

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Matthew Lynch published in Policy & Reform, Secondary Education

Why High School Graduation Is the Key to Improving At-Risk Communities: Part II

A guest post by Frank Britt, CEO of Penn Foster

When an at-risk student graduates high school, it creates a significant and positive trickle-down effect: it de-risks a family unit and the power of example encourages friends to also become contributing members as high school finishers, and can be a catalyst for galvanizing a community, and even a single building or street.

At scale, it can help build work forces with higher productivity, leading to lower poverty and reduced crime rates.

What Drives (and Improves) Crime Rates in a Community?

Crime rates are linked to educational attainment, according to a 2013 report by the Alliance for Excellent Education. The report, entitled “Saving Futures, Saving Dollars: The Impact of Education on Crime Reduction and Earnings,” asserts that if male high school graduation rates increased by just 5 percent, the nation could save about $18.5 billion in annual crime expenses. The lower the education attainment levels, the higher the rates of arrest and incarceration.

Reforming school climates and increasing student engagement can help move vulnerable young people away from crime and prison and toward college and a career path, says President of the Alliance for Excellent Education Bob Wise. “The school-to-prison pipeline starts and ends with schools,” Wise said.

Why Should Businesses Care?

It seems like a given—the business community needs to be far more invested in high school–level engagement. To ignore this imperative is to tacitly endorse a model that results in “imperfect” candidates, or simply not enough supply for employers’ growing demand for skilled workers. In fact, this is a root cause of the front line labor shortages we’re seeing today.

Additionally, they are looking at a future generation of consumers with lowered employment and salary expectations—so that’s a real bottom-line consideration.

What can businesses be doing? Starbucks’ recent initiative to help mitigate college costs is one example of a major corporation taking an interest in educating employees. It is a great start, but assumes a steady supply of high school graduates. The time has arrived that the employers such as leading retailer’s shift from supporting high school completion for purposes of philanthropy to instead invest for business productivity reasons. This will become a mega-trend in next five-ten years as there will simply not be sufficient quantities of students to support the next generation of blue and grey color jobs.

Where Do We Start?
Experts affirm that a local-level change agenda is about reestablishing the character of an area. As Charles C. Haynes writes, “Schools are typically the conscience of a neighborhood.” Employers and even colleges are all likely to become even more active players in helping to address the local level completion gaps, and in second-chance adult learners will begin to have allies in their efforts to find on-ramps to higher education.

It starts with a school’s system-wide educational reform initiative that includes creating more diverse academic alternatives for students, such as blended learning and flipped classrooms. Education ultimately improves and strengthens a community, including bolstering the economic infrastructure and increases wages. It empowers people to take better control of their own destinies.

The byproduct is a greater social consciousness with positive consequences and a more prospering community.

Are you ready?

Frank Britt is the CEO of Penn Foster, a leading career-focused online and hybrid education institution that annually supports over 100,000 active students and 1,000 institutions nationwide. His mission is to create a national movement to better connect education, career pathways and job creation, and to promote debt-free and affordable learning. By utilizing the power of practical education, career training and hands-on mentoring, he has helped improve the lives of everyone from underprivileged children and families, to front-line workers and recent college graduates. His efforts recognize the challenges faced by the 7,000 people that regrettably drop out of high school each day, the 4 million middle-skilled workers seeking employment, 50-70 year olds transitioning careers, and the thousands of veterans focused on establishing new career pathways.

 

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Matthew Lynch published in Matthew Lynch, Policy & Reform, Testing

Do Teachers really Hate Common Core?

As more and more governors and local politicians denounce Common Core initiatives, and more states officially back away from the standards, the debate over the place and effectiveness of Common Core heats up. There is a lot of talk about students, but what about teachers? After all, they are the people who are most accountable for any standards and testing systems that are put in place. They are also the ones who see firsthand how education policies impact students. So what do teachers say about Common Core and PARCC testing?

