For those who could not attend our 15th Annual Educational Law and Social Justice Forum on the “School-to-Prison Pipeline and School-to-Deportation Pipeline,” we have now put the forum up on YouTube.
Here is a direct link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xktnZBDDtwc
Sunday, May 19, 2013
Saturday, May 11, 2013
15th Annual Educational Law and Social Justice Forum will Feature the Journal of Educational Controversy’s Issue on the School-to-Prison Pipeline on May 17th
The 15th Annual Educational Law and Social Justice Forum will be held on Friday, May 17 at 4 p.m. in Miller Hall, Room 005 on the Western Washington University campus.
The forum is free and open to the public and is sponsored by the Journal of Educational Controversy and the Center for Education, Equity and Diversity.
The theme of the forum will be “The School-to-Prison Pipeline and the School-to-Deportation Pipeline.”
The school-to-prison pipeline refers to a national trend in which thousands of students each year are funneled through the public schools and into the juvenile justice system as a result of school policies and practices that increasingly criminalize students rather than educate them. It is a problem that has disproportionally affected students of color, students with disabilities, and students from impoverished and disenfranchised communities.
The School-to-Deportation Pipeline refers to obstacles and fears, specifically of personal or family detention and deportation that undocumented students face in a time of enhanced immigration enforcement, new laws criminalizing immigrants, and stigmatization by public rhetoric around ethnicity and nationality. The journal looks at what teachers need to know and understand to work with undocumented students and their families.
Panelists on the forum include authors whose articles were published in the current issue of the Journal of Educational Controversy. They will address these pipelines with special attention to the problems, cases, laws and statistics in Washington State followed by a Q&A session with the audience.
Panelists
• Dr. Maria Timmons Flores, Professor of TESOL, Western Washington University, has been teaching culturally and linguistically diverse students in schools, communities, and wilderness for over 25 years. It was her students in these settings that inspired her commitment to social justice and motivated Maria to earn a PhD in Bilingual/Multicultural Education. Maria’s teaching and research focus primarily on supporting teachers to understand the influence of language and culture on learning. She teaches courses in bilingual and multicultural education, learning and development, and teaching strategies to support ALL learners. Maria’s current research brings critical cultural lenses to understanding and addressing educational equity for bilingual and immigrant students.
• Dr. John G. Richardson, Professor Emeritus of Sociology, Western Washington University, received his PhD from the University of California, Davis, and then went on to teach at the University of Alaska before coming to Western Washington University. His primary area of research has been the institutional history of American education, and of special education in particular. His most recent publication is Comparing Special Education (Stanford, 2011, with Justin Powell). His current research is a cross-national study of special and vocational education as contemporary means to control the expansion of mass schooling.
• Dr. Thelma Jackson, Race & Pedagogy Chism Series Lead Educator/Scholar-in-Residence, University of Puget Sound, brings a broad range of experience and expertise in the education field from community mobilization to educational transformation. She has a long history of serving and providing leadership to various education related boards, commissions and associations in Washington State including serving the Board of Trustees for Evergreen State College. Dr. Jackson has been a keynote speaker and has provided leadership and facilitation to numerous workshops, seminars and education-related events throughout her career. She has received a number of recognitions and awards for her outstanding community service. Dr. Jackson received her doctorate in Educational Leadership and Change from Fielding Graduate University in Santa Barbara, CA. She and her husband live in Western Washington.
• Maggie Wilkens is state field coordinator at the League of Education Voters. A sociology major and ethnic studies minor, Maggie works to untangle the roots of structural inequality through reforming one of our biggest and most important social institutions: the education system.
• Tracy Sherman is a Policy Analyst at the League of Education Voters and handles a variety of issues including early learning and school discipline. Before returning home to the Pacific Northwest, she was the Associate Director of Government Relations at the American Association of University Women in Washington DC. There she advocated on numerous education civil rights issues including stopping bullying and harassment in schools, ensuring equitable access to school athletics, and increasing the number of women and minorities in science and engineering careers. In her spare time she helps find dogs permanent homes as a foster and volunteer with Saving Great Animals.
• Anne Lee is the Executive Director of TeamChild, a nonprofit civil legal advocacy project for youth in Washington State. Anne’s legal practice has focused on children’s rights, education law, and public benefits. She was one of the authors of the education advocacy manual, Make a Difference in a Child’s Life, and has provided training for hundreds of CASA volunteers, foster parents, youth, social workers, attorneys, and judges on a variety of topics, including advocacy, education law and benefits. Anne received her law degree from New York University School of Law and graduated magna cum laude from Princeton University.
The journal’s special issue on the "School-to-Prison Pipeline" and "The School-to-Deportation Pipeline" is now online. The issue is co-edited with Dan Larner from the Fairhaven College of Interdisciplinary Studies at Western Washington University.
The forum will be held during Western’s annual Back2Bellingham alumni weekend.
Location: Western Washington University, Miller Hall 005, Center for Education, Equity and Diversity (CEED)
Date: May 17, 2013
Time: 4-6pm
The forum is free and open to the public and is sponsored by the Journal of Educational Controversy and the Center for Education, Equity and Diversity.
The theme of the forum will be “The School-to-Prison Pipeline and the School-to-Deportation Pipeline.”
The school-to-prison pipeline refers to a national trend in which thousands of students each year are funneled through the public schools and into the juvenile justice system as a result of school policies and practices that increasingly criminalize students rather than educate them. It is a problem that has disproportionally affected students of color, students with disabilities, and students from impoverished and disenfranchised communities.
