Blog vacation

I'm taking the week off from blogging to ensure that I finish my last child-welfare study on children’s advocacy centers for Reason Public Policy Institute. After this study I will be concentrating on education rather than education AND child-welfare issues like foster care. My study looks at public-private partnerships that increase child safety while respecting due process for parents. The only bureaucracies worse for children than the education establishment is the police state that is child protection in our nation--this agency manages to let real child abuse slip through the cracks while unnecessarily interfering with hundreds of families.

Blogchildren

Proud to be one of Joanne Jacobs' blogchildren.

I'll Be Back

Gearing up for his bid for Governor no doubt. . .

Action star Arnold Schwarzenegger is swapping on-screen combat for a real-life political fight in California as he pushes a ballot measure to dedicate state money to after-school programs.

Too bad many after-school programs can not fill available seats and have a difficult time attracting the population of kids between 12 and 16. This initiative moves what had been a private segment of the education industry into another tax-supported public school service at the cost of at least $85 million for the first year increasing to $550 million annually if state revenues grow.

One for the Good Guys

School violence studies have shown that random searches with metal detectors do not work anyway.

A jury has awarded $425,000 to a Los Angeles school teacher, who claimed she was not rehired because she refused to allow students to be searched for weapons.

Ami Motevalli, 32, an art teacher with a one-year contract at Locke High School in South Central Los Angeles, charged the Los Angeles Unified School District with violating her First Amendment rights.

She said was not rehired because she spoke out against random searches of students using hand-held metal detectors.

Charter School for Cops' Kids

Another example of a workplace charter school. I have written several studies of charter schools centered around the workplace.

It's something that apparently has never been done before: a charter school for children of police officers, one that could meet the needs of parents with erratic schedules and students with special fears.

Developing such a school is one way New Orleans could improve its police department's morale, recruitment and retention rate, according to a blue-ribbon committee studying the problems. Now supporters of the idea say it's time to move forward with it.

More Appalling Special Education Policy

And we wonder why special education students are not making progress. . .

Stories of special-education children repeatedly handcuffed in front of classmates, sent to "time-out rooms" for long periods and disciplined in other ways for misbehavior have prompted a state review of "behavioral interventions."

Special education advocates say schools misuse time-out rooms and school police officers to deal with unruly students.

The stories of abuse are shocking:

His 16-year-old son, Joey, has an IQ of 49 and suffers from the effects of Fetal Alcohol Syndrome. Because of his outbursts, he was placed in Dakota Ridge School, a small school in Apple Valley run by the Rosemount-Apple Valley-Eagan school district for students with emotional or behavior disorders.

In the four months before removing Joey from the school in January, Callaway said his son was restrained 13 times, placed in a seclusion room 14 times, and was handcuffed by a sheriff's deputy six times.

Attorney Amy Goetz said her clients include an 8-year-old taken out of class three times by a police officer and an 11-year-old student with autism who spent 28 hours out of a 30-hour school week in an isolation room.

She worries that schools are criminalizing behavior that is a direct result of a child's disability. When protections afforded students under special-education laws become too burdensome for educators, too often schools call in police officers to deal with a situation, she said.

The story does not mention that this is one inevitable consequence of one-size-fits-all solutions like full-inclusion for special education students.

KIPP Charter Model Shows Impressive Test Scores

Jay Mathews reports that the KIPP Academy charter schools are making consistent academic progress:

The study says the KIPP DC/KEY Academy, which opened a year ago with 80 fifth-graders in a Southeast Washington church basement, posted unusually large increases on the Stanford 9 achievement test.

The students took the exam in fall 2001 and again in spring 2002. On a 99-point scale, they improved their average reading score from about 34 to 46 and their average math score from about 41 to 65. The results are similar to percentile scores, and the average score for the nation is about 50.

The fall-to-spring gains at the KIPP DC/KEY Academy were more than twice the increases that students typically achieve from one spring to the next on the exam, the study says. About 80 percent of the school's students qualify for federally subsidized lunches.

KIPP uses a funding model that combines the charter school per-pupil funding with outside philanthropic funding.