• 75 percent support Common Core, says a May 2013 American of Federation (AFT) poll that surveyed 800 teachers.
• 76 percent strongly, or somewhat, support Common Core based on an Education Next Survey from 2013.
• More than three-fourths support Common Core Standards “wholeheartedly” or with some minor reservations, according to a September 2013 National Education Association member survey.
• 73 percent of teachers that specializes in math, science, social studies and English language arts are “enthusiastic” about the implementation of Common Core standards in their classrooms, from a 2013 Primary Sources poll of 20,000 educators.

A higher amount of elementary teachers are optimistic about Common Core than their high school counterparts. A survey conducted by The Hechinger Report Scholastic and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation found that just 41 percent of high school teachers are positive about Common Core standards. A recent survey by the National Association of Elementary School Principals found that more than 80 percent of principals (out of 1,000 from 14 states) say that Common Core standards have the potential to increase student skill mastery, create meaningful assessments and improve areas like conceptual understanding.

These are just a few examples of studies of educators and administrators that relate directly to Common Core initiatives, but each one lists well over a majority who back the standards to some degree. This, despite the fact that many parents and legislators cite “unfairness” to teachers as a reason to dissolve the standards on a national level. In fact, this idea that all teachers somehow “hate” Common Core or are against the standards being taught is just not true. Yet this widely held public belief has led to even greater fervor when it comes to Common Core, PARCC testing and the related lessons in classrooms.

You may notice that many of these studies I mention are a little bit outdated. Even something from six months ago does not take teachers’ true feelings into account following teaching the standards, and facing assessments on them. Implementation aside, though, based on the criteria alone teachers appear to think that Common Core is a step in the right direction for the students in their classrooms.

Some teachers’ unions are calling for delayed implementation of the standards, for several reasons including the fact that materials have not yet made it to all the classrooms (which makes assessments based on those materials unfair, and impossible). These groups are not asking for states to abandon Common Core though. There is a difference.

It seems that the basis of Common Core is a solid one, then, when it comes to the people who understand teaching the most. Today’s teachers are in overcrowded, underfunded classrooms with higher accountability standards placed on them than ever before. If there truly was an unfair setup, teachers would certainly be the first ones to point it out.

I think that we need to stop using teachers as a reason to abolish Common Core standards. There are other reasons perhaps to take another look at these initiatives and modify them – but assuming that teachers are against them (and therefore everyone else should be) is a false pretense.

Are you a teacher that likes or dislikes Common Core standards?

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Matthew Lynch published in Equity, Policy & Reform, Secondary Education

Will the pending ESEA actually move funding backward?

By Derek Black of Law Professor Blogs Network

Last week, Nora Gordon focused on one of the more technical aspects of the pending Senate bill to reauthorize the Elementary and Secondary Education Act: the supplement not supplant standard. The standard requires that Title I funds for low income students only be used to supplement the resources that state and local entities were already providing those students, not supplant them. Gordon summarized the new revisions and her sense of their importance:

The larger legacy of the Every Child Achieves Act may well be how it cleans up supplement not supplant, a little discussed and often misunderstood fiscal rule with a big impact on how schools actually spend the $14 billion of NCLB Title I funds. The proposed legislation makes two important changes: (1) it requires districts to show they are distributing their state and local funds across schools without regard to the federal funds that each school receives; and (2) it increases local autonomy over how to spend Title I funds.

The problem she says is that:

Under current law, those Title I schools that do not operate school-wide programs must demonstrate that every single thing they buy with Title I funds helps only the neediest students, and would not be purchased with other funds absent the federal aid. In my research, I’ve found this rule often has the unintended consequence of preventing districts from spending money on the things that might help those students most, pushing schools to work around the edges of their central instructional mission. They buy “interventionists” instead of teachers, or “supplemental” curricular materials rather than “core” ones, and are discouraged from investing Title I funds in technology.

Gordon is correct that the supplement not supplant has been a disaster.  As I wrote in The Congressional Failure to Enforce Equal Protection Through the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, 90 B.U. L. Rev. 313 (2010),

Although well meaning, the prohibition on supplanting has not met its goal. In fact, in a recent report, the GAO recommended eliminating the supplement-not-supplant standard altogether. The GAO concluded that the standard has become almost impossible to enforce. Enforcing the standard requires too much speculation about what a school district would have spent on education and also requires extremely detailed tracking of spending in thousands of school districts. In short, the prohibition on supplanting funds relies on unreliable projections and unusually labor-intensive work. Possibly for these reasons, the Department of Education has effectively stopped attempting to enforce the standard, treating it as a non-priority. The standard, however, remains the law and a measure that well-intentioned schools may expend effort attempting to meet.