The School-to-Deportation Pipeline refers to obstacles and fears, specifically of personal or family detention and deportation that undocumented students face in a time of enhanced immigration enforcement, new laws criminalizing immigrants, and stigmatization by public rhetoric around ethnicity and nationality. The journal looks at what teachers need to know and understand to work with undocumented students and their families.
Panelists on the forum include authors whose articles were published in the current issue of the Journal of Educational Controversy. They will address these pipelines with special attention to the problems, cases, laws and statistics in Washington State followed by a Q&A session with the audience.
Panelists
• Dr. Maria Timmons Flores, Professor of TESOL, Western Washington University, has been teaching culturally and linguistically diverse students in schools, communities, and wilderness for over 25 years. It was her students in these settings that inspired her commitment to social justice and motivated Maria to earn a PhD in Bilingual/Multicultural Education. Maria’s teaching and research focus primarily on supporting teachers to understand the influence of language and culture on learning. She teaches courses in bilingual and multicultural education, learning and development, and teaching strategies to support ALL learners. Maria’s current research brings critical cultural lenses to understanding and addressing educational equity for bilingual and immigrant students.
• Dr. John G. Richardson, Professor Emeritus of Sociology, Western Washington University, received his PhD from the University of California, Davis, and then went on to teach at the University of Alaska before coming to Western Washington University. His primary area of research has been the institutional history of American education, and of special education in particular. His most recent publication is Comparing Special Education (Stanford, 2011, with Justin Powell). His current research is a cross-national study of special and vocational education as contemporary means to control the expansion of mass schooling.
• Dr. Thelma Jackson, Race & Pedagogy Chism Series Lead Educator/Scholar-in-Residence, University of Puget Sound, brings a broad range of experience and expertise in the education field from community mobilization to educational transformation. She has a long history of serving and providing leadership to various education related boards, commissions and associations in Washington State including serving the Board of Trustees for Evergreen State College. Dr. Jackson has been a keynote speaker and has provided leadership and facilitation to numerous workshops, seminars and education-related events throughout her career. She has received a number of recognitions and awards for her outstanding community service. Dr. Jackson received her doctorate in Educational Leadership and Change from Fielding Graduate University in Santa Barbara, CA. She and her husband live in Western Washington.
• Maggie Wilkens is state field coordinator at the League of Education Voters. A sociology major and ethnic studies minor, Maggie works to untangle the roots of structural inequality through reforming one of our biggest and most important social institutions: the education system.
• Tracy Sherman is a Policy Analyst at the League of Education Voters and handles a variety of issues including early learning and school discipline. Before returning home to the Pacific Northwest, she was the Associate Director of Government Relations at the American Association of University Women in Washington DC. There she advocated on numerous education civil rights issues including stopping bullying and harassment in schools, ensuring equitable access to school athletics, and increasing the number of women and minorities in science and engineering careers. In her spare time she helps find dogs permanent homes as a foster and volunteer with Saving Great Animals.
• Anne Lee is the Executive Director of TeamChild, a nonprofit civil legal advocacy project for youth in Washington State. Anne’s legal practice has focused on children’s rights, education law, and public benefits. She was one of the authors of the education advocacy manual, Make a Difference in a Child’s Life, and has provided training for hundreds of CASA volunteers, foster parents, youth, social workers, attorneys, and judges on a variety of topics, including advocacy, education law and benefits. Anne received her law degree from New York University School of Law and graduated magna cum laude from Princeton University.
The journal’s special issue on the "School-to-Prison Pipeline" and "The School-to-Deportation Pipeline" is now online. The issue is co-edited with Dan Larner from the Fairhaven College of Interdisciplinary Studies at Western Washington University.
The forum will be held during Western’s annual Back2Bellingham alumni weekend.
Location: Western Washington University, Miller Hall 005, Center for Education, Equity and Diversity (CEED)
Date: May 17, 2013
Time: 4-6pm
Tuesday, May 7, 2013
Latest books on Eco-Justice by Author C. A. Bowers
Editor: Readers will remember the article by Chet Bowers that was published in our winter 2009 issue of the Journal of Educational Controversy. Titled, “Rethinking Social Justice Issues within an Eco-Justice Conceptual and Moral Framework,” the article provoked one of our most interesting exchanges in our Rejoinder section. Chet has provided a description of his latest two books below.
The Way Forward: Educational Reforms that Focus on the Cultural Commons and the Linguistic Roots of the Ecological/Cultural Crises
By C. A. Bowers
This latest book by Chet Bowers, The Way Forward: Educational Reforms that Focus on the Cultural Commons and the Linguistic Roots of the Ecological/Cultural Crises, provides a more in-depth examination of several themes he has introduced before, as well as an introduction to issues that other environmental and educational writers have ignored. The former includes understanding cultures, including daily cultural practices, as ecologies—and how these micro-ecologies affect the life-sustaining viability of natural ecologies. Also explored in greater depth are how the community-centered cultural commons represent the early stages of a post-industrial future, as well as how public schools, universities, and environmental writers continue to perpetuate the linguistic colonization of the present by the past and the linguistic colonization of other cultures. Special attention is given to how to reframe the meaning of words (metaphors) in ways that are culturally and ecologically informed. The book also provides an in-depth examination of several areas of silence in thinking about current environmental and educational reform issues. These include expanding upon the thinking of Walter Ong and Eric Havelock in ways that clarify how print-based storage and communication (which includes computer-mediated thinking and communication) reinforces abstract thinking that, in turn, undermines the exercise of ecological intelligence essential to being aware of cultural differences in local contexts. The book also provides an examination of highly acclaimed scientists’ vision of future cultural developments that can only be called “scientism,” and which serves the purpose of giving scientific legitimacy to the West’s long-standing agenda of cultural colonization. The final chapter raises the question of what futurist-thinking scientists and progressives recognize as important to conserve in this era of ecological and political uncertainties. This chapter brings into focus the differences between the progressive orthodoxies of the last decades of the 20th century, where both progressive and market liberals shared many of the same deep cultural assumptions that were uninformed about environmental limits, and the challenges of the 21st century where the increasing level of social chaos resulting from systemic economic changes and the further degradation of life-sustaining ecosystems are likely to lead to a further breakdown in the democratic process and to the further centralization of power in the already existing alliance between fundamentalist religious groups, corporations, and the military. In short, this book challenges both environmentalists of all stripes as well as educational reformers to recognize that addressing the environmental crisis cannot be separated from addressing the cultural crises being perpetuated by late 20th century thinking. It also challenges educational reformers to recognize that the needed curricular reforms are easily derived from an understanding of the differences between ecologically sustainable and unsustainable cultural practices.
