Tag: Civil Rights Project at UCLA

Max Eden’s Shoddy Anti-School Discipline Reform Punditry

Your editor usually doesn’t write immediate follow-ups on commentaries. But yesterday’s Dropout Nation takedown of use of faulty data by Manhattan Institute pundit Max Eden and other opponents of reforming school…

Your editor usually doesn’t write immediate follow-ups on commentaries. But yesterday’s Dropout Nation takedown of use of faulty data by Manhattan Institute pundit Max Eden and other opponents of reforming school discipline generated plenty of discussion both in social media and in e-mails. Thanks to those discussions, the flaws in the studies used by Eden and his counterparts, most-notably Michael Petrilli of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute and Jason Riley of the Wall Street Journal, have been exposed.

As you would expect — and has become his wont — Eden dodged the report and questions raised by other reformers and education policy scholars. Save for arguing that Oakland Unified School District, whose ban on suspensions for disruptive behavior and other minor infractions was mentioned in his piece, supposedly fell behind academically because of that effort, Eden offered little defense of either his US News & World Report op-ed or his overall arguments.

But while Eden said little, what he did say revealed even more sloppiness in his arguments and thinking. Which given that he and other foes of school discipline reform are helping the Trump Administration and U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos justify their plans to ditch the federal government’s obligation to protect the civil rights of poor and minority children, is worrisome.

In the case of Oakland, Eden declared that research from Stanford University’s Sean Reardon showing that the district’s improvement in student achievement of 4.3 years over a five-year period trailed behind the overall state average made his “case” for his conclusion. The problem? For one, Reardon’s research, which focused solely on how districts improve academic progress for children from third grade to the end of middle school (as well as how poverty affects achievement), never looked at the impact of school discipline policy (or even overuse of suspensions) on achievement. Put simply, there’s no way that Eden can use Reardon’s data to reach or support his conclusions.

It gets worse. As it turns out, Eden probably didn’t mean to mention Reardon’s study, but Boston University grad student Dominic Zarecki’s study of Los Angeles Unified School District’s implementation of a ban on suspensions for minor infractions, the white paper at the heart of Eden’s US News op-ed. The study does mention that it did an analysis of Oakland Unified academic achievement after implementation of its school discipline reform effort to compare results with that of L.A. Unified. Zarecki does note that it found that Oakland Unified trailed the rest of the state in improving student achievement by the 2015-2016 school year, arguing that it proves his study’s declaration that suspension bans damage achievement.

But Zarecki also admits that “we cannot conduct a full difference-in-difference analysis for Oakland because we lack data to measure the change in academic growth”. Zarecki also concedes that Oakland would likely have “had a relatively low growth rate even without the suspension ban”, which, given its decades-long struggles on the education front, goes without saying. As Brian Stanley, executive director of the Oakland Education Fund, noted yesterday, the district “has had fairly low academic growth for a long time.” [Stanley, by the way, offers a rather insightful and data-driven account of Oakland’s school discipline reform efforts that opponents and supporters of school discipline reform should check out.]

This oversight could be considered if Zarecki provided his analysis of Oakland Unified (which is likely based on two years of school-level data instead of at least four years student-level data) in an appendix to the main study. He did not, which means there is no real way for to understand how Zarecki reached this particular conclusion.

It isn’t shocking that Dominic Zarecki’s shoddy research is being championed by Max Eden and other foes of school discipline reform. That’s just what they do.

Of course, this is one of the many flaws Dropout Nation and others have identified. Another is that Zarecki’s study focuses not on increases and decreases in actual achievement and out-of-school suspensions for minor infractions, but on differences in differences, essentially looking at growth over the short time frames being measured. The problem with so-called difference-to-difference research design is that it can inflate what would otherwise be minor increases and decreases in standard deviations during the time periods measured. Especially when measuring two-year periods instead of four years and beyond (which would tell more about the success or failure of any implementation or program).

Put simply, Zarecki’s study, already flawed because of its focus on school level data, lack of granularity and other issues, likely yielded inflated results. Zarecki himself admits this when he notes that the two additional analyses he used to check his work didn’t yield similar conclusions.

Given that Zarecki’s study is really more of a class paper that hasn’t been peer reviewed and probably hasn’t been looked over by his doctoral advisor, you can somewhat excuse those flaws. [The fact that his career has been in education research, including time as research director for the California Charter Schools Association, makes this excuse rather weak.] But Eden, a longtime education policy wonk who spent time working for Rick Hess at the American Enterprise Institute before landing at Manhattan Institute (and who still co-writes pieces with Hess on occasion), can’t justify why he ran with this shoddy work. If your editor can sniff out the weaknesses in Zarecki’s study, then Eden can do so, too.

