Recent Articles The American Prospect - articles by author en Campus Cash <div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <p>New education reforms often translate into big money for private groups. Following the 2001 No Child Left Behind Act, states paid millions of dollars annually for companies to develop and administer the standardized tests required under the law. Companies also cashed in on a provision mandating tutoring for students at struggling schools.</p> <p>Now, a movement to overhaul the teaching profession is creating another source of revenue for those in the business of education. More than half of states are changing their laws to factor student test scores into teacher evaluations and adding requirements for the classroom observations used to rate teachers. The main intent of the new laws is to identify which teachers are doing a good, bad, or mediocre job and to help them improve. One early outcome of such recent legislation, however, is a booming market that sells services and products to help states and school districts scrambling to meet the new standards.</p> <p>“It’s an incredibly heavy lift for states,” says Sandi Jacobs, vice president of the National Council on Teacher Quality, a Washington, D.C.-based advocacy group. “Some have contracted out big pieces of it, whether it’s someone internal in the state or an outside provider.”</p> <p>Nonprofit groups and for-profit companies alike are vying for contracts to design evaluations, train teachers and principals to use them, and set up online platforms to help sort the data that schools will be collecting. Private foundation money is subsidizing some of the contracts, but districts are also spending millions of public dollars, much of it from the Obama administration’s $4.3 billion “Race to the Top” initiative.</p> <p>In Florida, the state paid Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, a for-profit textbook publisher, $4.8 million to develop classroom observation methods and nearly $4 million to the American Institutes for Research, a nonprofit, to create a model for grading teachers based on student test scores, according to state officials. (Full disclosure: The American Institutes for Research is among the funders of The Hechinger Report, which produced this article.)</p> <p>This summer, New York also signed a contract with the American Institutes for Research to design its system for $2.7 million over three years. The state is also requiring school districts to hire state-approved contractors—which include for-profits, nonprofits, and the state teachers’ union—to design their observation rubrics. While most of the rubrics are free, schools may pay as much as $4,500 per day for training in how to use them.</p> <p>Although private companies may offer expertise that many school officials lack, administrators worry that low-quality evaluation programs could take over, just as multiple-choice tests did under No Child Left Behind.</p> <p>“The marketplace has become very, very competitive. All these simplistic models are coming out of the woodwork,” says William Sanders, the Tennessee-based researcher who has sold his own system for rating teachers based on their students’ progress on standardized tests—a method known as value-added modeling—to dozens of states and districts.</p> <p>Worries about the coming teacher-evaluation boom stem from school districts’ experiences with No Child Left Behind, during which states spent more than $600 million annually on standardized tests, with the vast majority of the money going to the private sector, according to a 2009 Government Accountability Office report. If the pattern holds, administrators fear that education contractors will aim to make money off evaluations rather than improve teaching.</p> <p>“There simply is not as much [money] to be made from professional development, or system design, as there is in testing students,” Charlotte Danielson, a researcher who developed a well-regarded teacher-observation method that districts around the country have adopted, said in an e-mail.</p> <p>But private groups sense an opportunity nonetheless. “If these states could have bought something off the shelf, a lot of them would have,” says Jacobs of the National Council on Teacher Quality. “It wouldn’t be surprising if people do look at how you can package this.”</p> <p>Nonprofits like the National Institute for Excellence in Teaching, which created a teacher-evaluation system used in Chicago and elsewhere, are offering their technical expertise to states. Mathematica, a research group that published a 2010 study warning about the use of modeling in high-stakes decisions because of high error rates, was paid more than $500,000 to design the model for the Washington, D.C., public schools, according to a DCPS spokesperson. Based on Mathematica’s analysis, about 275 D.C. teachers were fired because of low ratings.</p> <p>Pearson, a U.K.-based company with profits of more than $1 billion in 2010, began marketing Teacher Compass, a new teacher-observation software program designed by researchers at Johns Hopkins University, in the United States last year.</p> <p>Another company, Learning Sciences International, is selling iObservation, a computerized data system designed in collaboration with a group of researchers, including Danielson, who said she will get a small royalty from any sales. On its website, the company markets the system as a solution to the new mandates facing Race to the Top winners.</p> <p>Others are likely to follow in their footsteps. “I would think you’d see testing companies as well as the data-driven decision providers jumping in there,” says Trace Urdan, a research analyst who focuses on the business of education for Wunderlich Securities, a brokerage firm based in Memphis, Tennessee.</p> <p>Danielson says districts and states are doing the right thing by hiring outside experts as they design more rigorous classroom observations. “Entire states seem to be operating under the assumption that anyone can create a rubric. Then they want to use that for high-stakes decisions without having a clue what it takes,” she says.</p> <p>Aside from the amount of money being sent to private contractors, observers worry that the fiscal crisis battering school districts could drive administrators to race to the bottom in search of the most affordable rubrics, regardless of quality.</p> <p>“There are real dangers,” says Monty Neill, director of FairTest, a group critical of standardized testing. “While observations make good sense, if you start bringing in outside people … you’re more likely to end up with arbitrary and capricious decisions from which someone makes money.”</p> <p><em>This story was produced by <a href="">The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, nonpartisan education-news outlet</a> affiliated with Teachers College, Columbia University.