Contents:
Chapter 1 Introduction
Chapter 2 The Challenge Facing Educational Reformers: Making the Transition from Individual to Ecological Intelligence
Chapter 3 The Political Economy of the Cultural Commons and the Nature of Sustainable Wealth
Chapter 4 The Hidden Dynamics of Linguistic Colonization in Teaching English as a Second Language
Chapter 5 Pattern Language: Should Our Vast Spectrum of Expressiveness be Narrowed to Literacy and Numeracy? By Derek Rasmussen
Chapter 6 How Print and Computer-Mediated Learning Undermine Ecological Intelligence
Chapter 7 Toward an Ecologically Sustainable Vocabulary
Chapter 8 E. O. Wilson’s Drift into the Rabbit-Hole of Scientism: The Challenge Facing Environmental Educators
Chapter 9 Silences in the Thinking of Futurist Scientists and Progressives About What Needs to be Conserved in an Era of Political and Ecological Uncertainties
Appendix A Principles of Eco-Justice
Appendix B Characteristics of the Cultural Commons and the Forces of Enclosure
******************************************************
In the Grip of the Past: Educational Reforms that Address What should Be Changed and What Should be Conserved
By C. A. Bowers
With natural systems being exploited at an unsustainable rate, with technologies displacing the need for workers and now even professors, with print-based technologies undermining the intergenerational achievements in the areas of civil liberties and the cultural commons, it is now time for educational reformers to question the idea that students must be educated to become change agents. The industrial culture, now driven by digital technologies, is transforming cultures on a global scale. And they are being transformed in ways that serve the interests of environmentally destructive and profit-oriented corporations. The essays in this collection highlight reforms that teachers can introduce in classrooms––reforms that will enable students to become aware of the traditions within their own cultures that must be renewed in ways that ensure the prospects of future generations. Students must also be challenged to consider the traditions that need to be changed. The tensions between what needs to be conserved and what needs to be changed are the critical issues that will not be raised by the experts working to create a seamless world of digital communication and thought. For reasons explained in the book’s essays, this is the mindset that is habituated to constant change––a mindset with no sense of what is being lost that are sources of community self-sufficiency and empowerment.
Contents
Chapter 1 Introduction
Chapter 2 Is Transformative Learning UNESCO’s Colonizing Agenda for Global Educational Reform?
Chapter 3 Language Issues that Should be the Central Focus in Teacher Education and Curriculum Studies
Chapter 4 Toward an Ecologically Informed Paradigm for Thinking about Educational Reforms
Chapter 5 One of the Political Legacies of Print-Dominated Thinking: Ayn Rand’s Justification of the Pursuit of a Life of Selfishness
Chapter 6 How the Coming Online Revolution in Higher Education will Lead to the Elimination of Faculty
Chapter 7 Is Using Computers in the Classrooms of Oral/Tradition-Centered Cultures an Affirming Technology or a Trojan Horse?
Chapter 8 Rethinking Social Justice Issues within an Eco-Justice Conceptual and Moral Framework
Both books available from the Eco-Justice Press
The Way Forward: Educational Reforms that Focus on the Cultural Commons and the Linguistic Roots of the Ecological/Cultural Crises
By C. A. Bowers
This latest book by Chet Bowers, The Way Forward: Educational Reforms that Focus on the Cultural Commons and the Linguistic Roots of the Ecological/Cultural Crises, provides a more in-depth examination of several themes he has introduced before, as well as an introduction to issues that other environmental and educational writers have ignored. The former includes understanding cultures, including daily cultural practices, as ecologies—and how these micro-ecologies affect the life-sustaining viability of natural ecologies. Also explored in greater depth are how the community-centered cultural commons represent the early stages of a post-industrial future, as well as how public schools, universities, and environmental writers continue to perpetuate the linguistic colonization of the present by the past and the linguistic colonization of other cultures. Special attention is given to how to reframe the meaning of words (metaphors) in ways that are culturally and ecologically informed. The book also provides an in-depth examination of several areas of silence in thinking about current environmental and educational reform issues. These include expanding upon the thinking of Walter Ong and Eric Havelock in ways that clarify how print-based storage and communication (which includes computer-mediated thinking and communication) reinforces abstract thinking that, in turn, undermines the exercise of ecological intelligence essential to being aware of cultural differences in local contexts. The book also provides an examination of highly acclaimed scientists’ vision of future cultural developments that can only be called “scientism,” and which serves the purpose of giving scientific legitimacy to the West’s long-standing agenda of cultural colonization. The final chapter raises the question of what futurist-thinking scientists and progressives recognize as important to conserve in this era of ecological and political uncertainties. This chapter brings into focus the differences between the progressive orthodoxies of the last decades of the 20th century, where both progressive and market liberals shared many of the same deep cultural assumptions that were uninformed about environmental limits, and the challenges of the 21st century where the increasing level of social chaos resulting from systemic economic changes and the further degradation of life-sustaining ecosystems are likely to lead to a further breakdown in the democratic process and to the further centralization of power in the already existing alliance between fundamentalist religious groups, corporations, and the military. In short, this book challenges both environmentalists of all stripes as well as educational reformers to recognize that addressing the environmental crisis cannot be separated from addressing the cultural crises being perpetuated by late 20th century thinking. It also challenges educational reformers to recognize that the needed curricular reforms are easily derived from an understanding of the differences between ecologically sustainable and unsustainable cultural practices.