The fact that Eden ran with Zarecki’s study and conclusions despite all of its flaws isn’t shocking. As mentioned earlier in his wrong citation of Reardon’s study, Eden is sloppy, both in his research and his thinking. This becomes even more clear when you look at his claim to fame, a report released last yeara by Manhattan Institute on school climate throughout the city and the school discipline reform efforts undertaken by the New York City Department of Education under Former Mayor Michael Bloomberg and his successor, Bill de Blasio.

In that report, Eden concludes that the school discipline reform efforts by Bloomberg, de Blasio and their respective chancellors have led to traditional district schools in the Big Apple becoming less safe for teachers and children. How? By comparing responses of teachers and children in the traditional district to peers in charters on the city’s annual school climate survey. As any researcher can immediately note, such surveys have little usefulness as objective evidence, because they are based on subjective opinions that can change based on who is working in classrooms, because survey designs can be flawed with leading questions yielding results favorable to the pollster, and because survey designs can change drastically from year to year. Eden himself admits this in the study when he notes that he could only measure results on five questions from the city’s school climate survey because the wording had been consistent over time.

What makes Eden’s results even less-reliable is the fact that he didn’t just simply measure the raw results from the surveys over the five-year period (2011-2012 to 2015-2016) being measured, which is the most-reliable way of analyzing what is already unreliable data. Instead, Eden cobbled together a “distribution-of-differences” analysis in which any change of 15 percentage points on each of the questions represented “a substantial shift” in attitudes on school safety, especially for each school in the district. How did he arrive at 15 percentage points instead of, say, 20 or 10 or even five? Eden doesn’t explain. This gamesmanship, along with the lack of explanation, makes Eden’s analysis even less reliable than it already is.

If Eden was being intellectually honest and simply compared the raw numbers themselves, he would have reached different conclusions. Between 2011-2012 and 2015-2016, the percentage of teachers citywide (including charter schools) agreeing or strongly agreeing that “my school maintains order and discipline” remained unchanged at 80 percent. Exclude charters results from the survey, and the percentage of teachers just within the New York City district agreeing or strongly agreeing that “my school maintains order and disciplined” increased from 77 percent to 78 percent over that period, according to a Dropout Nation analysis of the city’s survey data from that period. This happened even as the number of out-of-school suspensions meted out by principals  in district schools declined.

Even when using subjective data, Eden’s arguments don’t stand up to scrutiny, a point made by Daniel Losen of the Civil Rights Project at UCLA during testimony at a December hearing held by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights at which Eden also testified. It doesn’t even stand up to the brief on overuse of suspensions in Big Apple schools released today by Center for American Progress, which uses objective data to look at the number of days children lose when they are kept out of school

Again, this isn’t a surprise. In a report on school safety released last October, Eden reached the conclusion that New York City’s charter schools were “safer” than traditional district counterparts not by comparing raw data from the Big Apple’s school climate survey or even using more-objective data such as incident reports over a period of several years. Instead, he cobbled together an index that gave scores to each of the questions on the survey, then crafted a secondary index in which charters that scored five or more percentage points higher on that first index over a traditional district school, would be rated higher. This approach to analysis is amateur hour at its worst.

The thing is that Eden’s shoddy work product could easily be ignored if not for the fact that he, along with Fordham’s Petrilli, is a leader in the effort to convince the Trump Administration and DeVos to reverse the Obama Administration-era Dear Colleague guidance pushing districts to end overuse of suspensions and other forms of harsh school discipline against poor and minority children. The four-year-old guidance, a keystone of federal efforts to spur school discipline reform, has long been the bete noir of so-called conservative reformers everywhere.

Because Eden, along with Petrilli and even Riley’s Wall Street Journal, likely has the ear of DeVos’ appointees (including Kenneth Marcus, the former George W. Bush appointee who will likely end up overseeing the agency’s Office for Civil Rights), the shoddiness of his data and that of his allies matters even more now than ever. Bad policy backed by slipshod data equals damage to children, especially those from Black, Latino, and American Indian and Alaska Native households most-likely to be suspended, expelled and sent to juvenile justice systems (the school-to-prison pipeline) as a result of districts and other school operators overusing the most-punitive of school discipline.

Which is why shoddy polemicism by the likes of Eden and other opponents of school discipline reform deserve to be exposed and denigrated. School reformers know better than to use bad studies to champion worse policies.

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The Conversation: Daniel Losen on Reforming School Discipline

On this edition of The Conversation, Daniel Losen of the Civil Rights Project at UCLA discusses his testimony to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights on school discipline reform, challenges…

On this edition of The Conversation, Daniel Losen of the Civil Rights Project at UCLA discusses his testimony to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights on school discipline reform, challenges the claims of Max Eden and others opposed to the federal guidance on addressing disparities, surmises why opponents of ending overuse of suspensions and other harsh discipline are unwilling to engage three decades of data proving the need for overhaul, and what districts must do to transform school climates for the better.

