Category — Equal Opportunity

Whenever someone starts to talk about the impacts of illegal immigration I think of the impact it had on one school superintendent, David Verducci.

It could have been my name that people remember, but I was fortunate. During my initial meeting with the Director of the English as a Second Language program in my new district, she informed me of the 1982 ruling that gave school age children, illegal immigrants or not, the right to attend a public school.

Evidently, Mr. Verducci was not as fortunate.

Bars Illegal Immigrants From School
The story of David Verducci, the Superintendent in Fairview, New Jersey, is the tale of a man who believed as a public official that he should seek to enforce the law. Mr. Verducci soon learned that even though he was the CEO of his school district and charged with balancing the school budget, he was not able to restrict students from attending his schools even if they were known to be illegal immigrants.

The story dates back 2002 when David Verducci learned that three of the students at his school were present due to the fact their parents were in this country illegally. Upon learning of the situation, he barred the children from attending school.

No Support for His Actions
He was immediately vilified in the press for his stance and he soon learned that as a school official he was actually not legally able to enforce the immigration law. In fact, all of the forces of government went to work to help the illegal aliens get back into school. The lawyer for the family, Louis Zayas, informed the court that “the immigrant status of the parents is entirely irrelevant; the law of the land says that children still have the right to a public education as long as they live in Fairview.”

N.J. assistant education commissioner Judith Weiss also asserted that “the superintendent is not supposed to ask about the immigrant status of the family.”

Soon, in fact every layer of government backed the illegal aliens. Again, according to Weiss, “so long as the parents…can document that they reside in the district, they’re entitled to enroll in the schools – period.”

The students were readmitted to much fan fare by the news media.

The INS View
As for the status of those in the country illegally, according to the Eastern Regional Office spokeswoman Amy Otten of the INS: “We cannot admit people on non-immigrant visas into the country to attend a public elementary or secondary school. But in this particular case, they’re already here. The INS doesn’t deal with who is admitted to public…schools.”

As people consider the costs associated with schooling as well as the illegal immigration issue in America, it is important that everyone be aware of the Verducci story.

The issue of illegal immigration continues to be an important one for most Americans even if Congress and the President seem unwilling to move forward to create a bipartisan solution to the issue. While the anger mounts among many Republicans and Democrats alike, it is interesting to see just some of the impact of illegal immigration as it pertains to America’s schools.

According to a FAIR (Federation for American Immigration Reform) “Breaking the Piggy Bank” report:

The calculation of the number of children of illegal aliens in the K-12 public school system indicates that more than 15 percent of California’s students are children of illegal aliens, as are more than ten percent of the students in Arizona, Colorado, Illinois, Nevada, and Texas. More than five percent of the students are the children of illegal aliens in Florida, Georgia, Kansas, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Oregon, Rhode Island, Utah, and Washington.

And as for the costs:

The total K-12 school expenditure for illegal immigrants costs the states nearly $12 billion annually, and when the children born here to illegal aliens are added, the costs more than double to $28.6 billion.

And a 2003 FAIR report, “No Room to Learn: Immigration and School Overcrowding,” provides estimates that immigration in total will account for 96 percent of the increase in the school-age population in the United States over the next 50 years with as much as 50% of that growth due to illegal aliens.

Tomorrow: The tale of School Superintendent David Verducci and his attempt to tackle the problem in New Jersey.

We have written a great deal in recent weeks about the issue of school dropouts. We spent time discussing the horrific situation in California as well as the current plan to address the problem in Los Angeles. We wrote about the recent Johns Hopkins research labeling numerous schools as dropout factories.

So it was with great interest we read about the push from across the pond to deal with the same problem. The going term for those not in school in Europe is a NEET, or a person “Not Engaged in Education, Employment or Training.” For the first time in at least a generation of students, the U.K. has raised the age for leaving education in an effort to crackdown on the growing number of NEETs.