</em></p> </div></div></div> Mon, 24 Oct 2011 21:43:21 +0000 207812 at Sarah Garland Dodgeball <div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <p>On an unseasonably warm evening last November, Glendalys Delgado lowered herself into a child-sized chair in the classroom of her youngest son, Juan, a second-grader at Thomas Dudley Elementary School in Camden, New Jersey. Juan's teacher, Shakira Wyche, sat next to her looking serious. </p> <p> "You're going to be a little upset," Wyche told Delgado as she held up Juan's report card. A line of Fs trailed down the page. Juan is "very intelligent," perhaps the smartest in the class, the teacher said, but he refuses to work in class or do his homework. "I can't just give him straight-A's because I like him," Wyche said. </p> <p>Delgado nodded. "I tell him he's going to be left behind if he doesn't do his work," she replied in halting English, giving the teacher a wan smile as she backed out of the room. "No more excuses." </p> <p>Delgado, a 32-year-old mother of three, works as a home health aide for the elderly. She moved to Camden at age 18 from Puerto Rico and lived alone with an infant daughter after the child's father was sent to prison for his role in a murder. Delgado stayed in Camden and had two sons. </p> <p>By any measure, there are few worse places in this country to raise a family than here. Camden, a small city across the river from Philadelphia, competes with Detroit and Youngstown, Ohio, for the nation's worst poverty and crime rates. Infant mortality in Camden is 16 percent, significantly more than the 6 percent nationally. This year, Camden's unemployment rate rose while it stabilized in the rest of the country. The city laid off 168 officers, half of its police force, until the state sent money that allowed it to rehire 50 of them. Last year, the city's population shrank, like it has every year since the 1950s as people with enough means flee to the suburbs. </p> <p>Only 16 percent of Camden's elementary school students pass literacy tests. The graduation rate at the two main high schools averages just 50 percent. Violence is common. Juan, who is 7, describes his first-grade experience as "rough" because of the numerous fights on the playground and in the halls. The district has a notorious history of corruption, cheating, and neglect by the grown-ups in the system.</p> <p> Many education reformers have become convinced that fixing failing public schools is the best, perhaps only, way to revive places like Camden. In New Jersey, Governor Chris Christie has proposed a series of reforms meant to resuscitate failing schools and, with them, failing communities. "If we get this right, most of our other problems will fix themselves," Christie has said. "And if we get this wrong, we can't fix any of our long-term systemic problems."</p> <p>Christie rolled out a slate of proposals for statewide school reforms including merit pay for teachers, stricter tenure rules, and more efficient means of removing ineffective teachers from the classroom. In Camden this June, he announced another initiative that would hand the management of failing schools over to private organizations. (Legislation is pending before the state legislature.) At the heart of Christie's philosophy, shared by reformers that include former school chancellors Joel Klein in New York and Michelle Rhee in Washington, D.C., is the conviction that poverty has been used as an excuse by teachers' unions and school districts to avoid the hard work of school reform. </p> <p>But in Camden, even great teachers face obstacles that are difficult to overcome. Increasingly, educators and experts are questioning the reformers' tactics and asking whether the single-minded focus on schools has become an excuse to avoid the hard work of addressing poverty. </p> <p>For the past seven years, Delgado has lived with her three children in the Ablett Village housing project. Surrounded by vacant lots, the community sits on a spit of land known as Cramer Hill that's cut off from the rest of the city by a sludgy brown tributary of the Delaware River and a rail yard. The project is a few square blocks of two-story bunker-style buildings with a reputation for crime and drug dealing. Living there is a trade-off. Although Ablett may be grimy and dangerous, the apartments are at least occupied; about one in seven homes in Camden is abandoned, and at least one rotting, boarded-up house sits on most blocks. </p> <p>Delgado's hope is that her children will escape poverty someday, and she has put her faith in the schools to help them do so. "I want them to go to college. I want them to be police or doctors, so that they do something in the morning. I want them to have careers," she says. This year, her faith in the power of schools was deeply shaken. She moved her children to new schools, asked for better teachers, and has meanwhile watched the district experiment with reforms like charter schools. These changes, though, seemed to have little effect on her children's academic performance. Were her children's failures the sole fault of their schools and teachers, or was there something more pervasive at work?</p> <p>During a parent-teacher conference last fall, Delgado listened to her son Carlos's sixth-grade special-education teacher spend a half hour complaining about her students: "They do not shut up. They're all talking while I'm trying to teach." The woman confided to Delgado that "math was never one of my favorites." The teacher then explained that she'd started the year with a fifth-grade math book but that the students didn't understand her lessons. So she switched to a third-grade book. </p> <p> In Juan's case, it was more difficult to blame an indifferent teacher for his troubles. Wyche, who has two years of experience, works late most days. One of her lowest-performing students often stays after school to finish his homework because his mother works long hours. Wyche, who spent much of her childhood in Camden and "knows what goes on outside of these walls," was sent several hard cases last year because her principal thought she was best equipped to handle them. Even after the parent-teacher conference, Juan still refused to do his schoolwork and was suspended twice for fighting. Wyche blames a combination of things: his past teachers, a lack of discipline at home, his environment, his own stubbornness. "I don't write them off," she says. "But there has to be effort from everybody." </p> <p>It's hard for schools to hold the line against a city that has crumbled into rubble and violence around them. The first time I visited the high school that Delgado's 16-year-old daughter, Ninoshka, attends, a brawl involving dozens of students broke out on the lawn. The second time, as I chatted with Principal Tyrone Richards, a school secretary swept him away to deal with an emergency. Gang members had threatened a ninth-grader after killing one of the boy's friends, and the ninth-grader had attempted suicide. "Learning is our first priority," Richards said later. "But sometimes it can be hard to focus on academics."