Category: Why Systemic Reform

Kids Still Need College Prep

There has been plenty of chatter since last week’s release of the report from Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce declaring that there are 30 million “good jobs”…

There has been plenty of chatter since last week’s release of the report from Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce declaring that there are 30 million “good jobs” for young men and women who don’t have a baccalaureate degree. Which sounds good on its face.

But a deeper look at the report offers another reason why school reformers must continue to push American public education to provide the college-preparatory education all children, especially the most-vulnerable, need so they can become part of the middle class and be successful in life.

Certainly the Georgetown report is correct in noting that there are still plenty of jobs paying that pay the kind of wages high school dropouts and graduates without some experience in traditional colleges, apprenticeships and technical schools need to become part of the nation’s middle class. This include jobs in traditional manufacturing sectors such as welding, machine tool-and-die making, and construction, as well as in service sector jobs such as nursing, computer service technicians, and bookkeepers.

The problem is that there are fewer of these jobs available in the first place. As the Georgetown team led by Anthony Carnevale admits, the percentage of $35,000-plus jobs held by dropouts and high school graduates without a baccalaureate declined by 25 percent (from 60 percent of jobs to 45 percent) between 1991 and 2015. There are also six million fewer jobs for them than there were 25 years ago, a 16.7 percent decline (from 36 million to 30 million) in that period.

The six decades-long decline in manufacturing and other traditional blue-collar fields, a trend that will continue into the future, is a major reason why  so few jobs are available for dropouts and high school grads without higher education of some kind. Thanks in large part to advances in technology (including the increase in the number of robotics used to handle low-skilled jobs once done by people), those jobs aren’t coming back.

But the bigger reason lies in the reality that the jobs that pay middle-class wages require higher levels of education than dropout and high school grads without higher education have mastered.

Between 1996 and 2016, some 4.1 million jobs were gained by high school graduates with some form of higher education other than a baccalaureate, while dropouts and grads without higher education lost one million jobs. Because so many sectors require higher levels of knowledge (as well as at least 60 college credits), those who don’t finish high school or don’t gain some form of higher education lose out on brighter futures. This is especially true for healthcare, which accounted for more than a quarter of the jobs gained by high school grads with at least some higher education, and the financial services sector (which accounts for another quarter of those jobs).

Even traditional manufacturing has become a place where workers must have higher education. Machine tool-and-die work makers who work on computer numerical control machines, for example, must both have strong math skills and be well-versed in computer programming languages. With robots having an even greater presence than ever in factories, those working in them must master computer programming languages such as C in order to do their work.

Given that higher levels of education are necessary for attaining most jobs, it becomes clear that all children need high-quality college-preparatory education. Especially since the kind of high-level math and science skills needed for success in white collar jobs requiring baccalaureate and graduate degrees are also necessary for the new blue collar jobs that can only be gotten after attending tech schools, community colleges, and apprenticeship programs (which are often run by state universities and community college systems).

The need for college-preparatory education goes beyond the jobs of today. Thanks to other advances in technology, including the rise of artificial intelligence and automation of even tasks such as crafting basic legal documents, even jobs requiring baccalaureate and graduate degrees are at risk of disappearing in the coming decades. As seen in the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics’ report last February on the decline in the number of teens in the labor force, the lack of high-quality education for current generations of adults has led to them taking jobs flipping burgers and other work that used to be the domain of adolescents who, are in turn, are now focused more on greater educational attainment. [By the way: The need for teens to learn more is something lost on the likes of U.S. Sen. Ben Sasse, who penned an op-ed this past weekend in the New York Times bemoaning their lack of summer employment.]

College-preparatory education is critical in providing children with the knowledge they can use in any job or career, helping them to remain employable for  future challenges and remain employable no matter what happens. Even if they don’t choose to initially attend a traditional college after high school, the knowledge they learn will help them when they in order to find a career path more-suited to them.

But as Dropout Nation readers already know, the problem is that American public education does a poor job of preparing kids for success in adulthood. Seventy-fie percent of the nation’s 12th-graders tested below grade level (Below Basic and Basic) in math on the 2015 National Assessment of Educational Progress. The numbers are even more bleak for children from poor and minority households. Ninety-six percent of Black high school seniors eligible for free- and reduced-priced lunch, along with 95 percent of American Indian and Alaska Native seniors, 92 percent of Latino 12th-graders, and 86 of poor White high school seniors scored below grade level.

The lack of preparation for higher education is why the percentage of Black adults with middle class jobs not requiring a baccalaureate barely budged (from nine percent to 11 percent) between 1991 and 2015, according to Georgetown, while the percentage of White adults holding such jobs declined by 16 percentage points over that same period.

The problem begins long before secondary education. As a team led by Amy Claessens of the University of Chicago determined in a study released two years ago on the effects of academic content on the learning of kindergartners, “all children benefit from exposure to advanced content in reading and mathematics”. In this case, advanced mathematics for kindergartners included advanced number concepts, and basic arithmetic such as addition and subtraction usually taught in first grade. Yet few children are provided high-quality content in math (as well as reading) in the early grades, ensuring that they will struggle academically by high school.

Continuing the overhaul of American public education, an effort complicated over the past couple of years by the passage of the Every Student Succeeds Act and its evisceration of both accountability and the ability of the federal government to advance college-preparatory curricula standards, must be kept apace. It will take new approaches to make it happen.

Providing kids with college-prep curricula that aligns with Common Core reading and math standards is key to making the promise of high-quality content a reality. It is also about building upon efforts such as Project Bright Idea in North Carolina as well as the work of the St. Charles Parish district in Louisiana.The work of providing kids with high-quality education must begin early. This includes providing intensive math instruction, especially on helping kids understand that numbers represent quantities, as well as basic arithmetic, in kindergarten.

The work must accelerate, especially once kids get into secondary schools. This includes providing all middle schoolers with Algebra 1 as well as with statistics, both of which help them with the hard math work that will come. Continuing to expand access to Advance Placement courses in high schools to poor and minority students will also help. But as the Education Trust details in a report released last week, districts and other school operators must provide youth with the support they need, as well as streamline practices such as setting master schedules for schools, in order to help improve their achievement.

Meanwhile it is important to help kids understand the relevance of what they learn to what they will do in adulthood. This includes efforts such as the Minddrive program in Kansas City, Mo., which helps kids see the connections between math courses and real world activities through the uses of 3D modeling, trigonometry, and electrical engineering in designing and building cars. Adding such courses will even help kids who are focused primarily on attending traditional colleges and careers requiring baccalaureate degrees.