All of KIPP's 15 schools are public, using tax dollars alloted to charter and independent schools, although 18 percent of their money comes from outside sources, including the Walton Family Foundation and the Challenge Foundation. Outside funding drops to 12 percent in established grade 5-8 schools, KIPP officials say. Given the extra money and longer schools days, some educators wonder whether many other schools can follow KIPP's example.

School Voucher Growth

Milwaukee

The number of students in Milwaukee's controversial voucher program reached 11,750 this year, continuing a trend of slow but steady growth. The program grew by 868 students over last school year.

Six private schools joined the program this year and six schools left, keeping the total number constant at 103.

Florida

Via Children First America

Choice as a Florida School District.

Florida is among the leading states in promoting school choice, with A+ Scholarships for children in failing schools, McKay Scholarships for children with disabilities, and with tax credit scholarships for low-income children. Choice opponents often claim that choice programs represent some sort of plot to help pay the costs for wealthy and/or easy-to-educate children to attend private schools.

In Florida, the number of students taking advantage of vouchers to escape failing schools jumped more than twelve-fold from last year. Also, an estimated 9,000 special education students - twice last year's total - have enrolled in school using McKay Scholarships. Perhaps most impressively, about 20,000 students have applied for scholarships provided through Florida's new corporate tax credit program.

If you combine these three programs however, you find that at least 42.5% of choice children have disabilities compared to a statewide average of 14.9%, and a minimum of 55% of the 23,500 choice kids are eligible for the federal free/reduced lunch program, compared to a statewide average of 36%. (The actual free/reduced lunch figure is higher than 55%, but income statistics are not readily available for McKay or A+ Scholarship beneficiaries).

Considered in whole, school choice kids are already a larger group than 45 of Florida's 67 school districts. Including the over 50,000 children attending the 232 Florida charter schools, the "school choice district" is the larger than all but five of Florida's government school districts, and growing fast. In a state that faces overcrowding problems in government schools and where it costs $30,000 per seat in construction costs for new schools -- choice works for parents, students and taxpayers.

Some Florida candidates have threatened to abolish Florida choice programs, but one cannot help but wonder where the state will find well over two billion dollars it will take to build spaces for these children in the public school system (which they would prefer not to attend).

Cleveland

And in Cleveland, applications for state-financed vouchers increased by 29 percent - from 2,100 last year to 2,700 this year. The month of July showed a particularly sharp increase - from 163 in 2001 to 648 this year

No Federal Investigation

The U.S. Department of Education says that no federal funds were involved and that it is outside its jurisdiction to investigate how Edison won contracts to run Philadelphia schools.

School Choice Legal Strategy

Education Week's Mark Walsh covers the second phase of the Institute for Justice's legal strategy to defeat state constitutional provisions that block school vouchers from being by students to attend religious schools.

"The rule of law we are seeking to establish in these cases is that a state cannot discriminate against religious school options," said Clint Bolick, a vice president of the institute who was the architect of a decade-long legal strategy that led to the high court's ruling upholding vouchers under the U.S. Constitution. In its June decision in Zelman v. Simmons-Harris, the justices held that the inclusion of religious schools in the Cleveland voucher program was not an unconstitutional establishment of religion under the First Amendment.

Now the focus has shifted to the states, where new choice programs that would include religious schools potentially face state constitutional barriers. The institute says 37 states have so-called Blaine amendments in their state constitutions. These are provisions, named for 19th- century U.S. Rep. James G. Blaine of Maine, that prohibit government funds from going to religious sects or institutions. Most of these provisions were added after the failure by Congress to adopt such an amendment to the federal Constitution in the 1870s, a measure pushed by Rep. Blaine.

Richard D. Komer, a senior lawyer with the institute, said 29 states have so- called "compelled support" provisions in their constitutions, which tend to predate the Blaine era and provide that no one be compelled to attend or support a church without consent.

In the institute's view, these state barriers should not prevent the inclusion of religious schools in any choice program. It argues that parents have several grounds under the U.S. Constitution for seeking to open choice programs to religious schools. These include the First Amendment's guarantees of free speech and free exercise of religion and the 14th Amendment right to equal protection under the law. . . .