</p> <p>A recent study by John Fantuzzo, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania, suggests that even for kids like the Delgados who don't suffer from problems like homelessness or abuse, being surrounded by kids who do can hurt their achievement.</p> <p>Delgado has sought out charter schools after hearing good things from other desperate parents about the schools' "no excuses" motto. She applied to four, but her children were waitlisted at each. Even if they had gotten in, it's not certain that they would have excelled. </p> <p>Camden's half-dozen charter schools have yet to prove that schools alone can conquer poor academic performance in high-poverty areas. Two-thirds of elementary students in Camden's charters fail state literacy tests, and more than half of middle-school students in charters fail, according to a report by the Christie administration.</p> <p>The focus on schools as the saviors of communities like Camden have largely quashed discussions about more large-scale anti-poverty policies as a piece of the solution. Two universities in Camden are trying to replicate the whole-neighborhood approach pioneered by the Harlem Children's Zone of improving parenting skills, health, and other outside-school factors; both projects had hoped for more funding from an Obama administration initiative known as Promise Neighborhoods, but Congress scaled back the budget for the program this year. </p> <p>Expecting schools to make up for all of society's problems is shortsighted, argues Fantuzzo. "Success in education is more than the education system," Fantuzzo says. If schools were to start coordinating with hospitals and doctors, government agencies that deal with homelessness and child abuse, and nongovernmental groups that provide counseling, after-school programs, and other services--all of the "many hands that touch the little hand," as Fantuzzo puts it--government might be better able to craft more comprehensive, and ultimately more effective, interventions. </p> <p></p><center>***</center> <p>On a recent afternoon at her apartment in the Ablett Village, Delgado sat at the kitchen table in hot-pink scrubs after work, thinking back on the school year that she once had high hopes for and recounting her children's latest academic crises. </p> <p>She lobbied to have Carlos moved into a regular education class for part of the day, where he was enjoying the more challenging work. But the principal told her that because his teacher continued to report behavior problems, he might have to move to a new school this year, which is known for gang violence. She caught Ninoshka cutting a free tutoring program she had found for her. And she was still at a loss about how to make Juan work harder. </p> <p> "I'm giving everything for my kids. I told them I want them to have a better life than I did. I don't know what's wrong," Delgado said, adding in Spanish: "I get so stressed and anxious about it. It's like I'm swimming and swimming upstream, and I don't get anywhere." </p> <p>The same might be said of Camden as a whole. Governor Christie and his fellow reformers hope that teachers will have more success in improving beleaguered places like Camden, where every previous effort seems to have failed. But, as Fantuzzo and his colleagues and many others are increasingly arguing, their job would be easier if poverty and failing schools were attacked together.</p> <p><em>This story was produced by <a href="">The Hechinger Report</a>, a nonprofit, nonpartisan education-news outlet affiliated with Teachers College, Columbia University.</em></p> </div></div></div> Wed, 17 Aug 2011 00:19:16 +0000 207606 at Sarah Garland Repeat Performance <div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <p>Last summer, Rebekah Robinson was called into her son Amari Jacob's charter school, Kings Collegiate in New York City, to meet with a counselor about Amari's grades. The good news was Amari had passed the state tests in math and reading. The bad news was his teachers thought he should repeat fifth grade anyway.</p> <p>Robinson, a 43-year-old mother of two from Saint Lucia, knew the school in her neighborhood would have promoted her son to the next grade. But she was pleased the charter school was so strict. Although Amari was good at math and science, he'd struggled with reading since fourth grade, when he had attended his neighborhood school in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn. "He could have gone on, but in his school work, we thought he was just not ready," Robinson says.</p> <p>Uncommon Schools, which runs Kings Collegiate, and the Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP) are among the more prominent charter-school networks that avoid "social promotion," the practice of passing low-performing students to the next grade in order to keep them with their peers. Charter schools, which educate 1.5 million students, have been set up as an alternative to the regular public schools. Although they are public, they are run by private organizations, which are required to be nonprofit in most states. The schools are given free rein to experiment with policies like longer school days in exchange for tougher accountability -- districts can shut down charters if the schools' test scores are too low. In keeping with their focus on rigorous academics and accountability, many charter schools have adopted strict "retention" policies requiring struggling students to repeat a grade when they don't meet expectations, sometimes even if they're just a point shy of passing. Amari's experience has become common in some of the highest-performing charter schools across the country.</p> <p>Charter-school advocates say this allows them to help students who are far below grade level to catch up. It may also give charters an edge over regular public schools on test scores. Even so, retention policies have gotten little attention in the debate over whether to expand the number of charters, although strict student-retention policies flout the education research. Studies have found that in the long term, students who are held back in middle or high school learn less and are more likely to drop out.