Contents:
Chapter 1 Introduction
Chapter 2 The Challenge Facing Educational Reformers: Making the Transition from Individual to Ecological Intelligence
Chapter 3 The Political Economy of the Cultural Commons and the Nature of Sustainable Wealth
Chapter 4 The Hidden Dynamics of Linguistic Colonization in Teaching English as a Second Language
Chapter 5 Pattern Language: Should Our Vast Spectrum of Expressiveness be Narrowed to Literacy and Numeracy? By Derek Rasmussen
Chapter 6 How Print and Computer-Mediated Learning Undermine Ecological Intelligence
Chapter 7 Toward an Ecologically Sustainable Vocabulary
Chapter 8 E. O. Wilson’s Drift into the Rabbit-Hole of Scientism: The Challenge Facing Environmental Educators
Chapter 9 Silences in the Thinking of Futurist Scientists and Progressives About What Needs to be Conserved in an Era of Political and Ecological Uncertainties
Appendix A Principles of Eco-Justice
Appendix B Characteristics of the Cultural Commons and the Forces of Enclosure
******************************************************
In the Grip of the Past: Educational Reforms that Address What should Be Changed and What Should be Conserved
By C. A. Bowers
With natural systems being exploited at an unsustainable rate, with technologies displacing the need for workers and now even professors, with print-based technologies undermining the intergenerational achievements in the areas of civil liberties and the cultural commons, it is now time for educational reformers to question the idea that students must be educated to become change agents. The industrial culture, now driven by digital technologies, is transforming cultures on a global scale. And they are being transformed in ways that serve the interests of environmentally destructive and profit-oriented corporations. The essays in this collection highlight reforms that teachers can introduce in classrooms––reforms that will enable students to become aware of the traditions within their own cultures that must be renewed in ways that ensure the prospects of future generations. Students must also be challenged to consider the traditions that need to be changed. The tensions between what needs to be conserved and what needs to be changed are the critical issues that will not be raised by the experts working to create a seamless world of digital communication and thought. For reasons explained in the book’s essays, this is the mindset that is habituated to constant change––a mindset with no sense of what is being lost that are sources of community self-sufficiency and empowerment.
Contents
Chapter 1 Introduction
Chapter 2 Is Transformative Learning UNESCO’s Colonizing Agenda for Global Educational Reform?
Chapter 3 Language Issues that Should be the Central Focus in Teacher Education and Curriculum Studies
Chapter 4 Toward an Ecologically Informed Paradigm for Thinking about Educational Reforms
Chapter 5 One of the Political Legacies of Print-Dominated Thinking: Ayn Rand’s Justification of the Pursuit of a Life of Selfishness
Chapter 6 How the Coming Online Revolution in Higher Education will Lead to the Elimination of Faculty
Chapter 7 Is Using Computers in the Classrooms of Oral/Tradition-Centered Cultures an Affirming Technology or a Trojan Horse?
Chapter 8 Rethinking Social Justice Issues within an Eco-Justice Conceptual and Moral Framework
Both books available from the Eco-Justice Press
Thursday, April 11, 2013
Federal Court Decision on Tucson, Arizona’s Ban of Mexican-American Studies to be Appealed to the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals
Here is the latest word on the recent court decision on the banning of the Tucson, Arizona Mexican-American program. The fight will continue. Supporters of the program have announced that they will appeal the decision to the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.
While the case continues on in the courts, interest in multicultural literature is reported to be soaring. Censorship appears to have drawn students across the nation to ethnic studies. Even the young students who watched the books being packed in boxes and taken away in their Tucson, Arizona high school classrooms have been given the opportunity to be taught outside the confines of the school district. Their teacher, Curtis Acosta, teaches a Chicano literature class at John Valenzuela Youth Center in South Tucson on Sundays. Moreover, Prescott College is now offering the students college credit for their study, ironically, the same study that was deemed too dangerous by the State of Arizona.
This raises an interesting and disturbing question. It seems that in a class-based society, only those privileged to continue on to college will have an opportunity to critically explore these deeper questions and assumptions underlying the power relations in our society. But all citizens in a democracy need this type of inquiry if they are to engage in the body politic. Given that many students will end their studies at the high school door, what are the implications for the kind of society we are forming?
We will be exploring the politics of education in the journal’s next issue on “Who Defines the Public in Public Education?”
While the case continues on in the courts, interest in multicultural literature is reported to be soaring. Censorship appears to have drawn students across the nation to ethnic studies. Even the young students who watched the books being packed in boxes and taken away in their Tucson, Arizona high school classrooms have been given the opportunity to be taught outside the confines of the school district. Their teacher, Curtis Acosta, teaches a Chicano literature class at John Valenzuela Youth Center in South Tucson on Sundays. Moreover, Prescott College is now offering the students college credit for their study, ironically, the same study that was deemed too dangerous by the State of Arizona.