But at this point, the question is not whether we should discard the current supplement not supplant rule.  The question is what we should replace it with.  It is far from clear that moving toward more district autonomy (so long as they provide data) fixes the funding inequities and inept state and local funding effort that Congress needed to tackle with supplement not supplant and other related standards.

The new fix in the pending bill is a compromise that dodges that fundamental problems, and has the potential to incentivize backsliding by state and local districts unless other new protections are added.  Yes, the new bill would provide more information on funding inequality from states so that we can see what they are doing.  But that data is generally available anyway.  The challenge is that data’s complexity, not its unavailability.  So the new freedom for states looks like a give away that runs the risk that states will engage in the very behavior it formerly sought to prohibit (even if Congress and the Department of Education never did a good job of prohibiting it).  Under the proposed new approach, federal money could even more easily become part of districts’ general operating budget, which would allow the money to be seriously diluted or state and local dollars to decrease when federal dollars are available to fill the gap.

So what should we do in reauthorizing the Elementary and Secondary Education Act?  I laid out the solutions in painstaking detail in the article noted above.  But in short, the Elementary and Secondary Act should 1) demand comparability of resources both within and between districts and 2) distribute federal funds to incentivize states to meet student need (get states to progressively fund high poverty schools), and 3) incentivize integration and punish segregation.  The first two proposal are intuitive, but the third is also necessary because the existence of segregation provides the platform for inequality and drives up the cost of delivering an equitable education in high poverty schools.  Unfortunately, there are longstanding headwinds against these solutions, which explains why the Senate’s proposed supplement not supplant approach does so little.

Get my full explanation of how to fix ESEA here.

 

This post originally appeared on the Law Professor Blogs Network and has been republished with permission.

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Matthew Lynch published in Policy & Reform, Teachers

Why Teaching Jobs Should be Preserved during School Reform

 By Matthew Lynch

School reform is never easy. When sweeping changes are decided upon and implemented, everyone must fully participate in order for students to benefit from the changes and certainly not to suffer during the transition. Part of providing that stability for students is through a strong front of teachers that remain at the school during the sometimes turbulent reform process.

Reform is truly not possible without a united front of educators and administrators. A shared vision is challenging to create and maintain without stable leadership, and a supportive culture from the staff.  It is a simple fact of life that high staff turnover can create instability and have a negative impact on efforts to establish a consistent learning environment for students. High staff turnover is also quite costly, particularly when the recruitment of teachers, and then the training of new teachers in the intricacies of the reform effort are considered.

More effort and support needs to be given to the recruitment process for teachers at the outset as schools and districts initiate reform efforts. Hiring teachers who “fit” reform goals will likely reduce teacher attrition.  Still, more support needs to be available for new teachers. Even teachers who ostensibly have the skills and attitudes that align with reform goals will need mentoring and other supports as they begin their jobs. Every attempt must be made to reduce the debilitating rate of turnover.

Doesn’t reform result in loss of teaching jobs though?

Inevitably, a major factor for sustaining reform is having the money to do so. Most efforts now are centered on how to make the most of current funding and utilizing money effectively in order to maximize the positive impact of reforms, rather than how to access untapped resources. Despite the dearth of new money, it is possible to free up cash through alternative means of spending.

An extreme proposal to accomplish this is to reduce staffing to the absolute minimum. For example, a school with 500 students would have 20 teachers and 1 principal. Approximately $1 million could become available, depending on how many education specialists (regular and categorical) and instructional aides worked within the school. This is radical option, and there are other, less extreme ways to change the way money is spent, to include increasing class sizes, spending less on upgrading technology, and eliminating some programs.