The Georgetown report is another reminder that providing all children with high-quality education is critical to helping them gain economically. We can’t afford to give them anything less.

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The Zip Code Education Problem

Marking the 60th anniversary of the Supreme Court’s Brown decision the Government Accounting Office has released a report on American public education.  As befits a bean-counting agency, the report comes…

Marking the 60th anniversary of the Supreme Court’s Brown decision the Government Accounting Office has released a report on American public education.  As befits a bean-counting agency, the report comes in the modest guise of a contribution to a technical accounting discussion, pointing out how “Better Use of Information Could Help Agencies…”, well, you get the picture.

this_is_dropout_nation_logoBut the report is more than an accounting exercise, as its title continues by stating that what its information can help agencies do is to “Identify Disparities and Address Racial Discrimination.”  In fact, the GAO found that “The percentage of K-12 public schools in the United States with students who are poor and are mostly Black or Hispanic is growing.”  Sixty years after Brown America’s traditional public schools are resegregating.

The defendants in the Brown case argued that although their schools were segregated by race, the separate educational opportunities provided were equal, separate but equal, as  they said, following the 1896 Supreme Court decision in Plessy v. Ferguson. In Brown, however, the Court found that “Segregation . . . deprive[s] [Black children] of some of the benefits they would receive in a racially integrated school system.” The Brown decision, relying on somewhat controversial research about the psychological effects of government-sanctioned segregation, concluded that its mere existence was damaging to Black students.

Now comes the GAO, with its analysis of “better information,” finding that America’s schools are not only in violation of Brown, they are increasingly in violation of Plessy as wellThe educational opportunities offered by our schools where separate, and they are increasingly separate, are decidedly not equal.

Before we go any further, in the spirit of GAO, here’s a technical note: The categories used in the report are those of the U.S. Department of Education.  There are the racial and ethnic categories—White, Black, Hispanic, Asian and Other—and the economic category defined by the eligibility of school children for free or reduced-price lunches. There are very serious problems with the racial and ethnic categories.  “Asian,” in particular, is high problematic, throwing together people with Chinese ancestry with people of Sri Lankan descent; Filipinos and Iranians, and so forth.  “Hispanics” can be of Cuban, Mexican, Dominican or Argentine derivation, for example, regardless of race.  “Black” refers to people with sub-Saharan African ancestry (but not the very dark people from Kerala or indigenous Australians) and White is practically a residual category.

These seemingly technical difficulties are deeply implicated in America’s problems with race and racism.  The absurdities of the Asian and Hispanic categories are irrelevant. The underlying point is that what matters in these United States is whether or not one is visibly and predominantly descended from enslaved Africans.  If so, one is likely to find, for example, that police pay more attention to you than to others; that employers are less likely to give you a chance at a job and if they do they will pay you less than others, and that it will be difficult to find housing outside areas of concentrated poverty.

As for economic categorization, the White median household income is $57,400. The median income for Hispanic households is $42,700. The Black median household income is $35,500. As the income eligibility line for reduced-price meals for a family of four is $46,000, most Black school children are included in the group eligible for free or reduced-price lunch, as are the majority of Hispanic school children.

In other words, saying that a Black school child is eligible for free or reduced-price lunch is practically redundant.

But you plow with the mules that you’ve got, so here we go:

In addition to finding that American schools are resegregating, GAO found that schools that were over 75 percent Black or Hispanic AND the students of which were eligible for free or reduced-price lunch “offered fewer math, science, and college preparatory courses.”  They are separate, but offer very unequal educational opportunities.  White middle class students attend schools with more math, science and college preparatory courses, schools for Black and Hispanic students from impoverished families offer fewer.

Which brings us to the fine print of Appendix II of the report: “Students Enrolled in Advanced Placement Courses, by Race.”

Advanced Placement courses are the crown jewels of American education, qualifying students for college study and in many cases giving credit for basic college courses while still in high school.  GAO divided high schools into four categories: Low-Poverty and 0 to 25 percent Black or Hispanic; High-Poverty and 75 to 100 percent Black or Hispanic; All Other Schools and the subset of schools 90 to 100 percent High Poverty and Black and Hispanic.

Let us look at the first and last of these groups: the privileged and the underprivileged.  24 percent of students in the middle class schools with low poverty rates and low Black and Hispanic enrollment enrolled in at least one AP course.  These schools were 80 percent White, seven percent Asian, six percent Hispanic, and four percent Black.  Within that group, 43 percent of Asian students and 24 percent of White students enrolled in at least one AP course, as compared to 17 percent of Hispanic and just 15 percent of Black students.

Now for the highly segregated schools serving students from impoverished families, schools with 90 percent poverty rates and 90 percent Black and Hispanic enrollment. These schools were 53 percent Black, 44 percent Hispanic, one percent White, and one percent Asian.  Just 12 percent of students in those schools—half the proportion of the other group—enrolled in at least one AP course. 18 percent of Asian students in the high poverty schools and 14 percent of White students enrolled in at least one AP course, as compared to 14 percent of Hispanic and just 10 percent of Black students.

The chances that an Asian student in a school serving underprivileged students will enroll in an AP class are much less than half those that an Asian student in a middle class school.  That for White students falls nearly in half, from 24 percent to 14 percent, for Hispanic students from 17 percent to 14 percent and for Black students the opportunity to take these gateway courses declines from 15 percent in a middle class school to 10 percent in a ghetto school.

Simply moving from a school high-poverty, highly segregated school to a low-poverty school with a student body more closely representative in racial and ethnic terms to the general population can double the opportunity to enroll in an AP course for all students. This doesn’t mean it always happens; we see this all the time with gifted and talented courses that are also often segregation by another name. At the same time, more opportunities means more opportunities for all.

As a note: It is striking that White students in schools reserved for underprivileged students enroll in AP courses at a rate slightly below that of Black students in middle class schools. Perhaps there is a tendency for administrators of schools with overwhelmingly Black and Hispanic student populations to practice within-school segregation.

GAO was also interested in the math courses offered by different categories of schools.  It found, for example, that 79 percent of middle class schools offered 7th and 8th grade Algebra, while only 49 percent of high poverty with 75 percent to 100 percent Black and Hispanic enrollment schools did so. Similarly, 71 percent of middle class, but only 29 percent of the high poverty schools offered calculus.  Interestingly, among the schools serving high poverty students, 75 percent or more of whom were Black or Hispanic, 30 percent of the traditional schools offered calculus, but only 17 percent of charter schools did so.