</p> <p>Although there are no national statistics tracking the percentage of students held back in charters, there is evidence that the number is large. Schools in charter hotspots like New York and Houston report retention rates as high as 23 percent, much higher than the district averages, which range from 1 percent to 4 percent. Margaret Raymond, director of the Center for Research on Education Outcomes at Stanford University, which conducted a major national study on charter-school performance, says she's observed that charter schools tend to hold students back at higher rates than regular public schools. And a recent national study by Mathematica, a research firm based in Princeton, New Jersey, found that a sample of KIPP middle schools, the biggest charter network in the country, had a significantly higher retention rate than traditional public schools.</p> <p>Charters didn't invent the idea of ending social promotion, an education-reform fad that caught on in several major cities in the 1990s. Chicago was seen as a pioneer when it implemented a strict retention policy in 1996. In 1999, Texas followed suit, passing a law proposed by then-Gov. George W. Bush to ban social promotion. Five years later, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who has embraced charter schools and borrowed heavily from their philosophy in his reforms of the school system, made a show of cracking down on social promotion in the third grade, the first year students take state tests. But by the time Bloomberg was embracing these ideas in New York (and ignoring heated opposition), school officials in Chicago and Texas were starting to back away from their retention policies because, officials said, holding back students was contributing to higher dropout rates.</p> <p>Even though research in New York City led to similar conclusions -- students who were old for their grade level were at much greater risk of dropping out -- Bloomberg kept the stricter retention policy intact and even expanded it to other grades. City officials defend the policy, noting that the overall dropout rate has fallen. And the city's retention rates are still much lower than those of charters: At 31 charter schools that reported their retention rates in the 2008-2009 school year, <a href="">16 percent of the sixth-grade class was held back</a>. Compare that to non-charter public schools, where only 1 percent of seventh- and eighth-graders were held back. (New York City did not end social promotion for sixth-graders until the 2009-2010 school year.)</p> <p>High retention rates can help to boost test scores at charter schools, at least in the short term. Students may do better on tests the second time, and retained students' scores are dropped from their cohort, so a class of students could improve its test scores over time because the lowest performers have been removed. And sometimes low performers simply leave the charter school when they find out they're going to be held back.</p> <p>While retention may help schools look better, the price may be students' long-term success. Nick Montgomery, a senior research analyst at the Consortium on Chicago School Research, which conducted a long-term study of retention policies, says his team found that students who were held back after elementary school were more likely to drop out later on. In addition, Montgomery says, "students who repeat grades during middle school learn somewhat less than their [low-performing] peers who don't repeat."</p> <p>Even some charter-school leaders admit that it's unclear if the policy will help or hurt their students in the long term. The research on social promotion has focused on traditional schools, not charters. It could be that charters handle retention better. But even if they do, the prevalence of strict retention policies at charters puts a kink in the positive reports on their performance. Are high-scoring charters lifting student achievement significantly, or is retaining students helping the schools engineer better test scores?</p> <p>Politicians like Bloomberg and even President Barack Obama have staked their reputations as education reformers on the promise of charters to erase the achievement gap. But, says Brian Gill, a researcher at Mathematica who co-authored the KIPP study, "We don't know if these kids will end up better off or worse off."</p> <p></p><center>***</center> <p>Robinson began her search for a charter school after Amari's grades started to slip in fourth grade. She had heard about charter schools from another parent, who told her they had higher test scores and tighter discipline -- a quality that Robinson, who as a child attended schools with strict rules in Saint Lucia, appreciated. She began searching for charters near her apartment in Crown Heights, Brooklyn.</p> <p>Although there are more than three dozen charters in Brooklyn and Robinson applied to several, Amari wasn't accepted by any of them. The jostling for spots at charter schools in New York City is intense, with most schools holding lotteries for slots. Like Robinson, many desperate parents see charters as the only escape from their neighborhood's dismal public schools. Robinson was relentless. She called the schools every day to check Amari's status on the waiting lists. Finally, two days after school started, Kings, a middle school that begins with fifth grade, called to say they had room for Amari. Robinson enrolled him immediately.</p> <p>Despite the popularity of charter schools among politicians and parents, the data show mixed results. A recent national study of charter-school performance by Mathematica reiterated past findings that, in the aggregate, charter-school students fare no better than those in regular public schools. But that study also found that charters serving disadvantaged populations have a positive impact on test scores. Obama, who has aggressively pushed states to open more charters, has emphasized that he's only interested in replicating the "good" charters, not the bad ones.</p> <p>The charter schools defined as "good" -- at least as measured by standardized test scores -- tend to be those with high retention rates. But if, as Obama is demanding, a school's worth is measured by how many of its students are prepared for and go on to college, then it's much harder to tell how charters are doing. KIPP reports high college-going rates among its students, as do a handful of other charters. But at some charters, students who leave the school, as students who are retained often do, are not counted toward graduation rates. (KIPP leaders say they track even students who leave.) For charter schools nationally, there is virtually no data on long-term outcomes for students.