The key however is to look in detail at all financial outlays, measure them according to the extent to which they contribute to the goals of the school reform, and rank them according to how well they do this. This will enable schools to break down spending into its core components and work out what is necessary and what can be cut during the process of change in order to better implement their improvement strategy. This is particularly important in times of austerity, when elements that are not essential may have to be reduced or cut in order to help drive reform, no matter how popular or long-standing they may be.

Spending money on non-essential areas does support school reform efforts. Prioritizing what money is spent on does not automatically mean cutting all non-academic projects. What gets cut will depend on the goals of individual schools. This should be a workable situation, as long as the school is still accountable to the state and the district for shifts in expenditures. An understanding that cutting teaching jobs can actually be detrimental to reform is important though, instead of just looking at the numbers on a piece of paper.

photo credit: R Joanne via photopin cc

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Matthew Lynch published in Policy & Reform, Teachers

Understanding Federal Funding Part I: 3 Types of School Funding

Not only do school systems receive state funding but also federal funding through various programs and initiatives. Therefore it is important to understand three types of federal funding methods that transpired throughout history which include categorical aid, grants, and Title I funds.

Currently, the federal government contributes approximately 9% annually, or about $71 billion, to the education of the nation’s elementary- and secondary-aged children. The amount of support varies from state to state, with some states receiving more federal monies. South Dakota receives the most federal funding (an estimated 16% of the state’s entire educational budget), while New Jersey gets only 3% of its funds from federal sources. The U.S. Department of Education was allocated $63.7 billion for fiscal year 2010. The department distributes funds to schools, determines major education issues and focuses attention to them through provision of funds, instigates programs designed to ensure an equal education for all, and engages in research activities that result in an accumulation of educational statistics.

Before the 1980s, federal funding was distributed to states solely in the form of categorical aid
(or grants). Basically, money was designated to fund several federally sponsored programs and to support federally based educational legislation. Categorical aid was spent on specific items or in particular ways. For example, money for textbooks was to be used exclusively for textbooks. Schools and districts had to track how money from categorical aid was spent and had to report these expenditures to the federal government to ensure that money was used in the manner for which it was intended. Any unused funds had to be returned to the provider, if they were not spent within an allocated time frame. Many critics claim that the stipulations attached to federal monies allowed the federal government to more readily influence state-based education, as districts had to accept federal regulations in order to receive the funding.

In the 1980s, the Reagan administration introduced the notion of the block grant. With this method of funding, monies were dispersed to states with relatively minor conditions attached. This change in funding reflected the Republican belief that the federal government should play a lesser role in educational policy making. The federal government transferred money in a “block” to individual states, and the states decided how the money would be spent. Both block grants and categorical aid are currently used by the federal government to finance education. States are accountable to the federal government for how monies are spent. To this end, they must accept conditions attached to grants and prepare plans for funds received. All expenditures must be tracked, and reports regarding how monies were spent must be submitted to the federal government. These requirements have led to an increased federal influence over education nationwide.

Federal government monies are often distributed to school districts through the state departments of education. Typically, states apply for available federal funds to support state goals and needs, although school districts can apply directly to the federal government for grants as well. As a beginning teacher, you may be asked to sit on a committee that structures a grant proposal. You may also want to consider taking the initiative to suggest an idea, a program, or an educational service that could benefit from the funds provided by a federal grant.

Some sources of federal funds have been available for a number of years. Funds under Title I of
Elementary and Secondary School Act (ESEA) have been available since 1965, when the legislation first passed. Title I funds are directed toward improving the education of students from low-income backgrounds. The intent of the legislation of ESEA 1965 is to provide “compensatory education” as a means of ensuring equality of educational opportunities for all children, regardless of the economic status of their parents. Today, states wishing to receive Title I monies must submit to the federal government a proposal for educational improvement.

Typically, the state disperses funds to school districts, which then provide funds to individual schools. All schools considered for Title I funds must have a minimum percentage of low-income students in attendance. Schools with the highest percentages of poor students receive the most money from the Title I fund. Schools have the right to decide how the money will be spent on site and do not have to specifically allocate funds to individual students. Title I monies can be channeled into general programs of improvement, benefiting all students enrolled in the school. Initiatives such as the “Race to the Top” stimulus program have also been initiated at a federal level. This fund aims to assist states in achieving the standards outlined by Title I, acting as a stimulus grant for schools that can demonstrate that they are committed to reform and take proactive steps to ensure the output of competent students. As a beginning teacher, you should investigate how your state participates in and coordinates reform initiatives and ensure that you remain abreast of requirements. Your investigation will also familiarize you with many of the structures discussed in this chapter and with applying the required guidelines to your particular school and students.