This raises an interesting and disturbing question. It seems that in a class-based society, only those privileged to continue on to college will have an opportunity to critically explore these deeper questions and assumptions underlying the power relations in our society. But all citizens in a democracy need this type of inquiry if they are to engage in the body politic. Given that many students will end their studies at the high school door, what are the implications for the kind of society we are forming?
We will be exploring the politics of education in the journal’s next issue on “Who Defines the Public in Public Education?”
Wednesday, March 20, 2013
How Can We Align Educational Reform with the Purpose of a Democratic Education?
In the article, “Is This What Democracy Looks Like,” published in our Fall 2011/Winter2012 issue of the Journal of Educational Controversy author Deborah Meier (2012) considers how current educational reforms may actually resist democracy. In this discussion, Meier identifies the purpose of a democratic education as “to prepare all of our students without exception to become members of a smart ruling class, while also living productive, socially useful and fully human lives” and asserts that current reform efforts are ineffective in achieving this purpose. “Democracy Left Behind,” a report from the University of Colorado Boulder by Kenneth R. Howe and David E. Meens (2012), also reveals the ways in which current reform efforts fail to meet the needs of a successful democratic society.
Aligning Educational Reform with a Deliberative Democracy
By, Celina Meza
Editorial Staff, Journal of Educational Controversy
In the report, “Democracy Left Behind” Howe & Meens discuss the consequences of No Child Left Behind (No Child Left Behind [NCLB], 2001) through the framework of Amy Gutmann’s (2004) concept of deliberative democracy. A deliberative democracy is a society in which citizens play an active role in deliberation, critical discussion and decision-making, of the policies that govern them.
In terms of educational policy, there are three main principles that constrain a deliberative democracy:
- Non-repression—freedom from interference and freedom to engage in deliberation. This takes the form of local control in decision-making, in which communities collectively determine the policies that govern them.
- Non-discrimination—the prevention of exclusion or denial of entire groups of children, especially in passive repression.
- The democratic threshold—a standard of equality in which all children are permitted to an education that prepares them with the knowledge, skills, and dispositions necessary to engage in democratic discussions and decision-making.
In 1983 a report from the U. S. Department of Education titled “A Nation at Risk” warned that the current public education system was contributing to “a rising tide of mediocrity” (A Nation at Risk, p.1) that threatened the global economic competitiveness of the U. S. Prompted by rhetoric around the perceived achievement crises, in the 1990’s NCLB was presented as a solution to hold local school districts accountable to nation-wide education standards.
NCLB enacted two policies to hold schools accountable: Standardized testing and public school choice. With standardized testing, all students are tested on the basics in reading, writing and mathematics. Based on student test results, Title 1 funds sanctions and rewards. Districts that do not meet standard are required to provide Supplemental Educational Services (SES). The first step of SES goes to funding third party tutoring (for example, Sylvan Learning Center). Next, districts are encouraged to take corrective action in firing staff and administrators and adopting new curricula. If test scores still don’t rise to standard, districts must offer an alternative school choice. School choice originally grew out of conservative advocacy for local control in the 1960s in the effort of fighting racial desegregation. Now, under NCLB, school choice gives parents the option to exit schools they are unhappy with to attend others and makes schools subject to market competition. In addition, failing schools may be reconstituted as charters under private management.
NCLB did not arise out of concern for closing the equity gap, but rather out of concern for the achievement gap, thereby shifting the focus from helping areas in high need for the sake of equity to raising the nation-wide achievement for the sake of national competitiveness. So it is no surprise that Howe & Meens find that the policies of NCLB fall outside of the principles of a deliberative democracy in a number of ways.
First, the implementation of standardized testing threatens the principle of non-repression immediately by removing the power of deciding upon standards out of local control. Next, democratic power is taken away from local communities through corrective action under SES when communities cannot determine their own needs. Local control is also threatened by school choice when third party private businesses and philanthropists come in to manage charter schools.
Second, the principle of non-discrimination is threatened by the method of sanctions and rewards based on standardized testing and by exclusion caused by school choice. Unsurprisingly, schools in wealthier areas test higher than schools in low-income areas. It is also true that schools in low-income areas tend to have large populations of historically marginalized groups such as Black and Latino Americans. “Democracy Left Behind” reveals that though urban schools are in disproportionate need of help, they comprised only 27% of the schools that received funds and 90% of the schools that received sanctions. In addition, Howe & Meens suggest “test-based accountability creates a perverse incentive for schools to allow and even encourage low-performing students to leave” (p. 8). The pressure of accountability and inequity of funding has contributed to increased dropouts, suspensions, and expulsions in historically marginalized ethnic groups. Thus, in an effort to close the achievement gap, standardized testing has resulted in passive repression that furthers the equity gap between the historically marginalized and the dominant.
Though school choice has the potential to foster democracy, the way that school choice is implemented is not democratic: Howe & Meens find that school choice actually exacerbates segregation. When school choice in not uniformly offered in all communities, it does not give parents equal opportunity to exit one school to attend a better one. In addition, the current implementation fails to ensure the protection of marginalized and historically disadvantaged groups. As a consequence, parents with power can figuratively hijack school choice to advance their own children—thus furthering segregation between the historically advantaged and the marginalized.