Some have argued that family, neighborhood and “cultural” factors determine a student’s educational achievement.  The GAO, on the other hand, found that “schools that were highly isolated by poverty and race generally had fewer resources and disproportionately more disciplinary actions than other schools.” Students needing relatively more educational resources because of, say, family, neighborhood and “cultural” factors receive fewer, a situation aggravated by school discipline policies and actions that have been shown to be racially discriminatory.

In other words, the GAO has found that educational opportunity depends on where you live. Schools in middle class areas offer more AP, algebra and calculus courses and enroll much higher percentages of students in those courses than schools serving poor kids, of whatever race or ethnicity. As schools, and communities, become increasingly segregated, educational opportunities become increasingly unequal: more separate, less equal. Which is the consequence of a public education system that determines opportunity based on zip code, and not on what families, given high-quality data and choice regardless of income, decide to access.

We know how important college-preparatory education in advancing economic and social mobility, especially for Black, Latino, and children from poor households. That we continue segregating those children from those opportunities when it possible to provide it to them are the result of deliberate decisions to exclude them from better lives for themselves and their communities.

What is to be done?  In accord with its mission, the GAO recommends that the departments of Education and Justice track data more closely and analyze it more comprehensibly.  There are other things that should be done.  State and local officials responsible for the disparities found by the GAO should remedy them—should remedy them as soon as possible before more Black and Latino children in high poverty schools have their future’s stolen from them.

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Education Helps End Black Child Poverty

The excellent researchers at the Pew Research Center have looked at recent Census Bureau data and found that although Asian, White and Hispanic (who may be of any race) child…

The excellent researchers at the Pew Research Center have looked at recent Census Bureau data and found that although Asian, White and Hispanic (who may be of any race) child poverty percentages have declined in the last few years, the Black child poverty rate has actually increased both since 2010 and, indeed, from 2000. It is now just under 40 percent, which is approximately what it was 30 years ago. According to Eileen Patten and Jens Manuel Krogstad: “Black children were almost four times as likely as white or Asian children to be living in poverty in 2013, and significantly more likely than Hispanic children.”

this_is_dropout_nation_logoPatten and Krogstad leave it there, but these data cry out for answers to the following questions: Why do so many Black children continue to disproportionately live in poverty? And what are the implications of this continuing tragedy?

Obviously, Black children live in poverty because their parents are poor. Black median household incomes are less than two-thirds the White average and while the poverty rate for all White families is 9 percent, it is 24 percent for Black families. And why is that? Part of the reason is that the unemployment rate for Black Americans is twice that for Whites. Part of the reason is differences in educational attainment. Nearly one-third more Black adults over 25 years of age than White are without high school diplomas, while those proportions are reversed for college graduates and nearly twice the percentage of White Americans than Black have graduate degrees. A Black man is much more likely to be without a high school diploma than to have a graduate degree; again, the reverse of the situation for White men. And Black pay rates for every type of job and at every level of educational attainment are lower than the wages of their White co-workers.

Three times the percentage of Black households as White (30 percent versus 10 percent) are those of female householders, no husband present, with children under 18 years. With only one possible wage-earner in the household, nearly half of the children in these households live in poverty. Not that being a single parent household naturally leads to either poverty or educational underachievement. As Ludger Woessmann of the University of Munich noted earlier this year in an analysis of data from the PISA tests of international student success, achievement gaps between married households and single-parent homes declined by 60 percent (from 27 points to 10 points) when adjusted for educational attainment and number of books in a home.

Black children live in poverty because their families are poor. Their families are poor because their parents have lower educational attainment than the adults in White families, are more likely to be unemployed, and if employed are paid less than White workers of equal educational attainment. Some factors in the relatively higher unemployment rate of Black workers include segregated housing remote from workplaces in areas, such as Milwaukee, with limited public transportation, and the tendency of employers to hire White applicants over equally qualified Black applicants on the basis of race alone.

Then there are those absent fathers. More than one-third of those absent fathers are easy to find. President Obama pointed out the other day in a speech to the NAACP that one in nine Black children now have a parent in prison. The incarceration rate for Black men is six times that of White men (and more than twice that of Hispanic men). This is vastly out of proportion to crime rates and is largely attributable, as the President has said, to the inequities of the criminal justice system: Police are more likely to stop Black men than White men in similar circumstances and more likely to ticket or arrest them.

Prosecutors (overwhelmingly White men) are more likely to prosecute Black Americans than White Americans for similar crimes and judges give Black men more severe sentences than they give White men for similar crimes. These inequities in the criminal justice system directly affect child poverty rates. When in prison Black men cannot contribute to family budgets and it is unlikely that ex-prisoners can earn enough to lift their children out of poverty with child support payments or other contributions to their household.

To complete this cycle, Black children living in poverty often live in highly segregated neighborhoods with poorly resourced schools. In many cities half or more male Black students do not receive a high school diploma and those that do are relatively unlikely to be well-prepared for college or careers. They are, however, highly qualified to be targeted by police for standing, walking or driving while Black. As a result, their children, as well, will be quite likely to live in poverty.

The situation has not changed over the past 30 years. So how could it change in the next 30? The answer starts with reforming education in order to achieve economic and social justice.

Schools with a predominately Black enrollment should be fully resourced, beginning with universal pre-kindergarten at age 3, with extended k-12 school days, weeks and years, high effective teachers and challenging curricula. College tuition should be free for all Black children whose family income is below the national median. Hiring and pay practices should be monitored for racial (and gender) inequities and where those are found remedial actions should be enforced. Black home ownership in non-segregated communities should be facilitated with federally guaranteed, low-interest mortgages. The criminal justice system should be radically reformed, perhaps in many places brought under federal supervision. School reformers should work together with criminal justice reform advocates and others to undertake these much-needed measures.

These initiatives could be supported by humane, rational legislation at all levels of government, or, if such a thing is impossible, by reparations for slavery and Jim Crow, calculated on the basis of the current disparities in income and wealth between the families of Black and White children, paid by those currently existing corporations and other entities that profited by slavery, Jim Crow and today’s disparities. We won’t count on the last solution. But the rest can be easily done if we have to political will to make them reality.