Under the new Education & Skills Bill, every teenager must either be in school (public school or college) or be receiving on-the-job training until they have reached their 18th birthday. Under the new legislation, authorities can now fine truanting teenagers £50 or can assess a new “attendance order” to force the teenagers back to school. Any teenager who fails to meet that order could then be hauled into court and fined up to £200.

Under the new law, all teenagers will be entitled to an apprenticeship, all with the goal of reducing the number of so-called “NEET’s.” The age for leaving school is to be raised to 18 in 2013.

Yesterday I noted the recent op ed piece of Dan Brown in which he told the tale of three students being ill-served by NCLB. Today we take a further look at the research regarding the situation involving Eddie.

Eddie has attendance issues with school as well as poor test scores. The result, according to Brown, Eddie is entering his fourth year in fourth grade.

Yes his fourth year in fourth grade.

NCLB Punishes Schools for Student Failures
The No Child Left Behind Act hovers like a black cloud over the situation involving Eddie. Designed to punish those institutions that are unable to move their student populations to prescribed achievement levels, NCLB has caused schools to once again enter into the practice of retention when it comes to those students who are unable to demonstrate mastery of the appropriate grade level standards. Retention, the formal term for what the public calls “staying back,” has been popular at various times in education, even though virtually all research indicates that the practice has proven unsuccessful.

The negative impacts of retention have been noted in numerous studies. Among the findings of various researchers, retained students have higher dropout rates, increased behavior problems, greater absenteeism, and lowered self-esteem. In addition, most research has shown that kids that have been held back do not do any better academically after having been held back.

According to educational researcher Linda Darling-Hammond, the reasons for the failure of retention to improve student learning are two fold. First, retained students often receive the same instructional approach that they received the first time, an approach that didn’t work the first time through that grade. Second, most retained students begin to get discouraged with school and eventually give up on themselves as learners.

Keeping Student’s Back - Back in Vogue
Retention most often occurs in large urban school districts though some states are now utilizing the practice as well. Chicago and Baltimore, for example have been using retention for the last several years while Florida is using the practice at certain grade level thresholds. For example, in that state, students unable to pass fourth or eighth grade reading and mathematics tests are not allowed to move onto the next grade unless they attend summer school and pass another version of the same exam.

Key statistics reflect that retention is definitely back in vogue today. Studies done in 1996 by the National Center of Educational Statistics and in 1998 by the National Association of School Psychologists both revealed that one out of every six high school seniors has been retained at least once in their schooling years. For the most part, students who repeated a grade did so in kindergarten, first or second grade. However, a recent study by Boston College researchers indicated that the number of ninth graders who fail to be promoted to tenth grade has tripled since the mid-seventies.

New Solutions Needed
The question of what to do with students who fail to reach specified standards should be at the forefront of educational discussions for the next several years, especially with the provisions of the NCLB Act. The fact that many states and cities are reverting back to a practice that has proven unsuccessful in the past is particularly troubling.

Schools will ultimately need to find an answer, a new method for dealing with this issue, if they are to have any hope of responding to this educational dilemma. Finding new solutions to this long-standing problem may actually prove to be the best outcome of the NCLB Act.

Otherwise we will continue to have situations like that of Eddie, in his fourth year of fourth grade, and as Brown noted in his piece, seemingly beyond the reach of teachers, this before Eddie is more than ten years old.

In a recent Op-Ed piece published in the New York Times and the Boston Globe, teacher Dan Brown reveals how the standardized testing associated with NCLB can actually have disastrous consequences for kids. Brown is the author of “The Great Expectations School: A Rookie Year in the New Blackboard Jungle” and is deemed a young man certain to help make policy changes in the educational arena.

His brief tales of Manolo, Sara and Eddie represent the great challenges that inner city schools face. They are three children from distinctly different worlds, two who cannot seem to meet the standards set forth under NCLB and one for which the school has no program to challenge the fourth grader’s superb intellect.