Listen to the Podcast at RiShawn Biddle Radio or download directly to your mobile or desktop device. Also, subscribe to The Conversation podcast series and the overall Dropout Nation Podcast series. You can also embed this podcast on your site. It is also available on iTunesBlubrry, Google Play, Stitcher, and PodBean.

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Five New Burning Questions in the World of School Reform


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A few things to ponder as the snow melts: When will Centrist and left-leaning Democrat school reformers not named Anthony Williams or Marion Barry embrace vouchers as zealously as they…

Photo courtesy of Fallbrook Bonsall Village News

A few things to ponder as the snow melts:

  1. When will Centrist and left-leaning Democrat school reformers not named Anthony Williams or Marion Barry embrace vouchers as zealously as they support charter schools? After all, both promote choice and improved educational opportunities for poor students — and place public dollars into private hands. And given the research gleaned from the pioneering Milwaukee voucher program, the effectiveness of vouchers is no less proven than that of charters.
  2. Will Denver’s Tom Boasberg be the next crusading reform-minded superintendent in the Michelle Rhee-Joel Klein mold? Reed Hunt’s protege-turned telecom executive-turned school official  is already striking a blow against forced placement of laggard teachers. But can he advance the district’s performance pay plan and take it up several notches to make it truly effective in driving teacher effectiveness?
  3. Which state will be the next battleground over teachers pensions and retiree benefits? National Education Association affiliates in Vermont, Pennsylvania and New Jersey are already battling to stave off increases in contributions and retirement ages. Could it be Indiana — home to the collapse of the NEA’s Indiana affiliate (and where Gov. Mitch Daniels and Superintendent Tony Bennett are already already advancing a series of reforms)? Or is it nearby Illinois, home to the nation’s biggest teacher pension deficit? Or maybe, Utah?
  4. What is the next step in the debate over charter schools and segregation? It is well-known that Richard Kahlenberg and company are displeased with the role of charters in President Barack Obama’s Race to the Top reforms and likely even more displeased by its role in his proposed reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind Act and the 2010-2011 budget. Will the reports released by the Civil Rights Project and be followed up by missives from a few members of the Congressional Black Caucus and other key players on the Hill?
  5. How will Randi Weingarten react to the move by the Houston Independent School District to fully tie student test scores to teacher evaluations? Given her pronounced support last month for such measurements, will she end up siding largely with the district and telling her local to just water it down a little? Or will she back the local’s effort to ditch altogether. Joel Klein and Michelle Rhee are definitely watching this one. So is the NEA and the school reform movement.
  6. And yes, I had to add a sixth: Who will succeed Jack Jennings as head of the Center for Education Policy? More importantly, will it release another report on high school exit exams? The second answer is clearly more apparent than the first.

More burning questions later this week.

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The Dropout Nation Podcast: Why Civil Rights Activists Should Embrace School Reform


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On this week’s Dropout Nation Podcast, I explain why the NAACP, the Civil Rights Project at UCLA and New Jersey’s Education Law Center should abandon their tried and truly counterproductive…

Dropout Nation Podcast Cover

On this week’s Dropout Nation Podcast, I explain why the NAACP, the Civil Rights Project at UCLA and New Jersey’s Education Law Center should abandon their tried and truly counterproductive approaches to improving equity and equality for the nation’s poor black and Latino children and embrace approaches offered by the school reform movement.

You can listen to the Podcast at RiShawn Biddle’s radio page or download directly to your iPod or MP3 player. Also, subscribe to get the podcasts every week. It is also available on iTunes, Blubrry, Podcast Alley and the Education Podcast Network.

Update: You can now download the Podcast from Zune Marketplace.

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Petrilli Misreads the Charter School Integration Debate


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While one appreciates Fordham’s Mike Petrilli for arguing that racial and ethnic integration in charter schools is as worthy a goal as it is in other aspects of American life, …

Photo courtesy of Jose Vilson

While one appreciates Fordham’s Mike Petrilli for arguing that racial and ethnic integration in charter schools is as worthy a goal as it is in other aspects of American life,  there are a couple of problems with his overall argument.

The first? He involves a false assumption not based on evidence: That charter school operators aren’t necessarily interested in integration. This isn’t the case. If anything, as evidenced by National Alliance for Public Charter Schools President Nelson Smith’s response to Gary Orfield’s latest report decrying segregation in charters (or to be more precise, the latest study coming out of his Civil Rights Project at UCLA), charter school advocates definitely think integration is important. This is also true in the fact that most charters are open-enrollment, lottery-driven schools which are open to all comers so long as the children and the parents commit to being the active players in education decision-making they should be.