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All Children Should Get Higher Ed

There is little hope that the Obama Administration’s proposal this week to subsidize community college attendance for any student who enrolls at least part-time and maintains a 2.5 grade point…

There is little hope that the Obama Administration’s proposal this week to subsidize community college attendance for any student who enrolls at least part-time and maintains a 2.5 grade point average will be passed in the next two years. The fact that congressional Republicans have made it their goal to keep the administration from attaining anything other than the most-minor of legislative victories means that the plan is dead on arrival; that movement conservatives activists are already criticizing the plan for reasons legitimate and otherwise also make its passage unlikely. Beyond the opposition, there’s also the fact that the administration’s plan will do more for children from middle class households (who can already afford the cost of community college) than for those from poor and minority backgrounds who are denied high-quality education (and thus, opportunities to attain any kind of higher education).

this_is_dropout_nation_logoYet in offering the community college plan, the Obama Administration deserves credit for reminding all of us, especially some reformers who have lost their way, about why all children need to complete higher education: Because the prospects are bleak for high school dropouts and even those high school graduates without some form of higher education.

This reality, emphasized by the Obama Administration plan, was further highlighted yesterday by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistic with its release of December employment numbers. The news that seasonally-adjusted unemployment rate officially declined by two-tenths of a percent (to 5.6 percent) is belied by the woeful job numbers for dropouts and high school grads who never have never attended (or completed) the traditional colleges, technical schools, and apprenticeships that make up American higher education.

The unemployment for dropouts aged 25 and older of 9.1 percent is just 1.3 percentage points lower than reported numbers for the same period last year. More importantly, the unemployment rate for dropouts is almost double the 4.8 percent rate for high school grads who attended or completed some form of higher education, and four times the 2.7 percent rate for collegians with baccalaureate and graduate degrees. That’s just for the dropouts who are in the workforce: Three-fifths of dropouts aged 25 and older aren’t in the workforce at all — and because of their lack of skills, won’t likely return.

Meanwhile the 5.3 percent unemployment rate for high school grads aged 25 and older without some form of higher education is 1.8 percent lower than in the same period last year. This seems like good news until you keep in mind that more of them are likely to be unemployed than peers who have some higher education and collegians with baccalaureate and graduate degrees. Just as importantly, with 45.4 percent of high school grads without higher education not in the workforce at all, many of them are likely never going to re-enter the workforce anytime in the future.

The long-term prospects for dropouts and high school grads without higher education haven’t gotten better over the last eight years. The unemployment rates for both groups are, respectively, 2.3 percentage points and one percentage point lower than levels in December 2006, just before the financial meltdown that led to the nation’s slowly-retreating economic malaise. Workforce participation rates have also declined; the percentage of high school grads without higher education in the workforce has declined by 5.4 percent within the last eight years.

Since dropouts and high school grads without higher education are among the 2.8 million unemployed for 27 weeks or longer, their prospects for future employment is even dimmer. While there are officially 1.1 million fewer long-term unemployed Americans than in 2013, this is only because of the decision last year by the federal government (resulting from sparring between the administration, Senate Democrats and House Republicans) to not extend unemployment benefits to them. Those out of work for longer than six months still make up 31.9 percent of all unemployed Americans, versus 16.2 percent of unemployed workers in the same period in 2006.

Also keep this in mind: Dropouts and high school grads without higher education also make up many of the 2.3 million so-called marginally attached Americans (or unemployed job-seekers not counted in official unemployment numbers because they usually cannot collect any more jobless benefits and, thus, not considered looking for work); those numbers haven’t improved within the last year and in fact, the number of marginally-attached workers is 1 million more than in the same period eight years ago.

Certainly the hangover from the economic malaise — including the shortcomings of the stimulus efforts undertaken by both the Obama Administration and that of George W. Bush, as well as the consequences of the Affordable Care Act — is one reason why so many dropouts and high school grads without higher education are unemployed. But it isn’t the predominant factor. The reality is that for both groups, their low levels of reading, math, and science proficiency renders them unfit to take on the middle class wage-paying knowledge-based white- and blue-collar jobs in fast-growing sectors. That the industries that used to be their go-tos are either contracting or not growing economically — including construction (which employed 2.5 million fewer employees last year than in 2006) and retail (which employs 1.7 million few workers last year than eight years ago) — means that those dropouts and high school grads who are unemployed will remain so.

New York Employers Offer Work Opportunities At Job Fair

For poor and minority communities, higher levels of education equal lower levels of poverty and unemployment.

This is a problem because high levels of education are key to the poor emerging into the middle class. Twenty-seven percent of households in the lowest 20 percent of income earners were high school dropouts and another 36 percent were high school grads without some form of higher education, according to data from the U.S. Census Bureau. High school dropouts and high school grads with no college education made up only nine percent of the highest-earning fifth of the nation’s households, and just a quarter of those in the fourth-highest earning fifth of all households. The median weekly wage of $472 for a high school dropout is 35 percent lower than that for a high school graduate with some form of higher education and three-fifths lower than that a high school grad with a baccalaureate; the median weekly wage of $651 for a high school grad without higher education training is half that of a peer with a baccalaureate.

As your editor noted nearly two years ago, lack of higher education is particularly problematic  for workers from poor and minority backgrounds, who are the most-likely to not have been provided high-quality education needed to gain it. After all, black high school dropouts and high school grads without higher ed experience account for 40 percent of all African-Americans in the civilian population age 25 and older and a whopping 58 percent of Latinos; 34 percent of whites and 23 percent of Asians were dropouts and high school grads without college experience. The lower the levels of education in a community, the more-susceptible it is to economic and social distress. Unemployment rates for black high school dropouts 25 and older stood at 20.5 percent in December, 3.8 percentage points higher than at the same time in 2013.

Simply put, higher education is critical for lifelong success in an increasingly knowledge-based economy. But it isn’t just about economics alone. The more children from poor backgrounds attain higher levels of education, the more-likely they are to avoid the pernicious cycle of bad decisions, lack of knowledge, and dearth of resources that keep them in poverty.

As Dropout Nation pointed out last August, higher education is key to keeping young women from falling into out-of-wedlock childhood and ending up in poverty; this is because a longer a young woman is in school, the more-likely she will delay pregnancy until she attains the education needed to gain middle class-paying jobs critical to sustaining marriages and raising children. Higher education also keeps young men out of the school-to-prison pipeline, stopping them from ending up in the woeful economic positions that lead them to makethe kind of desperate decisions to put food on their table that land them in prison, a point highlighted on Thursday by Contributing Editor Michael Holzman in his piece on Chicago’s educational and criminal justice woes. Hoping that earning a high school diploma and avoiding pregnancy alone will keep poor kids out of poverty, an argument offered up by some traditionalists and reformers such as Michael Petrilli of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute (along with the claim that only some children should attend and complete higher education), ignores economic and social reality. Higher education is key to transforming communities and those who live in them.