Manolo has already repeated one grade, second, the year his mother died. Brown describes him as an imaginative writer with terrible spelling and mechanics. Angry at the world that had taken his mom, Manolo now faces a system that labels him a school failure.

Brown describes Sara as way ahead of her peers. According to Brown, “She wrote hilarious, irreverent poetry and had already mastered grade-level math. She fired off endless questions about current events.” Then the crusher, “The administrators at my school discouraged creative lesson planning in order to cram in endless “drill-and-kill” packets of basic skills test-taking strategies.”

Then there is Eddie who is in his fourth year in fourth grade. His attendance is a major issue and he cannot pass the standardized tests. Try as he may, Brown cannot seem to engage him in class. The teacher notes that Eddie has a particular talent when it comes to drawing, even if the child sees no art programming because the class needs to allot more time for standardized test preparation.

Brown paints a sorry picture of what NCLB is foisting upon this school. He also notes that “nearly six years into the No Child Left Behind era, American public schools have more money than ever, but students are still widely denied the most crucial tools for their success: individual attention and specialized support.”

Instead, Brown insists that “the resources that my students badly needed were being spent elsewhere; the money was going into high-stakes testing.”

Brown then backs up his concerns with a recent report by the Center on Education Policy that states 44 percent of schools have reduced instructional time in untested subjects (social studies, science, art and music, physical education, lunch, and/or recess) since the implementation of NCLB.

His conclusion, “we have taken our eye off the ball on what is most important in schools - students’ needs.”

For more on Brown visit his blog site (note: photos are from Brown’s online site).

We found a couple of bloggers who were willing to speak to the fact that they attended one of the schools deemed in a recent report to be dropout factories. I am sure there are others out there yet it was interesting to read these two.

Doug writing on his Masson’s blog site gives his thoughts thus:

<em>It’s been 18 years since I graduated from there, so maybe it has gotten a lot worse. But, when I was there, I felt like I had the opportunity to get one of the best educations anywhere. It helped –a lot– that my parents had taught me to value my education, that school work came pretty easily to me, and that my friends and their families viewed education in much the same way. When I went to college, I met a lot of students who had come from some pretty nice private schools, and I never felt like my education was inferior to theirs. I can’t speak for the other schools on the list, and I suppose I can only speak for Richmond High School as it was many years ago, but at the time, good educational resources were available to the students.

On the other hand, it was a big school - I graduated in a class of about 400, and I think there were about 2,200 students spread over four years. I don’t doubt that it’s pretty easy for a student to get lost in the shuffle there.

My guess Doug is that the school is every bit as good as it was then if not better.

Trent England writing on his libertylive.org blog offers:

Ten years ago, I graduated from Henry Foss High School in Tacoma. I chose to commute to the inner city school rather than attend my local, upscale high school in Gig Harbor. Today, Foss is in the news as one of our state’s 22 “dropout factories.”

The solution to America’s crisis in education is out there. Even amidst the “dropout factories,” some students are learning. The solution, however, is not as simple as dollars or buildings or lofty rhetoric. The solution is a culture that values learning more than labor union politics, government control, and other petty, counterproductive agendas.

These two writers offer a very interesting perspective regarding these schools, certainly not one that matches the public perception of the term “dropout factory.”

One of the key issues in trying to determine the real number of dropouts is the ability to develop a way of measuring those who do leave school. One would think it would be easy, but with the transitory nature of society today, it is truly difficult to track students.

The recent report from Johns Hopkins challenged the typical method of counting dropouts, stating that the nation’s statistics are simply not accurate. The study further asserts that dropouts are grossly underreported.

Promoting Power
The Hopkins researchers utilized a measure called “Promoting power.” The analysis was done by simply comparing the number of freshmen enrolled at a school to the number of seniors enrolled at the school three years later.