</p> <p>Based on tests, Kings Collegiate would certainly be counted among the good charter schools. Nearly all of the students at Kings are black or Hispanic. In 2009, the percentage of Kings students passing state tests was in the 90s -- significantly higher than the statewide average. The only area in which the school faltered was in fifth-grade reading, where only 74 percent of students were proficient. That's the test Amari passed. But Kings demands "mastery," meaning students must both pass the test and score at least a 70 in all of their classes. "If a student hasn't mastered their times tables, they can't be promoted no matter how unfortunate the idea of holding back students is," says Brett Peiser, managing director of Uncommon Schools in New York City. "We're very up-front with families about that possibility happening." To Rebekah Robinson, the policy made sense. "He knew the work, but he was still struggling," she says of her son. And because one out of five fifth-graders at Kings was held back in 2009, Robinson says, "I didn't feel bad."</p> <p>Democracy Prep Harlem, the first school in a new network that plans to open more schools in New York and Rhode Island, is a charter that subscribes to the "no excuses" principle common at charters, meaning everyone, from students and parents on up, is held accountable for their performance and must pay consequences if they don't measure up. Unlike many charters, Democracy Prep, a middle and high school, has an outsized population of special-education students. Seth Andrew, the school's founder, says students at the school are far behind when they arrive in sixth grade. Last year, more than 20 percent of the sixth-grade class was held back. "The reason that charters exist is to help remediate for traditional public schools that are not teaching students to read, write, or do math, and that's not a one-year job," he says.</p> <p>Charter-school leaders say that students often repeat the last grade they completed in public school. But Raymond, the Stanford researcher, says that more students are held back after they've already spent at least a year at the charter. "We've analyzed whether kids are held back when they come into the school, or whether the retention happens later on," Raymond says. "It turns out that it's later."</p> <p>Raymond has also looked at whether students who repeat a grade at a charter do better than students who repeat in regular public schools. With a few exceptions, the performance of retained students is the same in both settings -- that is, students who are held back don't do better because they attend a charter. In Louisiana and Washington, D.C., charter students who are retained do worse on math and reading tests than their traditional-school counterparts. (In New Orleans, the regular public schools actually have a higher retention rate, but they also educate more special-education students than the charters.)</p> <p>When students repeat a grade, they are taught, often by the same teachers, the same material that stumped them before. Charter schools frequently offer extras that regular schools may not, including Saturday classes. But the Chicago research found that simple repetition is not enough -- students who are struggling to understand their coursework generally need more intensive interventions, not just a do-over. Retention brings other problems, too. Researchers have written about the psychological impact of separating students from their age group. It can be hard on the retained students, but also on teachers and younger students. They may have to contend with kids who are 15 and 16 years old in middle school and who may have behavioral problems in addition to their academic issues. At the same time, students who are retained are by nature already struggling and more likely to be disengaged with school. Being held back can increase their frustration by moving back the finishing line of graduation and, in the words of the Chicago Consortium researchers, making it seem less "worthwhile to continue."</p> <p>Nyeesha Hill, a student at Democracy Prep, had to repeat sixth grade at the school. Nyeesha is one of 12 siblings and lives with her grandparents in a lower-income section of Washington Heights, in upper Manhattan. She was held back in first grade -- because of behavior issues, she says -- so she was already old for her grade when she was chosen in a lottery to attend Democracy Prep. She struggled at the charter school and was assigned to summer school to improve her grades in three classes -- global history, writing, and math. She ultimately failed one of the classes, so under Democracy Prep's retention policy, she had to repeat the grade. "In the second year, I raised my hand for help and participated more. It helped me," she says. "It's a second chance."</p> <p>But Nyeesha faltered again, and she will have to repeat eighth grade this year. She has pressed her grandparents to let her attend an alternative high school, where she hopes she can join peers who are her age and graduate faster. "I'm going to be 16 this year, and I feel like I shouldn't be in that school," she says of Democracy Prep. "I don't want to go back." Most of her classmates will only be 13 or 14 years old. Her grandfather, Duely Adolphus, shares her frustration. "I was under the assumption that by going to that school that she would be getting her high school diploma," he says. "I have really high regard for the school. I don't know why she can't move from that grade. Maybe Nyeesha isn't motivated."</p> <p>School leaders say that the higher attrition rates at charter schools are due, in part, to their retention polices: Students who are held back often return to regular public schools where looser academic standards allow them to move up with their peers. A 2004 study of charter schools in Arizona by the conservative Goldwater Institute found that charter-school students were significantly more likely than traditional-school students to switch schools if they were going to be held back. Andrew says Democracy Prep lost about half of the eighth-graders it planned to retain. (Around 15 percent of the eighth-grade class is held back each year.) At Kings Collegiate, the attrition rate ranges between 15 percent and 18 percent for all grade levels, school leaders say.</p> <p>The high transfer rates leave charters open to the criticism that they're forcing out the lowest-performing students. Gary Miron, a Western Michigan University researcher who studies charter schools, says the retention policies of charter schools may sound good, but they "could be a mechanism to have the weaker kids go back to traditional public schools."</p> <p>But Raymond says her studies have found that students who leave a school rather than be retained are <i>less</i> likely to be minorities or on free or reduced-price lunch, suggesting that it's the more affluent parents who worry about the stigma of repeating a grade. And charter-school leaders say they work hard to hold on to students whom they want to retain. That's why Kings Collegiate tries to hold back students only in the early grades, Peiser says. "They're more likely to stay with us," he says. Andrew, at Democracy Prep, says his school has an incentive to keep the students it wants to retain because they're the ones who make the most progress -- and New York City relies heavily on student progress on state tests to evaluate schools.