In the 2006–2007 school year, the federal government committed almost $14 billion to Title I grants, which aided 17 million elementary- and secondary-aged school children in 61,000 schools across the country. Almost two thirds of the recipient children were in elementary school. Funds aided the education of 35% of all Hispanic students, 33% of all European American students, and 25% of African American students. Asian American and Native American students made up the remaining 7%. A national assessment of Title I conducted in 2006 found that students who had received services through the grant made modest improvements in both reading and mathematics, as evidenced by standardized test scores. Although Title I funds have helped low-income children improve, their progress in basic reading and mathematics lags behind that of their higher-income peers.

Some criticize Title I as a waste of money, suggesting that there is no real evidence that Title
I helps to improve education outcomes for students who receive Title I services. Critics point out that the funding directed toward improved educational outcomes for low-income children has done little to stem the unremitting cycle of poverty. They maintain that social ills associated with poverty, such as drug use, dropping out of school, early pregnancies, and the inability to find work persist. Advocates of Title I claim that the legislation was never meant to address every facet of poverty, and that services made possible by Title I funds have resulted in small gains in the lives of children the services were intended to help. Proponents of Title I further argue that small successes have an inestimable influence on a life that would otherwise be destroyed by poverty, and that no monetary value can be assigned to that influence.

In addition to Title I, the federal government funds other compensatory programs, all aimed to provide equality of education for lower-income children. Some, like Head Start include a substantial parental involvement component as a means for increasing each parents’ role in facilitating the intellectual and social growth of their children. Other programs target older students, whether in elementary or in secondary schools. Tutoring, literacy training, and projects designed to discourage dropping out of school are all examples of programs funded by the federal government. Title I programs today fall under the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act, which was passed in 2001. The 2001 enactment of NCLB was actually a renaming and reauthorization of the ESEA. ESEA was modified several times after 1965, but NCLB was the first sweeping overhaul of the legislation.

Unlike its predecessor, NCLB includes extensive language that connects federal benefits and funding to evidence-based achievement, like standardized testing. NCLB includes specific goals for schools that include early learning initiatives for at-risk students intended to set them on the right path for learning in the formative years. These reading programs for young students have been shown to boost the overall educational achievement for children.

While ESEA took the first steps toward equalizing public school education, NCLB put more specific benchmarks in place. NCLB is grounded in the conviction that a student’s performance can be improved through the simple act of setting high standards and that the achievement of educational objectives can be accurately measured by standardized tests. NCLB requires schools to show adequate yearly progress (AYP) toward a goal of 100% proficiency among students by the 2013–2014 school year, in the areas of reading and mathematics. Schools not making AYP from year to year are subject to sanctions, ranging from the requirement to develop or revise an existing improvement plan after missing AYP for 1 year to complete school restructuring after missing AYP for 5 consecutive years. School districts that fail to ensure that sanctions are implemented at schools not making AYP risk losing Title I funds. Schools do have some leeway in how they can attain AYP. The safe harbor provision, for example, allows a school to improve by 10% overall, even if individual students have not attained state standard. Schools can also receive credit if individual students improve their performance by one third over the course of the year.

The federal government’s commitment to the education of all children was evidenced most recently with the American Recovery and Revitalization Act (ARRA), formalized in 2009.
ARRA allocated a total of $150 billion to keep schools open and functioning across the nation.
This particular piece of legislation was especially significant, because it marked the first time that the federal government provided funding based on the level of need of either the schools or the educational system.

Through the development of federal funding programs school systems are able to continue providing education to children and youth. Although there is still some controversy regarding the amount of funding given by the government, as Educators and guardians, we must be aware of the changes in legislation and how their decisions impact federal funds.

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