So the Obama Administration’s theory behind its effort to subsidize community college learning is correct. But it won’t work without addressing two issues. The first? How higher education institutions fail to aid first-generation collegians, many of whom come from poor and minority households that have no previous experience with such matters as annually filling out the Free Application for Federal Student Aid. The second: Continually tackling the nation’s education crisis, the underlying reason why just 18 percent of high school freshmen graduate with a baccalaureate by age 25 (and why college graduation rates for children from poor and minority backgrounds are even lower).

This starts with providing all children with the kind of high-quality teaching and comprehensive, college-preparatory curricula and standards children need to attain knowledge needed to succeed in higher education and in career. [The Obama Administration deserves credit for advancing reform efforts on this front, especially through Race to the Top.] This includes continuing the implementation of Common Core reading and math standards, along with overhauling how we recruit, train, compensate, and manage teachers; that Common Core’s standards are higher quality than those most states had in place before its development should give pause to politicians in states such as Tennessee, where fores of Common Core are pushing to halt implementation. Aligning curricula with high-quality standards is also important to making the promise of the standards a reality for our children.

But the focus cannot be on standards, teachers, and curricula alone Districts and other school operators must be held accountable for improving student achievement. This is where the accountability provisions of the No Child Left Behind Act, which has been weakened substantially by the Obama Administration’s waiver gambit (and could end up being eviscerated altogether if congressional Republicans and traditionalists have their way) come in. By using annual test data to track how districts are educating children, especially those from poor and minority backgrounds, states, families and reformers can advance efforts that will lead to kids getting the knowledge that they need to attain higher education and lifelong success.

Meanwhile we must also provide families with the school choice and Parent Power they need to provide high-quality education to their children. This includes developing data systems that allow for families to make smarter choices, implementing Parent Trigger measures that allow parents to overhaul schools in their own neighborhoods, expanding high-quality charter schools, and launching online learning options. Considering how poorly traditional districts do in providing kids with guidance counselors who can help them stay on the path to higher education success, allowing families to choose alternatives would be helpful.

The Obama Administration’s community college plan won’t become reality. But the proposal, along with the latest unemployment data, is another reminder of the need to help all kids get on the path to higher education and success in an increasingly knowledge-based world.

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Let Public Education’s Failed Legacies Die

The last two months of every year is what your editor calls silly season, when otherwise-sensible people end up writing less-than-sensible things. This is why your editor won’t devote many…

The last two months of every year is what your editor calls silly season, when otherwise-sensible people end up writing less-than-sensible things. This is why your editor won’t devote many words to the latest defense of overusing out-of-school suspensions and other harsh traditional school discipline by Thomas B. Fordham Institute President Michael Petrilli. Doing so means giving the data-free claptrap more credence than the unserious piece deserves. Considering that I have torn apart Petrilli’s earlier arguments about the issue so many times before — and has cited decades of evidence to boot — another point-by-point response would just heap on more embarrassment for him.

this_is_dropout_nation_logoNor will I give any more attention than necessary to the shoddy scholarship coming from Fordham last month in the form of a piece by Brookings Institution scholar Tom Loveless arguing that American public education should return to the racialist practice of ability-tracking because it can supposedly help high-achieving kids from poor and minority backgrounds. The fact that the evidence Loveless cites contradicts his hypothesis (and shows that tracking doesn’t help children at all) should have been enough for the piece to be rejected out of hand. At some point, Loveless has to stop trying to revive a legacy of America’s condemning of poor and minority children with low expectations.

I’m not even going to bother with Rick Hess’ latest defense of preserving Zip Code Education policies (and ultimately, the traditional district model), this time during the Education for Upward Mobility conference held by Fordham last month, and his claim that efforts to expand school choice do little more than allow poor and minority families to evade personal responsibility for raising their children. This is a theme he began last year with a piece in National Review last year arguing that reformers were encouraging irresponsible parenting. Conor P. Williams of New America Foundation responded best to Hess’ sophistry by noting that he fails to admit that the very Zip Code Education laws he is effectively defending actually neuters the ability of all families to do the best for their children by taking away their God-given right to structure education for their kids, a point made on these pages ad nauseam. Given Hess’ penchant for look-at-me contrarianism, his argument deserves no serious consideration.

Yet Petrilli, Loveless, and Hess, through their respective polemics and advocacy for traditionalist thinking, raise an important question: Why do traditionalists and even more-sensible reformers advocate for replicating the failed polices and practices of American public Education’s past and present when we must do better for all of our children?

One of the enduring conflicts, both in the battle over reforming American public education as well as within the school reform movement itself, is that there are some outdated ideas that damage the futures of kids to which some hold on to with dear life. Considering the data on how woeful American public education remains — including 33 percent of all fourth-graders in 2013 were functionally illiterate (along with another 33 percent reading at basic levels of literacy) — and that one out of every two dropouts and high school grads without higher ed training aren’t in the workforce, you would think it would be hard to justify holding on to nearly every policy, practice, and institution within it.

Yet as Petrilli, Loveless, and Hess demonstrate in their rhetoric, there are some reformers who are as keen on preserving the worst traditionalist thinking as those opposed to systemic reform. Same is true for some charter school operators such as Eva Moskowitz’s Success Academy who have been rightly called out for out-of-school suspension rates that are often as high (if not higher) than those of traditional districts. Same also goes for centrist and liberal reformers who still oppose expanding vouchers and other forms of school choice. And like most traditionalists, they fight vigorously to preserve institutions and practices ultimately because they believe such policies and practices are worth keeping.

This strain of thinking was given some credence this summer when Andy Smarick of Bellwether Education Partners wrote a series of essays asking why the school reform movement seems hostile to movement conservative thinking. One of Smarick’s complaints was that reformers, especially centrist and progressive Democrats within it, are far too disinterested in conserving institutions and policies within public education that may actually have some social and political value. From where Smarick sits, the technocratic approach embraced by many reformers, which can involve tremendous upheaval can lead to “valuable things [being] lost in the process”. From where Smarick sits, reformers should at least think about the reasons why earlier generations put practices and institutions in place before taking them down.

Your editor understands Smarick’s point, at least when it comes to such matters outside of education such as civil liberties. Certainly there are traditions, policies and practices worth preserving because those who came before us, through their hard-earned experience, figured out that some things work best when it comes to fostering liberty, freedom, and civil society. Freedom of speech, for example, protects minority views that may be unpopular in the times in which they are expressed, while freedom of the press allows for media to shed the much-needed antiseptic of sunlight on governments to protect our society and tax dollars. Then there are institutions such as churches and charities, which help foster a humane society from which we all benefit. Not every long-lived idea or institution should be tossed into the ashbin of history.