The institute plans to file lawsuits challenging Blaine amendments and compelled-support provisions around the country. It will pick its battles carefully, the lawyers said, because it doesn't have the resources to sue in every state, but it wants to litigate in enough places to create a conflict among the federal circuit courts. That would eventually lead back to the Supreme Court.

Where's the money part deux

A just-released NEA teacher survey performed in June 2002 of 1,000 teachers nationwide claims that:

One out of six elementary and secondary school teachers who use textbooks in their classes say they do not have enough books for every child in their class, and nearly one in three teachers report they do not have enough textbooks so that all students can take a textbook home.

I'll say it again. The average class yields around $200,000 a year in per-pupil income. Yet, there is no money for books. What are they spending the money on?

Where everyone knows your name

One of the things I have against the public schools is the institutional indifference. This Education Week story about a teacher's experience with accidentally calling a boy by the wrong name gets close to my sense of how public schools operate.

Miguel's paperwork arrived about three weeks after he had moved away. I was going through the folder, updating it for his next teacher, when I noticed something that made me catch my breath. His name wasn't Michael. It wasn't Miguel. His name was David.

I wondered how it was that this child could have been part of my classroom for more than a month, and in that entire time he never had enough personal power to tell me that his name was David. What was it about me, about the other children, about the school that made David feel he had to give up his name? No child should have to forfeit his identity to walk through our classroom doors. No child. Ever. It is much too high a price to pay.

Kids give up more than their names in public classrooms.

And we want to give them more money...

Keep this in mind when you are thinking about voting yes on the largest California school bond in history.

So Typical . . .

Via Education Intelligence Agency

Defense Department Schools Study Wastes Money to Save Money. EIA is devoted to the principle of limited government, especially the federal government. EIA rarely finds itself in agreement with NEA affiliates, especially when the issue concerns reducing the role of the federal government. Nevertheless, EIA finds itself aligned on just such an issue with the Federal Education Association, the NEA affiliate that represents education employees of the Department of Defense (DoD) schools.

For those unfamiliar with the system, the Department of Defense runs schools overseas for the dependents of U.S. military personnel and civilian DoD employees. The department also runs some 58 schools for 32,000 students of military parents in the United States. Congress has mandated a DoD study to determine the fiscal benefits of closing the stateside schools and sending the students to local public schools.

The $1.15 million research contract was awarded to the Donahue Institute, associated with the University of Massachusetts. A second study, at a cost of $450,000, will determine how much it will cost to bring the DoD school facilities into compliance with federal, state and local building regulations for use as public schools by the local district.

As a general rule, the feds should not perform a task better suited to state and local governments. In some Southern states, there might even be a cost benefit to letting local school districts handle the job. What's missing from a such an analysis, however, is the fact that students in DoD schools, especially poor and minority students, significantly outperform their peers. Shouldn't results count for something?

The Federal Education Association and the National Military Family Association are already asking researchers to include measures of quality in their analysis. EIA believes the $1.6 million would be better spent replicating the DoD school environment in the local public schools, instead of the other way around.

Anti-Testing

While were on the subject of school drug policies Daryl Cobranchi covers a Boston Globe story on drug testing. He notes how drug-testing policies began with a narrow group of student athletes and have grown to potentially include every high school student.

So, to catch the 1.76% of student-athletes who were smoking and the 0.29% who were using illegal drugs, the school district subjected the other 97.9% to an invasive, embarassing, useless test. This testing craze started out with the "drug problem" among student-athletes. Then we started sliding downhill to testing students participating in competitive inter-scholastic events (like "choir"). This morphed into testing students who needed to drive to school. And now the slope carries us down to testing nearly everybody for pretty much any damn thing the schools decide to test for. Your tax dollars at work (and another good reason to HS).

Zero Judgement

Via reason Brickbats

Zero Tolerance, Zero Sense (10/8)

Joshua Erdkamp has been suspended for five days for not turning in a classmate's drugs quickly enough. When a classmate handed the eighth-grader some pot to pass to another student during class, he got up from his desk and threw the drugs away. After class, he told a trusted school counselor what had happened. His actions didn't satisfy the principal, who says Erdkamp should have told his teacher immediately. Since he didn't, he's being punished by the Nebraska school. That'll teach him to keep his mouth shut next time.