</p> <p></p><center>***</center> <p>During his second attempt at fifth grade at Kings Collegiate, Amari says his schoolwork "was like a breeze." By the end of the year, he was making 80s and 90s, including in reading. He also did well on the state tests.</p> <p>Every year, local papers in New York City compare the test scores of students in the city's charter schools to those of students in regular public schools, and charter schools usually come out ahead. But Gill, the Mathematica researcher, notes that "a kid who is taking the test for a second time around is likely to do better than the first time around," giving charters an advantage in each year's media contest.</p> <p>Retention rates also affect the outcome of more sophisticated analyses. Students who are held back are typically a school's worst performers, but often such students can't be counted in studies. For the Mathematica study that found KIPP students outperformed regular public-school students, Gill says he and his co-authors had to estimate the performance of students who'd been held back so as not to have missing data.</p> <p>Sean Reardon, a professor of education at Stanford who specializes in statistical methods, consulted on a study of student achievement in KIPP middle schools in the San Francisco Bay Area. The researchers encountered a problem, however: Many students who started at the schools in fifth grade didn't reach eighth grade within three years because they'd either moved to another school or repeated a year, making longitudinal measurements difficult. "Studies that don't deal with this carefully should be suspect," Reardon says. "They run the risk of producing estimates that make charter schools look better than the other schools."</p> <p>Some charter schools have rejected strict retention policies. Elise Darwish, the chief academic officer of Aspire Charter Schools in California, says her network advises against holding students back because "kids don't do better the second year."</p> <p>Elliott Witney, the principal of the first KIPP school in Houston, says the network doesn't have a national policy on retention. Instead, he says, schools base retention decisions on a range of data points about a student -- from behavior to test scores to "grit." He says his school also lets parents make the final decision about whether their child is held back. About 11 percent of eighth-graders at his school are held back at some point, Witney says, a figure that is high compared to other Houston schools. "The phrase we constantly use with kids is 'it's not a race,'" Witney says. "Colleges don't care what age you are; they only care what you know."</p> <p>For now, researchers can only speculate about the consequences of charter-retention policies. It's possible that the rigorous academic culture, along with the fact that retention is so common in many charter schools, could ameliorate the problems normally associated with holding kids back. "I think that we need to look at retention in charters differently than we do retention in large systems," says Nelson Smith, a senior adviser to the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools.</p> <p>Robinson says she doesn't regret the decision to have her son repeat fifth grade. Amari, now a gangly 12-year-old with braces, is excited and confident about entering sixth grade this fall. He is due to graduate in 2017, and he's determined not to be held back again. If Amari succeeds and goes on to college, it may be because he was given a second chance to catch up with his peers. But it may also be that he beat the odds stacked against him when he was held back.</p> </div></div></div> Thu, 07 Oct 2010 16:37:57 +0000 148919 at Sarah Garland Suburban Ghetto <div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <p>Jessica stood in a clearing in the woods where the ground was strewn with used condoms and broken bottles. Cicadas hummed in the country club grounds edging the campus of the Hempstead High School, a brick fortress with narrow windows and a weedy green lawn. Beyond the trees that separated the high school from the golf course, commuters from Eastern Long Island zipped along the expressway on their way to work in New York City. It was September of 2000, Jessica's first week of seventh grade, but she would not be going to class.</p> <p>She felt both anxious and excited as one of the older boys standing next to her pulled out a black-and-white marbled notebook from his backpack and handed it to her. Scrawled inside it were the secrets of his gang, Salvadorans With Pride -- its handshakes, history, and symbols, and even some photographs of its teenage enemies. She was instructed to memorize it. She had 15 minutes, and then she would be quizzed. If she passed, she would move on to the beating. </p> <p>She answered every question correctly and was even able to recite the gang's prayer before she was pushed into the middle of the circle. One of the boys looked at his watch and gave the signal. Two boys and three girls lunged at her, kicking and punching. A couple swung sticks. She fought back. She was supposed to. Jessica was small, but she was tough. She eventually succumbed to the beating and curled into a ball on the ground as their sneakers and fists rained down on her. At the end of 15 seconds, they picked her up gently. One of her attackers put his arm around her and lifted her into his car. Mercy Medical Center was a few blocks away. They dropped her off at the door. </p> <p>After the nurses had bandaged her cuts, they left her lying in the emergency room bed alone. Her decision to join the gang was supposed to have severed her ties with her family, but the only person she could think of to call was her mother. She dialed, and her mom answered. She already knew what had happened. "Call a taxi," her mother said. Jessica walked home. </p> <p>Until middle school, Jessica had lived in a house that neighbors dubbed the "crack house" for its often drug-addled residents and visitors. Her uncles were members of Mara Salvatrucha, a gang originally formed in Los Angeles by refugees of Central America's civil wars, and Jessica's living room was one of their main hangouts. </p> <p>In first grade Jessica was placed in an English as a Second Language class, even though she was born on Long Island and spoke English fluently. Her mother was furious when she found out, but that wasn't until the end of the year. Her mom, an immigrant from Honduras, didn't speak English and couldn't