Third, the democratic threshold is threatened by restriction of curriculum in order to teach to the test and by segregation caused by school choice. With the threat of corrective action under SES, teachers are pressured to design their curricula around what have been called the basics, those topics that will be tested. However, the basics do not cover the knowledge and skills necessary to be an active citizen. For example, a study by the Southern Poverty Law Center concludes, “across the country, state educational standards virtually ignore our civil rights history” (as referenced in Howe & Meens, 2012, p.12), though this part of our history is essential knowledge for all American citizens in a deliberative democracy. In addition, we must have diverse and integrated schools to dialogue across differences and develop the skills and dispositions necessary for democratic deliberation. School choice that leads to segregation limits the democratic potential of the context in which children learn.
In conclusion, Howe & Meens offer four recommendations to better align educational reform with the purpose of a democratic education:
- Provide additional support for staff, parents, and community to get involved in schools in need rather than implementing sanctions.
- Focus the curriculum to content and skills necessary for democratic citizenship rather than curriculum that teaches to the test.
- Hold accountability through democratic procedures (such as elected school boards), rather than through privatization of public resources in SES and school choice.
- Ensure access to equal educational opportunities and diverse context for learning by including enrollment constraints as part of school choice policy.
References
Gutmann, A. (1999). Democratic education. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Howe, K. R., & Meens, D. E. (2012). Democracy left behind. Boulder, CO: National Education Policy Center.
Meier, D. (2012). Is this what democracy looks like? A personal retrospective . Journal of Educational Controversy , 6(1), Retrieved from http://www.wce.wwu.edu/Resources/CEP/eJournal
National Commission on Excellence in Education (1983). A nation at risk. Washington, DC: U. S. Government Printing Office.
No Child Left Bbehind Act of 2001. 107 P. L. 110. 115 Stat. 1425. 2002 Enacted H.R. 1
Southern Poverty Law Center (2011). Teaching the movement: The state of civil rights education in the United States 2011. Montgomery, AL: Southern Poverty Law Center.
Thursday, March 14, 2013
The Latest on the Federal Court Decision on the Banning of the Mexican-American Studies Program in Tucson, Arizona
Editor: Readers will remember our article titled, "The Hypocrisy of Racism: Arizona's Movement towards State-Sanctioned Apartheid," by Augustine F. Romero, from our Fall 2011/Winter 2012 issue of the journal. Since its publication, we have tried to keep readers updated on the events in Arizona that resulted in the banning of the Mexican-American Studies Program in the schools of Tucson, Arizona. A decision from the federal courts has just come down on March 8th. Here is a link to the decision, Acosta v. Huppenthal . Essentially, the law, HB 2281, was upheld except for one provision that barred courses "designed primarily for pupils of a particular ethnic group." The court upheld other provisions of the law that bar courses promoting the overthrow of the U.S. government, promote racial or class resentment, and those that advocate ethnic solidarity instead of the treatment of pupils as individuals.
We provide both a press release from the Save Ethnic Studies website about a possible appeal to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and a statement from the Office of the Attorney General.
Statement from Save Ethnic Studies Website:
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: Monday, March 11, 2013
Contact:
Law Offices of Richard M. Martinez
(520) 327-47-97
SES Statement on Tashima Ruling: The Path Forward
Late in the afternoon of March 8, 2013 Judge Tashima issued the long anticipated ruling concerning the pending motions for summary judgment. The motions were initially submitted in 2011 and argued in March of 2012.
The plaintiffs' motion sought to invalidate HB 2281 (A.R.S. § 15-111 and 112) as unconstitutional because it is impermissibly vague and overbroad, precluding speech and infringing students' "right to receive" under the First Amendment. Although Judge Tashima recognized that the students' First Amendment rights in the classroom were at stake, and found one provision of the statute unconstitutional, A.R.S. § 15-112(a)(3) - "classes designed primarily for pupils of a particular group ethnic group", the decision left intact the remainder of the law that was used to prohibit the teaching of Mexican American Studies in the Tucson Unified School District.
The Acosta/Arce case is not over. The immediate task is to decide what is the next step: seek reconsideration of the decision or file an appeal to the United States Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. That decision will be made within the next few days. It was always understood that this case would end up before the Ninth Circuit, and we have been preparing for this inevitable step for the past year. We have assembled a legal team that includes professors from the Seattle University Law School and the Bingham McCutchen law firm. Their contributions to the appellate process will be invaluable.
Once an appeal is filed, briefing will be submitted by both sides and a hearing will occur. This step will likely take about 18 to 24 months. The legal process is never as quick as we all hope for. This is especially true when important constitutional rights are at stake.
The effort to invalidate HB 2281 will continue. Too much is at stake. The right of every student to learn and teacher to teach the history, literature and culture of Latinos in Arizona is currently prohibited. Mexican American Studies proved to be a valuable educational program that instilled students with a positive academic identity. Much better academic skills, grades, graduation rates along with increased matriculation to college consistently occurred in every year the program was offered.
The mandate to successfully educate every student irrespective color, gender, culture or economic status is in crisis. As a nation we have failed miserably to reach this goal. We can and must do better. Ethnic studies provide a critical curricular option that must be available to every school district to consider, implement and maintain.
HB 2281 is the product of fear and a profound misunderstanding of the role of culture, language and history. These are areas of learning that do not divide us as a nation but provide a vehicle to promote understanding, respect and success. We cannot allow this fear to spread to other jurisdictions and eliminate important programs that already exist or the development of new programs.
The American dream has always included the universal hope that our children do better than we did. Irrespective of color, gender, culture or language every student must have the right to know who she is and how she fits into our complex and challenging society.
The path to obtain and maintain our civil liberties is continuous. In this lucha we all move forward. Your support is vital. Stand with us united in our common effort to be make our nation "a more perfect union".
