Tag: Dear Colleague

When Congressmen Lie About School Discipline Reform

If you want to get a better sense of the shoddiness of the arguments of opponents of school discipline reform, especially when it comes to the Department of Education’s guidance…

If you want to get a better sense of the shoddiness of the arguments of opponents of school discipline reform, especially when it comes to the Department of Education’s guidance on reducing the overuse of harsh school discipline, simply look at the traditional districts represented in Congress by Rep. Andy Harris of Maryland, who this morning, complained that the four-year-old Dear Colleague letter made school leaders “afraid” to discipline children in their care.

Harris made this declaration during one of two hearings that touched on school discipline reform — a House Appropriations subcommittee hearing on the Trump Administration’s proposed budget for education programs. After several congressional leaders — most notably Rep. Barbara Lee of California — roasted U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos for continuing to weaken the department’s Office for Civil Rights and effectively abandoning the federal role in protecting the civil rights of poor and minority children, Harris essentially encouraged DeVos (along with the planned commission on school safety over which she will be chairing) to toss the school discipline reform measure into the ashbin. Why? Because the measure has forced the districts he represents to stop “disciplining people”.

Certainly you can expect the likes of Manhattan Institute wonk Max Eden (who, for some reason, was testifying at a House Judiciary subcommittee hearing on school safety convened a month after the Parkland Massacre) to make big hay of the Maryland Republican’s complaints. After all, it comes on the heels of Florida U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio amplifying the accusations of Eden and other school discipline reform opponents that the Obama Administration-era guidance was responsible for Nickolas Cruz’s murder of 17 children and teachers at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School. Rubio’s move (based on an argument disproved both by Dropout Nation and other outlets) resulted in DeVos placing review of the guidance under the school safety commission (which will consist of not one expert on school safety and will only include three of her fellow cabinet secretaries in the Trump regime).

The problem, as a Dropout Nation analysis of data submitted by the districts to the U.S. Department of Education’s Civil Rights Database, is that none of Harris’ statements are true.

Take Harford County, the largest district in Harris’ district. It meted out one or more out-of-school suspensions to 1,339 children in regular classrooms, or 3.5 percent of the students, in 2013-2014. That is slightly more than the 3.3 percent suspension rate in 2011-2012, two years before the Obama Administration issued its guidance. It also arrested and referred 163 children to juvenile justice systems in 2013-2014, three times the 59 it arrested and referred two years earlier.

Another district represented by Harris, Wicomico County, meted out one or more suspensions to 9.5 percent of students (or 1,381 children) in 2013-2014. That was a three-fold increase over the 3.28 percentage suspension rate two years earlier. Dorchester County’s district meted out one or more suspensions to 11 percent of students in 2013-14, an increase over the 8.6 percent suspension rate in 2011-2012. There’s also Caroline County, which meted out one or more suspensions to five percent of students  in 2013-2014, an increase over the 4.5 percent rate two years earlier. In fact, Caroline County suspended 29 more students in 2013-14 than two years earlier.

Then there is Kent County, which is right on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. In2013-2014, it meted out one or more suspensions to a whopping 14 percent of its students. That’s three times the 5.2 percent suspension rate in 2011-2012, two years before Obama’s school discipline guidance (and just after Maryland’s state board of education had investigated overuse of harsh discipline by districts it oversees). If anything, Kent County’s district became even more punitive: It arrested and referred 60 children in 2013-2014, a sixty-fold increase in the number of students sent onto the most-direct path to the school-to-prison pipeline two years earlier (which was none).

Maryland Congressman Andy Harris argues that the Obama Administration-era guidance against overusing harsh school discipline is stopping school districts he represents from correcting student behavior. The data proves, if anything, that those districts suspend far too many children, especially those Black and Brown.

Another district in Harris’ backyard, Worcester County, meted out one or more suspensions to 4.5 percent of children in 2013-2014, higher than the 3.1 percent suspension rate in 2011-2012, before the Obama Administration’s Dear Colleague guidance was issued. Talbot County meted out one or more suspensions to  4.75 percent of students one or more times in 2013-14, nearly double the 2.7 percent suspension rate two years earlier. Only Queen Anne’s County, one of the smallest districts represented by Harris, experienced something of a decline in out-of-school suspensions; one or more suspensions were meted out to 2.2 percent of its students in 2013-2014, only a slight drop over the 2.4 percent rate in 2011-2012.

None of this is a surprise to Dropout Nation readers or to honest scholars of school discipline reform. This is because the Obama Administration’s guidance was focused primarily on encouraging districts to reduce overuse of suspensions and other harsh discipline against poor and minority children as well as those condemned to special education ghettos. Even with the guidance, the U.S. Department of Education would only intervene when alerted about potential civil rights violations. Put simply, districts could ignore the administration so long as families and civil rights groups didn’t make a fuss. Which is clearly the case with the district’s represented by Harris on Capitol Hill.

This is a shame because the data the districts submit make a strong case for federal investigations — especially when one understands the long history of racial bigotry in the Eastern Shore of the Old Line State.

Kent County, for example, meted out-of-school suspensions to 21.4 percent of the 478 Black children attending its schools in 2013-2014, double the 11.4 percent suspension rate against Black children two years earlier; Black children account for a mere 22.4 percent of the student population. The rate of suspensions for Black children in Kent is double the 11.8 percent suspension rate for White children, who, by the way, make up 65.6 percent of students in the district.

Wicomico County meted out one or more out-of-school suspensions to 16.7 percent of Black children under its watch in 2013-2014, a five-fold increase over the 3.2 percent suspension rate in 2011-2012. In fact, Black children account for 78.8 percent of all children suspended by the district in 2013-2014 — or four out of ever five kids suspended one or more times that year — while White peers accounted for a mere 33.7 percent of students suspended. This is in spite of the fact that the district is almost equally divided between Black and White students (with the latter making up the majority).

The worst part is that Maryland’s state officials know this — and have done little in the last couple of years to address these problems. Thanks in part to a board of education dominated by conservative reformers such as Andy Smarick of the American Enterprise Institute and former Thomas B. Fordham Institute President Chester Finn Jr. (the latter of whom presided over the think tank’s initial activism against the Obama-era guidance), the Old Line State only plans to intervene when suspension levels for poor, minority, and special ed-labeled children are three times higher than that of other peers. Which means districts such as Kent County could continue damaging the futures of our most-vulnerable children with absolute impunity. The state’s move last year to only allow districts to suspend kids for up to five school days (and all but banish suspensions for kids in preschool programs) does nothing to address this problem.

Contrary to the assertions of Harris — as well as those of opponents of school discipline reform such as Eden (who deserves no consideration), as well as Michael Petrilli and his crew at Fordham– the case can easily be made that the DeVos and the Department of Education should build on the Obama Administration guidance and go even further. This includes restoring rules allowing Office for Civil Rights investigators to look at years of past complaints against districts to determine patterns of discrimination, hiring more investigators to look into patterns of disparate impact, and even requiring states such as Maryland to implement stronger rules against overuse of harsh discipline.

When it comes to building brighter futures for all of our children, we need facts, not assertions based on nothing but talking points that betray the bigotries of those who state them.

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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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