read most of the report cards and notes Jessica carried home. The next year, Jessica was moved to an English class, where she sat in the back and stayed inconspicuous by keeping her head down on her desk. She quickly fell behind. The teacher began sending her to a remedial reading class during her lunch period. Her mother only got involved at school when Jessica was suspended for fighting. She had a reputation for throwing chairs, earning the nickname <i>La Diabla</i> from her classmates. </p> <p>Jessica shuttled between the village's decrepit elementary schools several times. The harried teachers and guidance counselors had little time or resources to deal with a problem child like her. Two of the schools were eventually closed because the buildings, plagued by water leaks, structural hazards, mold, and rodents, were declared too dangerous to house students. No one noticed when one of Jessica's uncles began sexually abusing her when she was 11. She joined Salvadorans With Pride, the rivals of her uncles' gang, as a gesture of defiance. </p> <p>Jessica met Sergio Argueta, a former gang member who had founded an anti-violence organization to help at-risk youth, at the pinnacle of her career in the gang two years later. She was one of the leaders, and she had been given her own gun, which she kept tucked under her mattress. She was an expert at stealing cars, and Salvadorans With Pride had dispatched her to make friends with a gang in a nearby town that had access to guns. </p> <p>Sergio arrived at her house in the company of a social worker, who had opened a case on Jessica's older brother. It was 9 in the morning, and Jessica's mother mentioned that her daughter, a freshman in high school, had just come home from a night out. The social worker and Sergio exchanged glances. They asked to meet her. </p> <p>Jessica started cursing as soon as she saw Sergio and the social worker. "What the fuck do you want? Why don't you people leave me the fuck alone!" she said by way of introduction. Jessica stormed out. Sergio was stunned. He would leave this case to the social worker. </p> <p>Months later, however, he met Jessica again. A police detective had called Sergio to ask for his help in dealing with a high school student who believed her life was in danger. Sergio was dismayed when he saw the student he would be trying to help. But he didn't walk away this time. They didn't have many options, he told her. There was no official mechanism for dealing with children in Nassau County who were already involved in gangs. There was a state shelter for homeless runaways, but technically she was neither. </p> <p>The biggest hurdle, however, would be Jessica herself. By this time, Jessica had been in and out of court, spent time in group homes for juvenile delinquents, and was drifting through high school even though she still struggled to read. If Sergio was going to help her, she had to promise him that she really wanted to change. </p> <p>She stared down at her feet. She nodded. Yes, she wanted out. </p> <p></p><center>***</center> <p>In 2005, then-Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez gave a speech to the fraternal order of police in New Orleans warning about the "expanding danger of violent street gangs." The gangs were becoming more sophisticated, regimented, and competitive, he told the officers, but, even "worse, our latest data indicates new trends in gang violence that we must anticipate and prepare for: The gangs that are migrating, spreading, and expanding are increasingly influenced by the California-style of gang culture." </p> <p>The gangs brought with them "more violent and targeted techniques for intimidation and control, as well as a flourishing subculture and network of communication," he told police. In even "the quiet community of Hempstead on Long Island," he said, "we've seen drive-by shootings riddle neighborhoods and innocent bystanders with bullets." </p> <p>This popular narrative of the gangs' spread -- which posited that major Central American gangs such as Mara Salvatrucha and 18th Street were sending out emissaries to strategically expand their territory -- was contradicted by, among others, the National Youth Gang Center, a Justice Department subsidiary. The center researchers cautioned that many of the new cliques sprouting up in far-flung cities and suburbs were copycats and that, "in most instances, there is little, if any, real connection between local groups with the same name other than the name itself." The gangs might have originated in Los Angeles and Central America, but they flourished in places like Fairfax, Virginia, and Nassau County, New York, because of specific local conditions there that facilitated immigrants' alienation and anger. According to the center, the gangs were generally "homegrown." </p> <p>But the argument that the problem was coming from within was largely ignored. It was easier and more politically expedient to blame outsiders. In the 1990s, the country experienced an influx of new immigrants -- most of them Hispanic -- that matched the waves of Irish and Italians a century before. The new arrivals landed in places that previous waves of immigrants had rarely ventured, skipping urban centers and moving directly to the suburbs. By 2002, the majority of Hispanics in the United States were living in residential rings beyond the inner cities that had long acted as the country's welcome mat. In the 1980s, the number of Hispanics living in cities compared to the number in the suburbs was about the same, but after the 1990s suburban Hispanics outnumbered their urban counterparts by 18 percent. And while the suburbs of New York, Los Angeles, and Miami saw substantial increases in their already-large Hispanic populations, the growth was just as fast in places where previously only a handful of Hispanics had lived. </p> <p>The immigrants were following jobs, which proliferated in the booming economy of the 1990s, and their presence helped to buoy the country's prosperity. They came to work, and the United States needed their labor. Some took jobs in manufacturing and agricultural processing in new growth centers like North Carolina and Tennessee. Others were drawn to construction work as the housing industry exploded. Many had plans to stay, and those who came legally applied to become U.S. citizens in large numbers. </p> <p>Although the country was enjoying an economic boom, it was reaching levels of income inequality not seen since the first half of the 20th century. Communities and schools across the country, especially suburban ones, were becoming more racially segregated, and the opportunities the immigrants came searching for were increasingly elusive. The first generation of Hispanic immigrants on Long Island, many with battle scars from