The educators, students and community of Save Ethnic Studies.
Statement from the Office of the Attorney General:
Attorney General Tom Horne Wins Federal District Court Case Against Tucson Ethnic Studies Program
Phoenix (Monday, March 11) – Arizona’s law prohibiting courses that teach ethnic solidarity, rather than treating other students as individuals, was upheld as constitutional in a Federal District Court ruling issued Friday. The law was held to be constitutional, with one minor exception, Section (A)(3). The case was personally argued by Arizona Attorney General Tom Horne in Federal District Court in Tucson.
In a statement Horne said, “This is a victory for ensuring that public education is not held captive to radical, political elements and that students treat each other as individuals - not on the basis of the race they were born into.”
Enforcement of the law resulted in cancellation of Tucson Unified School District’s Mexican-American Studies Program after an independent Administrative Law Judge (ALJ) found that the program presented material in a “biased, political, and emotionally charged manner.” The ALJ also stated: “Teaching in such a manner promotes social or political activism against the white people, promotes racial resentment, and advocates ethnic solidarity instead of treating peoples as individuals.”
The State law prohibits courses if they violate any one of four prohibitions, including “promote resentment toward a race or a class of people”, “are designed primarily for peoples of a particular ethnic group”, or “advocate ethnic solidarity instead of the treatment of peoples as individuals.” The Court found only “designed primarily for peoples of a particular ethnic group” to be unconstitutionally vague, and upheld the other standards under which Tucson’s Mexican-American Studies Program was eliminated.
The Statute was challenged on numerous grounds, including violation of free speech, and unconstitutional vagueness – they were denied. The Court held that the State’s legitimate concern here was to reduce racism, as set forth in the declaration of policy in the statute that states: “The legislature finds and declares that public school pupils should be taught to treat and value each other as individuals and not to be taught to resent or hate other races or classes of people.” The Court found that the prohibitions in the statute are reasonably related to the goal of reducing racism at the schools.
In a related action, another Federal Law Judge had issued a ruling in the Tucson desegregation case calling for the development of culturally relevant courses, an Order that has been appealed by Attorney General Horne. However, that Order also stated: “The State is free to enforce its laws as it did in 2011 when it took action against TUSD for Mexican-American Studies courses, if it believes any culturally relevant courses developed and implemented in TUSD violate state law.”
Office of the Arizona Attorney General
We provide both a press release from the Save Ethnic Studies website about a possible appeal to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and a statement from the Office of the Attorney General.
Statement from Save Ethnic Studies Website:
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: Monday, March 11, 2013
Contact:
Law Offices of Richard M. Martinez
(520) 327-47-97
SES Statement on Tashima Ruling: The Path Forward
Late in the afternoon of March 8, 2013 Judge Tashima issued the long anticipated ruling concerning the pending motions for summary judgment. The motions were initially submitted in 2011 and argued in March of 2012.
The plaintiffs' motion sought to invalidate HB 2281 (A.R.S. § 15-111 and 112) as unconstitutional because it is impermissibly vague and overbroad, precluding speech and infringing students' "right to receive" under the First Amendment. Although Judge Tashima recognized that the students' First Amendment rights in the classroom were at stake, and found one provision of the statute unconstitutional, A.R.S. § 15-112(a)(3) - "classes designed primarily for pupils of a particular group ethnic group", the decision left intact the remainder of the law that was used to prohibit the teaching of Mexican American Studies in the Tucson Unified School District.
The Acosta/Arce case is not over. The immediate task is to decide what is the next step: seek reconsideration of the decision or file an appeal to the United States Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. That decision will be made within the next few days. It was always understood that this case would end up before the Ninth Circuit, and we have been preparing for this inevitable step for the past year. We have assembled a legal team that includes professors from the Seattle University Law School and the Bingham McCutchen law firm. Their contributions to the appellate process will be invaluable.
Once an appeal is filed, briefing will be submitted by both sides and a hearing will occur. This step will likely take about 18 to 24 months. The legal process is never as quick as we all hope for. This is especially true when important constitutional rights are at stake.
The effort to invalidate HB 2281 will continue. Too much is at stake. The right of every student to learn and teacher to teach the history, literature and culture of Latinos in Arizona is currently prohibited. Mexican American Studies proved to be a valuable educational program that instilled students with a positive academic identity. Much better academic skills, grades, graduation rates along with increased matriculation to college consistently occurred in every year the program was offered.
The mandate to successfully educate every student irrespective color, gender, culture or economic status is in crisis. As a nation we have failed miserably to reach this goal. We can and must do better. Ethnic studies provide a critical curricular option that must be available to every school district to consider, implement and maintain.
HB 2281 is the product of fear and a profound misunderstanding of the role of culture, language and history. These are areas of learning that do not divide us as a nation but provide a vehicle to promote understanding, respect and success. We cannot allow this fear to spread to other jurisdictions and eliminate important programs that already exist or the development of new programs.
The American dream has always included the universal hope that our children do better than we did. Irrespective of color, gender, culture or language every student must have the right to know who she is and how she fits into our complex and challenging society.
The path to obtain and maintain our civil liberties is continuous. In this lucha we all move forward. Your support is vital. Stand with us united in our common effort to be make our nation "a more perfect union".
The educators, students and community of Save Ethnic Studies.