Petrilli also downplays the role of state charter legislation in fostering the segregation he and Orfield mutually decry. (It could be worse, of course: Orfield and company pretend this doesn’t even exist.) As I’ve noted, the likelihood of integration is as much dependent on the location- and demographic-based restrictions as it is on the choices of parents. As evidenced in Maryland and Virginia, the dual role of traditional districts as both public school operators and charter authorizers also means that charters are also less-likely to exist in suburban communities. Suburban districts abhor the presence of charters even more than their big-city counterparts. Until these barriers are eliminated, charter schools will continue to confined to the nation’s urban locales. And unless those cities manage to lure more whites from suburbia through sensible fiscal and quality-of-life policies, charters will also remain highly-segregated.

Certainly integration is a great benefit, both to society and to the people on an individual level. After all, I’ve spent most of my career arguing for a color-blind society and even, demanding that my fellow African-Americans stop placing themselves into ghettos intellectual and otherwise. Petrilli is correct in noting that, depending on the setting, integration can even help improve student academic achievement (as well as, to borrow from J. William Fulbright, promote mutual understanding). Eliminating restrictions on the growth of charters would greatly aid that goal. So would the expansion of school voucher plans, the abolition of intra-district zoning  and magnet school policies, the promotion of inter-district public school choice (by making school funding a state-level role), and even the expansion of grassroots groups aiding parents in education, be it the Black Star Project or the PTA.

But integration isn’t the only social good. More important to black and Latino families — especially my own — are opportunities to provide the best education for their children. Given the low graduation rates for blacks and Latinos — and the consequences of mass academic failure wrought upon these communities — integration becomes a secondary priority. These families can no longer wait for the benefits of integration, wonderful and enriching as they are, as their young men and women struggle in traditional public schools that treat them as afterthoughts.  They want — and deserve — the power to choose better options.

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Urban Parents Don’t Care About What Gary Orfield Thinks


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Dear Gary Orfield: As someone who grew up in one of the better (of the admittedly abysmal) urban neighborhoods in America, I can tell you that many parents care greatly…

Two kids attending the Bronx Charter School for Better Living

Photo courtesy of the New York Daily News

Dear Gary Orfield:

As someone who grew up in one of the better (of the admittedly abysmal) urban neighborhoods in America, I can tell you that many parents care greatly about the quality of education for their children. So when they see opportunities to escape woeful public schools — as in the case of Virginia Walden-Ford as a most-famous example — they will take it quickly.

This is the chief reason (along with the restrictions on the location, growth and even demographics placed by state legislators at the behest of teachers unions and suburban districts) why America’s public charter schools are mostly black and Latino, generally attended by they poor, and largely in big cities. It is also why there are some 39,000 New York City children waiting for seats in charters and why President Barack Obama is pushing states to end restrictions on their growth.

In some ways, this lack of diversity also explains the success many charters have had in bolstering the academic achievement of their largely at-risk student populations. Besides the attention given to kids in their mostly-small settings, the opportunity for children to see peers of their own race and color succeed academically — a reality that happens far too infrequently in traditional public schools — gives these children the sense of pride they need in order to succeed in school and in life. Certainly, we may all believe in a color-blind society, but most of us don’t think that the melting pot and racial pride are mutually exclusive.

When the cvil rights activists of five decades ago used to talk about “separate and unequal”, they were talking about a lack of equal funding for schools, the restrictions on black children to attend any kind of school they wanted — majority white or otherwise — and ultimately, fulfill their academic and economic destinies without barriers codified into law. Most of those racial barriers have been brought down (although some of the issues of funding still do exist, partly because of the neglect of “broken windows” by generations of big-city leaders, along with their economic decisions  to grant tax abatements and other deals that have reduced much-needed tax revenue). But the political and political barriers — including woeful public school bureaucracies; gamesmanship by districts with Title I funding; and zoning and “magnet school” policies that favor wealthier families — still exist.

These, along with the sclerosis within public education systems makes it more critical than ever to give poor urban families as many choices as possible to escape the worst traditional schools. They don’t care about the segregation they knowledgeably choose; their concern is about the quality of education for the children they love. They truly understand that for which Thurgood Marshall, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King were fighting. Choices of great schools, traditional, charter or private, both in their neighborhoods and outside of them without restriction.

In other words: Urban parents don’t care about so-called civil rights activists who work in ivory towers, live in suburbs, release reports on “segregation” just in time for Black History Month (wink, nudge), and avoid the worst American public education offers on a daily basis.

And Mr. Orfield (and you too, Richard Kahlenberg), they mean you.

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