As has been quickly noted by most educators, “Promoting power” is neither a graduation rate nor a dropout rate. In fact the researchers make that same note in their report. Instead a better phrase to be used to describe the measure is that it is more of a “check engine” light.

However, for reasons known only to one of the researchers, Bob Balfanz, those schools with a low promoting power number were quickly dubbed “dropout factories.” And then, as is often the case, the press ran with a concept that was certain to sell papers.

School Officials Cry Foul
However, that descriptor was soon assailed by virtually every school thus named. As one example, we turn to a Washington State Superintendent who saw his school named as such. The Superintendent there, Rick Schulte, dismissed the research as “crackpot” and the publicity surrounding the data “irresponsible journalism.” He also noted how severely damaging the report was to the image of his high school.

As but another example, Pinckney Community School officials vehemently denied the report that their school had a 46 percent dropout rate. The high school Principal Jim Darga insisted that the school’s actual dropout rate is about 1.7 percent. Said Darga, if the suggested rate were indeed accurate students would “be walking out the doors daily”

Crackpot Research?
While it is easy to see why so many education officials took exception to the simplistic approach used, the study does beg a legitimate question. Where do all these freshmen go over their four years of high school? Individuals do transfer, do move to new locations, etc. but there should then be additional students at some schools by virtue of that movement.

A simple example of the difficulty of assessing school responsibility would also to be to examine the number of teenagers who are incarcerated. They are truly dropouts in most people’s minds, but should that number be assessed to the school that the student last attended?

That aside, it is time for elected officials to recognize there is indeed an issue here, even if it is difficult to accurately portray the extent of it. For many teenagers today, school is not seen as a solution. In fact, for many of that age group, school is seen as one of their problems.

One Size Does Not Fit All
While NCLB purports to close the achievement gap for minority students, it in fact creates more problems for the group of students already struggling in school than it solves. For those who are experiencing academic difficulty in school, raising the standards bar only exacerbates their problems.

Some students simply do not learn well by reading and writing. For many more the complexities and abstractions of algebra are beyond the scope of their abilities. Yet as a nation we have foisted upon all students a one size fits all approach and now seek to penalize schools that cannot get all students to fit into that one size.

With such an approach we will continue to see dropout rates that are truly troubling, rates that have not improved in more than a decade no matter what measure is used.

The flexibility that online educational programming offers has led to enormous growth at the post-secondary level. While college enrollment numbers continue to remain flat for traditional brick and mortar universities, virtual education had been growing with each passing year.

However, “Education Sector,” a nonprofit think tank based in Washington D.C., categorizes the change as “largely unnoticed” by those who lead traditional schools. The group’s report goes on to state that virtual schooling could be used to greater advantage, perhaps to ultimately serve as a crtical catalyst for improving public education in general.

In that regard, Kaplan Inc. has announced the launch of Kaplan University High School, a new national online high school option. Called Kaplan Virtual Education, the new online program will focus on providing high school students with high-quality, online programming.

The new school will offer the same innovative and flexible programming that has worked well for adult learners, but will offer the programming to both traditional and nontraditional-aged students. The result is that a student of any age could earn their high school diploma through Kaplan Virtual.

The new program features two basic options. Students can enroll in one single course for credit at any time, in essence making up credits that may have been missed while in traditional programs. In addition, students will also have the option of enrolling in a full 18-credit College Access Diploma program. To receive a Kaplan University diploma, students will have to earn at least five credits through KU.

The virtual high school curriculum will cover all of the essential aspects of a traditional high school program. Courses will be offered with instructors communicating with students via e-mail, instant messaging, and telephone.

The Story - Part Two

Later that fall, on November 30, 2006, a fire that was deemed to be arson destroyed the main academic building on the school campus. No connection was ever made to the original noose incident and no suspects have been charged with starting the fire. The failure to determine the culprits had to be an enormous frustration for school administrators as well as for the local police.