At the same time, as I noted last July in a critique of one of Smarick’s pieces, preserving traditional ideas and institutions can be as much a flaw as virtue, especially when they perpetuate injustice that is morally and intellectually indefensible. This is because ills, social, educational and otherwise, is often as much a result of bad structure s and approaches that perpetuate human failings. Just as importantly, there is the reality that tradition, like so much else wrought by man, is based on limited human reasoning; the same humility Smarick counsels in favor of preservation also favors change because few ideas and institutions are ever timeless. As famed conservative philanthropist John M. Olin would likely note, because earlier generations don’t have the benefit of data and knowledge that has come since they left this earth, the correct conclusions for their time may be incorrect today (and, with benefit of hindsight, may have been wrong even then).

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Why do some reformers continue to join common cause with traditionalists to defend policies and practices that damage children’s futures?

The blind adherence to tradition, or the democracy of the dead, can often result in people being unwilling to address injustice by those institutions even when it is morally and intellectually justified to do so. More importantly, adhering blindly to traditionalism, especially in American public education, has damaging consequences to all of our children inside of schoolhouses and outside of them. Especially since these practices originate from the state-sanctioned bigotry, racial, ethnic, and religious, that is America’s Original Sin; if anything, these legacy practices can end up perpetuating decades of harm done to children and their communities by earlier laws.

Your editor was reminded of these realities over the past five months as the nation became riveted by matters not immediately connected to the nation’s education crisis: The murder of 43-year-old Eric Garner by New York City police officer Dan Panteleo. The execution of 22-year-old John Crawford, who was shopping in a Walmart, by cops in Beavercreek, Ohio. The slaying of 18-year-old Michael Brown by now-former Ferguson, Mo. cop Darren Wilson. And the execution of 12-year-old Tamir Rice (who was outside playing with a toy gun, as any child would do) by Cleveland police officer Timothy Loehmann.

Their state-sanctioned murders, along with the grand jury verdicts in the cases of Garner, Crawford, and Brown letting the officers off scot-free, and the mountains of data on how police officers are often allowed to get away with killing unarmed men (especially black men) with impunity, were reminders that reforming criminal justice systems is as important in addressing the nation’s shameful legacies as it is in preserving our civil liberties today. The use-of-force laws that allow police officers to get away with murder this century are no different in effect and substance than the fugitive slave and Jim Crow laws that effectively gave license to murder of black men in the previous two.

If it is important to abandon criminal justice practices that end up making courts and police departments more harmful than helpful to the communities they are supposed to serve, it is doubly important to ditch policies and practices within American public education that help not one child and end up damaging millions more. Especially since the dysfunction of education’s super-clusters, especially traditional big-city and suburban districts, help foster the very conditions of social and economic decay in the communities they serve. Especially since schools, through practices such as overusing suspensions and overlabeling kids as special ed cases, have become the gateways into criminal justice systems and dependence on the welfare state. [Even Smarick, in his arguments to abandon the traditional district model, admits that the preservation argument, is incredibly flawed when applied to the nation’s education crisis.]

What is clear, in short, is that American public education cannot continue to exist in its current form. This doesn’t mean abandoning the concept of public education, at least as the system of financing high-quality opportunities for children of all backgrounds so that their geniuses are nurtured in order for them to choose their own paths to success and happiness. What it does mean is that the failed policies, practices, and institutions within public education shouldn’t be preserved.

This includes ditching traditional school discipline practices that have been demonstrated to be ineffective in helping children behave themselves, let school operators off the hook for failing to provide intensive reading remediation at the heart of their behavioral struggles, and, in the case of use of restraints and . That the practices perpetuate thinking by those in law enforcement that black, Latino, and Native children are criminals, end up making schools gateways to prison (through referrals to juvenile justice systems and school arrests), and, in the case of seclusion and restraint practices used in special ed ghettos, physically endanger kids, should lead reformers to do all they can to push for abandoning them. There’s no reason why reformers such as Petrilli defend Success Academy and other charter school operators for overusing suspensions and expulsions when they can and should do better.

It also means abandoning efforts to revive ability-tracking, which along with the comprehensive high school model and special education ghettos, did little more than allow teachers and other adults to deny poor and minority children college-preparatory curricula they need and deserve. That ability-tracking is a legacy of early 20th-century eugenicist thinking that black children, along with those from immigrant households, we’re less-capable of academic learning than white Anglo-Saxon children should be enough to render it intellectually illegitimate. Folks such as Loveless, who know both the history and the evidence of the damage ability-tracking has done, should not advocate for its revival.

This especially means that we must put an end to school zones, school residency laws, and other Zip Code Education policies that keep families, especially those from poor and minority households, from choosing high-quality opportunities for their children. Not only do such laws keep parents from acting responsibly as they should, they are also another legacy of America’s racial, ethnic, and religious bigotries. By no means can Hess defend policies that originate with such racialist and religiously bigoted laws such as Connecticut’s Black Law (which banned black families from outside of the Nutmeg State to attend a private school operated by legendary teacher Prudence Crandall) and Blaine Amendments (passed by states to stifle the growth of Catholic and other parochial schools).

Reformers should not be in the business of defending policies and practices that should no longer continue. That Petrilli, Loveless, and Hess (along with their colleagues) do so is just plain unacceptable. They should stop, just stop, with this not-so-intellectual madness.

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Transform Juvenile Justice

There is well-deserved outrage over the decisions by two grand juries in St. Louis and New York City to not indict police officers Darren Wilson and Dan Pantaleo for the…

There is well-deserved outrage over the decisions by two grand juries in St. Louis and New York City to not indict police officers Darren Wilson and Dan Pantaleo for the murders of Michael Brown and Eric Garner. The good news is that many of the nation’s school reformers realize that it isn’t enough to transform education. Groups such 50Can Teach For America, and Parent Revolution, along with activists such as Derrell Bradford, Stacy Childress, Alex Hernandez, and James Shuls, realize that reformers must stand up and counted when it comes to addressing the intersection between American public education and our criminal justice systems.

this_is_dropout_nation_logoRaising voices is a start. But I declared in this week’s Dropout Nation Podcast, reformers must also take action by working with criminal justice reform advocates to address how schools and courts end up damaging our children. One area in which reformers can play powerful roles lies in keeping kids out of the nation’s juvenile justice systems and overhauling how those already condemned to youth prisons are treated, educationally and otherwise.