wars back home, found their presence was not just unwelcome but infuriating to many of their new neighbors -- some of whom aggressively campaigned to send them back home. Others reacted violently. Nationally, hate crimes against Hispanics rose 40 percent between 2003 and 2007. Immigrants on Long Island were victims of regular attacks that included the 2003 firebombing of a Mexican family's house and the 2008 fatal beating of an Ecuadorian man. The immigrants' children attended schools and played in streets as segregated as the Jim Crow South, and the racial achievement gap between the races, particularly for Hispanic students, was widening. </p> <p>Many of the immigrants who arrived in Hempstead in the 1990s, including Jessica's family, found themselves in neighborhoods where they were easy targets for established American gangs; many were undocumented and did not have bank accounts, so they carried cash in their pockets on payday. When they were robbed, they were usually too scared of deportation to call police. To defend themselves, the men banded together. One group chose a name that borrowed the English of their aggressors: the Redondel Pride. They grew quickly. </p> <p>The group was more than a gang. It also functioned as a support organization for the men, most of them day laborers. They raised a pot of money for members to draw from if they fell behind in rent or got sick, and they helped each other find work. Some members broke from Redondel Pride, which dissolved in the late 1990s, and named themselves Salvadorans With Pride. The plan was to promote themselves as a self-help group and to make it clear that they disdained violence. But as new members joined, their good intentions began to unravel. A series of altercations with other gangs escalated to a full-blown war. By the time Jessica joined, SWP was as much a gang as Mara Salvatrucha or 18th Street. </p> <p></p><center>***</center> <p>When news of a central American gang crisis hit in 2003, it ignited a nation well-primed to expect that violent immigrants were on the verge of invading its cul-de-sacs. The national reaction fit a well-documented pattern. Research on fear about crime has found that usually the people who are most afraid of it are not the ones most likely to be victimized. Gang members usually attack other gang members, but women and the elderly tend to be just as fearful of being targeted. Often their anxiety has little to do with actual crime levels. Instead, it stems from perceptions that a community is changing and, the fearful populace usually believes, for the worse. </p> <p>Both local and federal politicians were quick to react to the national mood -- and the potential for votes. The gang problem became a popular topic on the campaign trail and the number of federal programs to combat gangs surged. Most focused on tracking down gang members and throwing them in jail. In 2005 the Department of Homeland Security started an anti-gang task force, Operation Community Shield, that carried out immigration sweeps in search of Mara Salvatrucha gang members. And in the years that followed, the federal government poured more and more money and resources into gang-prevention efforts. In 2007, the year men linked to Mara Salvatrucha shot a group of teenagers execution-style in a school playground in Newark, the Department of Justice dedicated millions of dollars to an in-school prevention program, Gang Resistance Education and Training (G.R.E.A.T.), which was modeled on D.A.R.E. (Drug Abuse Resistance Education), a federally funded anti-drug program. It received mixed reviews by researchers studying its effectiveness. </p> <p>Both Democrats and Republicans continued to sound alarms about the gang problem. The Homeland Security secretary under President George W. Bush, Michael Chertoff, regularly listed Mara Salvatrucha among the top threats to the country. "This is not yet an ideological organization, but it is an organization which has the capability to do an enormous amount of damage," Chertoff said in an April 2008 speech. </p> <p>Yet the more attention paid to them -- and the more gang members swept up and sent back to Central America or to jail under the new federal initiatives -- the more the gangs seemed to spread. In 2005, the FBI had tracked Mara Salvatrucha to 33 states; by 2008, the agency said the gang was operating in 42. The FBI estimated that by 2008 there were at least 10,000 members of Mara Salvatrucha in the United States and ranked the gang's threat level as "high." The breathless media and law enforcement reports that characterized Mara Salvatrucha and 18th Street as the largest, most dangerous gangs in the world had become a self-fulfilling prophecy. </p> <p>In June 2008, the National Conference of State Legislatures, an elected body that serves as a think tank for state lawmakers, declared that gangs were still on the rise despite half a decade of concentrated law enforcement efforts and billions of dollars spent to bring them down. Echoing Gonzales' speech from three years earlier, the group warned that "while it was once only an inner-city problem, today gangs have spread nationwide to suburbs, small towns, and Native American reservations." The conference suggested that gangs had more money and power than before and that their fancier cars and guns were luring more young people to join. </p> <p>But the truth was that the gangs' rise to power revealed not what they offered to a new generation of immigrants and their children but what America did not: safety, dignity, and a future. </p> <p>Five years later, Jessica accompanies Sergio to presentations in schools, where she tells other kids her story: the cold nights sleeping in the park when her mother kicked her out, the time she held a friend in her arms after he was shot. She also tells them about the times she considered suicide. She explains how helpless and lonely she felt. Young people sometimes come up to her after her speeches to tell her their own stories. The helplessness has transformed into purpose. She has been hired as a counselor at a summer camp, and she thinks about her future and saving money. </p> <p>Her dream is to get off of Long Island, and out of the suburbs, as soon as possible. </p> <p><i>This article is adapted from</i> <a href=";tag=theamerpros-20&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=9325&amp;creativeASIN=B002BD2V6K">Gangs in Garden City: How Immigration, Segregation, and Youth Violence are Changing America's Suburbs</a><img height="1" border="0" width="1" src=";l=as2&amp;o=1&amp;a=B002BD2V6K" alt="" style="border: medium none ! important; margin: 0px ! important;" /><i>, published by Nation Books, 2009. Reprinted here with permission.</i></p> </div></div></div> Wed, 12 Aug 2009 03:59:49 +0000 148138 at Sarah Garland