On December 4th, six black students, the so-called Jena 6, allegedly attacked a white student, Justin Barker. One student allegedly struck Barker in the back of the head knocking the seventeen-year-old to the ground unconscious. While Barker lay unable to respond, the six black students allegedly kicked him repeatedly.

Barker was taken to the hospital where he was treated for his injuries. He was later released the same day and attended a school based function that evening though he had vision issues with one eye for the better part of three weeks.

Students Arrested
Though the incident occurred on school grounds, the response came from the legal system and not the school district. District Attorney Reed Walters had the six students arrested. He had five of them charged with attempted second-degree murder while the sixth, a fourteen-year-old, was charged as a juvenile. Bail for the Jena 6 was set at varying amounts that ranged from $70,000 to $138,000.

The contrasting actions from the two incidents have resulted in an uproar that culminated with a march on Jena that was reminiscent of those during the 1960’s civil rights movement. One young man remained in jail until today, initially convicted on lesser charges, then unable to post bail when charges were overturned. The others continue to face future trials that could result in extensive jail time while a community is in upheaval.

The charge of attempted second-degree murder was clearly excessive. Assault, absolutely, but second-degree murder? Though the charges were eventually reduced, the damage had been done. And with one young man remaining in jail until today, it is easy to understand the outrage of the black community.

Two Wrongs
The old story is that two wrongs don’t make a right. The folks in Jena have learned that the hard way.

In this case, two wrongs have brought the community immense scrutiny and negative publicity. And a nation back to the long ago days of public lynchings and the subsequent civil rights movement.

Note: Adding to the incredible chain of events is the amazing aspect that Barker would be expelled in late spring from Jena for bringing a gun onto school premises. The legal charges against Barker for that behavior were listed as possessing a firearm in a firearm-free zone.

There is one extremely tough question to be answered in schools today. What is the appropriate set of consequences for teenagers when their behaviors move into the realm that is normally associated with adults? And where should the school punishments leave off and the criminal charges begin?

The difficulty in determining the appropriate punishment for adolescents involved in unacceptable behavior has never been more evident than the emotionally charged situation that has been taking place in Jena, Louisiana. The story is an exceptionally complex one.

The Story in Jena - Part One
The racial tensions in the community began in September of 2006 when a black student requested that he and some of his peers be able to sit under a particular oak tree on school grounds. Apparently there was an unwritten rule that the tree was a place for only white students to congregate. The morning after the student made the request, hangman’s nooses were found hanging from the tree.

The horrible symbolism from another era certainly caught the attention of the Jena High School administration. Once school officials determined who was responsible, the principal took a strong stance and recommended the three individuals involved be expelled for their actions.

However, even though the FBI and other investigators agreed that the noose incident bore all the markings of a hate crime, no legal charges were brought against the three students. According to law enforcement officials, the students were under the age of eighteen and had no prior records so the case did not meet federal criteria for charges to be assessed.

Then, inexplicably, at the expulsion hearing for the students involved, the elected school board for the district ruled against the recommendations of the school principal. The students instead were given alternative punishments and eventually allowed to return to school.

Intent versus Impact
When it comes to suspension versus expulsion, Leavitt Area high school principal Patrick Hartnett always used a phrase that made things crystal clear in this arena for me. Begin by examining the intent of the behavior then move on to consider the impact of the behavior.

Given this situation, the intent may have been debatable. It could have been truly a practical joke by students who had no idea what they were doing or it could have been a vicious and malicious intent to cause fear in black students who dared to ask for certain privileges.

But the impact was unquestionable. The nooses did create a vicious and malicious image that reminded everyone of the horrific lynchings of yesteryear. It also sent a message of confrontation to the black students involved.

The principal at Jena understood that and he wisely recommended expulsion. Unfortunately, though the principal was doing what he was paid to do, make decisions, the school board decided not to listen to that recommendation.

It truly was an enormous mistake.

Next Up - the story in Jena, part two.