The latest focus on our juvenile prisons comes courtesy of the Obama Administration, which issued guidance on Monday to state superintendents and attorneys general on how to stem the high numbers of children caught up in juvenile justice systems, as well as overhaul how teaching and curricula is provided to the 146,979 kids incarcerated in prisons and jails (including residential treatment centers) as of 2011, according to an analysis of federal and state data by the criminal justice reform-oriented Justice Policy Institute. Certainly there will be some reformers who will argue that the Dear Colleague guidance is another form of federal overreach as they did when the Obama Administration began work on reducing overuse of harsh school discipline. But the administration deserves credit for once again shining a light on how schools and criminal justice systems work together to condemn so many children to the worst America offers.

One aspect of the administration’s guidance has to do with the reality that far too many children from poor and minority households are more-likely to end up trapped in juvenile justice systems than kids from white and middle class backgrounds. This, of course, reflects what happens in American public education. Sixty percent of delinquency cases involving black children, along with 58 percent of American Indian, and 56 percent of Asian kids, were petitioned (or led to formal charges) in 2011, according to the U.S. Department of Justice; only one out of every two cases involving white kids led to formal charges.

The Obama Administration’s guidance comes both amid the uproar over the Ferguson and Garner grand jury verdicts, and as Justice Policy released its special report revealing that 46 states (along with the District of Columbia) spent $148,767 per child annually on juvenile incarceration in 2011. Based on those numbers, states (along with the federal government) actually spent $22 billion on imprisoning youth, more than four times the official number of $5.7 billion (which only accounts for kids in juvenile prisons, not those in residential treatment where most incarcerated youth will be placed). Concludes Justice Policy staffers Amanda Petteruti, Marc Schindler, and Jason Ziedenberg: “Policies that needlessly confine youth have an immediate cost for taxpayers and our communities.”

This is an understatement. Twenty-five percent of convicted juvenile delinquency offenders and seven percent of convicted status offenders (or children convicted of activities that would be legal if they were 18 or 21), were incarcerated in 2011. Another 64 percent of convicted juvenile delinquency offenders and 56 percent of those convicted of status offenders end up on probation, which can be just as onerous as prison time because probation usually lasts until a child reaches age 18 or 21 (and could lead to prison if they violate — quite likely given high recidivism rates — or if families fail to pay often-exorbitant monthly probation fees to courts). Given that only 4.6 percent of the 1.5 million juvenile arrests made in 2011 were for violent crimes such as murder, and property crimes accounted for just 23 percent of arrests, children end up in juvenile justice systems either for minor offenses that can be solved through better means or because of referrals by traditional districts and other school operators for matters they should be handling on their own.

This is especially troubling for three important reasons.

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Children incarcerated in juvenile prisons such as the now-shuttered Al Price in Beaumont, Texas, often never get high-quality education. (Photo courtesy of the Beaumont Enterprise.)

The first: Once a child lands in juvenile courts, they are unlikely to gain the kind of due process granted to adults. The U.S. Supreme Court’s 1967 ruling, In Re Gault, established that juveniles are entitled to legal counsel and due process the same way adults are. Yet as Seattle University School of Law Professor Janet Ainsworth noted in a 1996 report, 47 percent of accused juvenile offenders in three states went through court without any legal representation; a decade later, the National Juvenile Defender Center and the Indiana Juvenile Justice Task Force reported that 40 percent of juvenile cases in Indiana were handled without defense counsel. Just 19 states allow alleged juvenile offenders to have their cases decided by jury trial in at least some situations, according to NJDC.

Because of the lack of due process and legal representation, children can end up being subjected to arbitrary and capricious behavior by judicial overlords — who often control juvenile jails and probation agencies alongside their own courts — whose decisions can end up causing more harm to kids than any possible good. Your editor detailed what could happen in a 2006 editorial series for the Indianapolis Star on scandal that enveloped the Circle City’s juvenile court. An even more-horrific example was revealed three years later, when then-Luzerne County (Pa.) Court of Common Pleas judges Michael Conahan and Mark Ciavarella were charged with (and later, convicted of) racketeering and bribery charges for funneling $1.3 million a year in taxpayer dollars to cronies operating two private jails by incarcerating alleged youth offenders (many of whom were first-time offenders charged with misdemeanors such as spraying graffiti, writing prank notes, and truancy), often finding the kids guilty in less than two minutes, and denying them their rights to attorneys.

The second reason: Once a child ends up in juvenile prisons and jails, there is little likelihood that they will be safe from harm. Twelve percent of juvenile prisoners report being sexually assaulted by either another inmate or by prison staff, according to a Justice Department study. Last year, the Justice Department revealed that one out of every three children held in 13 juvenile jails and prisons — including the Circleville Juvenile Correctional Facility in Ohio and the Illinois Youth Center Joliet — were sexually abused by guards, other employees, or fellow inmates. And in California, the problems of sexual abuse of children in juvenile prisons was brought to light once again last October when Cesar Navejar, who worked as an officer in Kern County’s juvenile jail, was accused of sexual battery on a child locked up there.

But the damage to kids in juvenile jails extends beyond molestation. Thirty-five percent of juvenile prisoners reported that they spent some time in solitary confinement, essentially being subjected to the kind of psychological abuse that has gotten prisons serving adults into trouble. Because juvenile prisons and jails are ill-equipped to deal with the underlying mental health issues of kids incarcerated in them, suicide ends up being common. The average age of children in juvenile prisons committing suicide between 1995 and 1999 was 15.7 years old, according to a 2009 report from the Justice Department; 72.7 percent of them were locked up for nonviolent offenses, while 65.8 percent had a history of mental illness, and 78.5 percent had a history of physical or emotional abuse. Given that 63 percent of kids incarcerated in juvenile prisons were convicted of nonviolent property, drug, and technical (read: probation) offenses, putting kids into juvenile prisons harms them physically and mentally in the present — and does little to help them change their behavior and become model citizens in the future.

Then there is the reality that most kids in juvenile jails and prisons are unlikely to be provided high-quality education. Just nine percent of children locked up in state juvenile prisons in 2009 graduated with either a high school diploma or lower-quality GED, according to the Justice Department; a mere four percent of inmates were either enrolled or accepted into a higher education program. When they are locked up in juvenile prisons, they are unlikely to get high-quality teaching and curricula; 26 percent of children locked up in juvenile prisons and jails for more than 90 days made any kind of academic progress, according to a report released earlier this year by the Southern Education Foundation. Meanwhile as lawsuits such as one filed by the Southern Poverty Law Center have revealed, few juvenile prisons and jails do much to provide kids with education in the first place.