Similarly, Our Horrible Children has the latest on the suspended sophmore honor student who found a baggie of over-the-counter and prescription pills and didn't turn them into teachers because she was afraid they'd claim the drugs were hers.

The Florida high school student that was recommended for expulsion for "drug possession", after she found a baggie of pills outside the school, has been reinstated back into school by a hearing officer. John Allbritton, a local attorney who served as the hearing officer, said Teresa cannot be guilty of possession of an illicit substance if she didn't know what the pills were. "The argument of the superintendent that the fact that (the) student concealed the baggie and passed it onto her friend is evidence that she knew of the presence and illicit nature of the pill is without merit," he wrote in his order. "It is simply evidence of a frightened 15-year-old child who did not use good judgment and who probably would have done the same things, even if all of the pills had proven to be legal."

The Coed Question

In an engaging New York Times magazine piece Margaret Talbot questions the new-found support for single-sex education. She notes that the evidence that boys and girls learn better when they are apart is slim and argues for the positive benefits of learning in a coed environment.

What is troubling about this breezy new enthusiasm for segregation is not that it may lead to new single-sex schools, some of which will be good schools whatever their gender makeup. What is troubling is the tenor of the arguments. There is no solid body of evidence showing that single-sex education is better for girls or boys. A handful of public schools, including the six-year-old Young Women's Leadership School of East Harlem, have shown impressive results. But whether this is because these schools also tend to have small classes and the kind of committed teachers and parents eager to devote themselves to an educational experiment is not clear.

As for research showing that boys and girls (or men and women) use their brains in vastly different ways, it comes in two forms: the soft and speculative social psychology of books like ''Women's Ways of Knowing'' and brand-new, small-scale brain-imaging studies. Brain imaging may yield all sorts of durable insights into gender differences, but it certainly has not yet. The recent and much-bruited study that showed that women are ''hard wired'' to recall emotions better than men involved a grand total of 12 men and 12 women.

But perhaps the most insidious aspect of the latest advocacy is the idea that boys inevitably bring out the worst in girls, or hopelessly intimidate them. For while single-sex education is sometimes presented as a boon for boys, especially in the inner city, it is usually portrayed as a way of rescuing and protecting girls.

Talbot notes that there is nothing wrong with parents paying for private single-sex schools. I would go farther and argue that school choice would make this whole debate go away.

Monitoring Matters

In order for any kind of school privatization or contracting to work better than the government provider, the contracts must be monitored and measured. Oversight is always key. This story about private special education contracts in DC demonstrates what happens with poor oversight.

The District public school system paid $67 million over a 28-month period to private special education providers without reviewing their bills for accuracy, including $1.2 million in payments for students who may not have been eligible for the services they received, according to a city audit.

The D.C. auditor blamed poor oversight by the school system and its financial office, which is run by the city's chief financial officer. The audit also cited flaws in a payment system for private services that was set up as part of an ongoing class action lawsuit against the schools.

Private providers face the same incentives as public institutions when tax money is involved--especially when it is unclear who the customer is.

These overpayments appear to be the result of an earlier school management deficiency.

The audit examined payments under a special system established to pay many private schools and other providers. Under the plan, devised in the 1990s at a time when vendors were not getting paid on time, the providers send the school system estimates of their costs per child and are paid based on those estimates. The school system is later supposed to reconcile any differences between the estimates and the final costs.

A federal judge, the school system and the plaintiffs in the class action lawsuit signed off on the plan. A new plan, in which payments would be made based on actual bills, has been negotiated and awaits the judge's approval.

Weak Blogging

I'm going to get back on track for more frequent education updates. Between Reason work demands, the implementation of our K12 home charter school program, a case of strep throat for Katie 4, and a toothache for Jacob 6--meaning multiple doctor and dentist visits and more all-nighters with miserable crying children than I care to count--blogging has been very slow.

I think our family might be starting to adjust to our multiple commitments (either that or we are just delusional). We like watching the children learn and having them with us all the time, but it is slow going!