The failures of public education in juvenile justice systems is especially problematic for kids who have been condemned to the nation’s special ed ghettos when they were attending traditional district schools. Thirty percent of incarcerated youth surveyed by the U.S. Department of Justice were diagnosed as being special ed cases. University of Florida professor Joseph C. Gagnon and his team determined in a 2009 study that between 38 percent and 44 percent of juvenile inmates were taking special ed classes. As Sarah Butrymowicz and Jackie Mader of the Hechinger Report detailed this past October in a report on Mississippi’s juvenile prisons, the likelihood of a juvenile prison following up on an incarcerated child’s individualized education plan is slim to none.

Certainly the complex nature of juvenile justice systems can make it difficult for school reformers to even discuss, much less devote energy to it. As I noted four years ago, the complex behavioral and psychological issues alone are harder to grapple with than matters of teacher quality. Yet reformers must work hand-in-hand with advocates for overhauling juvenile justice systems. Why? Because far too many children are condemned to juvenile systems for problems that have as much to do with the failures of American public education as they do with bad parenting and a fraying civic society.

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Corruption and denial of due process to children by juvenile justice officials such as now-convicted former Luzerne County judges Michael Conahan and Mark Ciavarella is far too commonplace.

As Dropout Nation has noted over the past few months, schools account for three out of every 10 status referrals to juvenile courts in 2011, according to the Justice Department. This includes 65 percent of truancy referrals, which account for 33 percent (or the single-largest share) of all status cases handled by juvenile courts. Given that juvenile court judges are incapable of handling matters that have to do with the failures of traditional districts to provide high-quality education and families not keeping their kids in classrooms, there is little reason why truancy cases are even be adjudicated.

The failures of traditional districts on the literacy front are another reason why so many kids are ensnared by juvenile justice systems. Forty-four percent of incarcerated children in state juvenile prisons were at least a grade level behind in reading. As Stanford University researchers Deborah Stipek and Sarah Miles determined in a 2006 study, low literacy levels in first grade are strong predictors of long-term disciplinary problems by third grade; essentially kids act out because they realize that they are falling behind their peers, but are unable (or unwilling to) verbalize it. This was further borne out in a 2011 study by Chuang Wang and Bob Algozzine of University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Thanks to low-quality literacy instruction and curricula (especially in the early grades), along with the lack of intensive identification and remediation of functionally-illiterate children, kids who would otherwise stay out of trouble in and out of schools end up on the path to incarceration.

The failure of districts to help illiterate children end up leading to another problem that ends up in juvenile justice systems: The overlabeling of children, especially young black and white men, as special ed cases. As Dropout Nation noted in reports on school districts in Ferguson, Mo. (where Michael Brown was slain), districts in the Washington, D.C., metro area, and Minneapolis, children in special ed ghettos are at least twice as likely to be arrested or referred to juvenile justice systems as peers in regular classrooms. Because districts fail to address literacy issues, and because teachers and other adults in schools end up labeling certain groups of students as special ed cases because they think they are destined to end up that way, far too many kids end up being put on the path to juvenile and adult prisons. That many special ed ghettos embrace many of the worst practices of those prisons — including use of seclusion (or solitary confinement) and restraints on kids — essentially conditions kids to being mistreated in juvenile justice.

Then there’s the role that state education departments fail to play in regulating schools and other educational programs operated in juvenile prisons and jails. Because education agencies often fail to fulfill their mandates to oversee juvenile correctional schools — as well as because of their struggles in developing robust data systems that can provide data on their performance (as well as allow them to get information from districts) — jails and prisons end up doing little for the kids in their academic care.  In fact, as a 2009 study by team led by Gagnon determined, more than half of principals running juvenile detention schools believe that kids in their care should not be expected to learn at grade level; which means that incarcerated children are being subjected to the soft bigotry of low expectations by those who should do better by them. The neglect of state education departments on this front is one reason why the Obama Administration’s guidance extends to them as well as to attorneys general.

The failures of our schools and juvenile justice systems spill out onto our streets — especially in the form of black kids essentially condemned to lives of incarceration. So overhauling juvenile justice systems must be a priority for school reformers and criminal justice reform advocates alike.

This starts with reformers and juvenile justice advocates, along with the rest of the criminal justice reform community, coming together to support reforms that can keep kids out of juvenile justice systems in the first place. This includes ending mandatory sentencing for all but the most-violent acts of delinquency, as well as backing laws requiring jury trials and legal counsel (in a manner similar to the guardian at litem system for kids going through child welfare systems) for all alleged juvenile offenders. These moves, along with greater oversight of juvenile incarceration (including putting operation of juvenile jails in the hands of city and county jail agencies and out of the hands of judges) should be undertaken.

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Youth in detention are routinely searched, at some facilities six times a day is standard procedure. (Photo courtesy of Richard Ross)

 

Directly addressing the intersection between public education and juvenile justice systems, reformers should support juvenile justice reform overhauls being advanced by outfits such as the Annie E. Casey Foundation and the John T. and Catherine D. MacArthur Foundation. Casey, in particular, has worked diligently in cities such as Indianapolis to reduce the numbers of kids referred by districts to juvenile courts. Crafting laws that require state education departments to keep better tabs on juvenile prison schools must also be a key priority.

Yet there will still be some kids who will be in juvenile prisons and jails because of violent offenses. This is why reformers must play powerful roles in overhauling the schools that serve our kids locked up in juvenile prisons and jails. This is where charter school operators such as KIPP can come in. Outfits such as the See Forever Foundation, which operates schools serving the District of Columbia’s juvenile jail (as well as other charters serving ex-dropouts) have shown that incarcerated kids can and should receive high-quality teaching and curricula. Online and blended learning players such as Rocketship should also help out on this front. Universities, technical schools, and apprenticeship programs can also help by providing kids in juvenile jails the postsecondary education they will need to avoid poverty and incarceration upon adulthood.

Meanwhile juvenile justice advocates should support reformers in transforming American public education. After all, if we ensure that all kids are reading proficiently and on the path to lifelong success, we keep them out of juvenile justice systems. This includes high-level reforms such as implementing Common Core reading and math standards; implementing techniques such as Response to Intervention (which can keep kids from landing in special ed ghettos and help them get reading remediation); building school data systems that can help all schools inside and outside juvenile justice systems serve children well; and expanding school choice and Parent Power, especially for poor and minority families affected most by the dysfunctions of public education and criminal justice.

We must keep our children out of juvenile justice systems and help them, along with those already trapped in them, get the high-quality education they need and deserve. Reformers can’t stand on the sidelines any longer on this matter.

Featured photo courtesy of Richard Ross. Check out his Juvenile in Justice series.

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