Statement from the Office of the Attorney General:
Attorney General Tom Horne Wins Federal District Court Case Against Tucson Ethnic Studies Program
Phoenix (Monday, March 11) – Arizona’s law prohibiting courses that teach ethnic solidarity, rather than treating other students as individuals, was upheld as constitutional in a Federal District Court ruling issued Friday. The law was held to be constitutional, with one minor exception, Section (A)(3). The case was personally argued by Arizona Attorney General Tom Horne in Federal District Court in Tucson.
In a statement Horne said, “This is a victory for ensuring that public education is not held captive to radical, political elements and that students treat each other as individuals - not on the basis of the race they were born into.”
Enforcement of the law resulted in cancellation of Tucson Unified School District’s Mexican-American Studies Program after an independent Administrative Law Judge (ALJ) found that the program presented material in a “biased, political, and emotionally charged manner.” The ALJ also stated: “Teaching in such a manner promotes social or political activism against the white people, promotes racial resentment, and advocates ethnic solidarity instead of treating peoples as individuals.”
The State law prohibits courses if they violate any one of four prohibitions, including “promote resentment toward a race or a class of people”, “are designed primarily for peoples of a particular ethnic group”, or “advocate ethnic solidarity instead of the treatment of peoples as individuals.” The Court found only “designed primarily for peoples of a particular ethnic group” to be unconstitutionally vague, and upheld the other standards under which Tucson’s Mexican-American Studies Program was eliminated.
The Statute was challenged on numerous grounds, including violation of free speech, and unconstitutional vagueness – they were denied. The Court held that the State’s legitimate concern here was to reduce racism, as set forth in the declaration of policy in the statute that states: “The legislature finds and declares that public school pupils should be taught to treat and value each other as individuals and not to be taught to resent or hate other races or classes of people.” The Court found that the prohibitions in the statute are reasonably related to the goal of reducing racism at the schools.
In a related action, another Federal Law Judge had issued a ruling in the Tucson desegregation case calling for the development of culturally relevant courses, an Order that has been appealed by Attorney General Horne. However, that Order also stated: “The State is free to enforce its laws as it did in 2011 when it took action against TUSD for Mexican-American Studies courses, if it believes any culturally relevant courses developed and implemented in TUSD violate state law.”
Office of the Arizona Attorney General
Saturday, March 9, 2013
School-to-Prison Pipeline Issue Now Online
We are pleased to announce that our special issue of the Journal of Educational Controversy on the School-to-Prison Pipeline and the School-to-Deportation Pipeline is now online at: http://www.wce.wwu.edu/Resources/CEP/eJournal/v007n001/
Readers are invited to contribute a rejoinder to any article in this issue.
Readers are invited to contribute a rejoinder to any article in this issue.
Sunday, February 24, 2013
The School-to-Prison Pipeline: A Civil Rights and a Civil Liberty Issue
The School-to-Prison Pipeline: A Civil Rights and a Civil Liberty Issue
An Editorial Preview of Upcoming Issue
The School-to-Prison Pipeline stands as a direct contradiction to the vision of the public school as an institution for promoting and sustaining a democratic republic. Each year thousands of students are funneled through the public schools into the juvenile justice system as a result of school policies and practices that increasingly criminalize students rather than educate them. Most are students of color, students with disabilities, and students from impoverished neighborhoods. How and why this is happening is the focus of this issue of the Journal of Educational Controversy.
Research indicates that both the number of school suspensions and expulsions have increased dramatically as well as the kind of behaviors and infractions that result in suspensions and expulsions. Data from the United States Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights indicate that over three million students are suspended and over 100,000 students are expelled each year. 1 This rate has almost doubled in the past thirty years. Research also shows a relationship among expulsions, suspensions and school dropouts and subsequent involvement in the juvenile justice system. According to national figures, “high school dropouts are three and one-half times more likely than high school graduates to be arrested, and more than eight times as likely to be incarcerated.”2
Zero-tolerance policies, the overuse of school discipline and juvenile court referrals, exclusionary discipline policies, excessive policing in schools, the criminalization of disability-related behaviors, and pressures and abuse from the high-stakes testing environment are often cited as contributing factors. Together these policies and practices have resulted in the violation of three of our most basic democratic principles:
1. Right to an Education
2. Right to Non-Discrimination
3. Right to Due Process
The disruptions and denial of education as a result of suspensions, expulsions and exclusionary disciplinary policies have threatened the right to an education, especially when students are given indefinite expulsions without recourse to an alternative education route. The disproportionate impact on different student populations, especially on students of color and students with disabilities and emotional problems, has resulted in discriminatory treatment. And the process that often funnels students from the public school into the juvenile justice system often violates fundamental due process procedures. Most important, if the philosopher and educator, John Dewey, was correct in his theory that children learn what they experience, what are these school policies and practices teaching our children about the fundamental principles of our democracy?
A reconstructed example illustrates all three violations. A young student of color in an urban school in an impoverished neighborhood is confronted by a police resource officer in the hallway. Suddenly the young student finds himself in handcuffs and arrested for speaking back and for defiant and disrespectful behavior. Infractions that would have been treated as a school disciplinary incident have now become a criminal act. This often results when the concepts of school discipline and criminal acts are not clearly defined in a school policy, and the role of school administrators and police resource officers are not clearly distinguished. The role of police is to ensure safety and stop criminal acts, not to discipline students for breaking school rules. Are these misunderstandings that result in criminal arrest due to a lack in the training of school resource officers in cultural differences and a failure to understand the special needs of adolescent development? How aware is the student of his or her rights to due process at this point. How will this experience lead to school alienation and future dropout? What has this incident taught the student about our democratic principles? The complexity of any specific incident has led many authors in our issue to talk about a “persistent nexus or a web of intertwined, punitive threads” rather than a simple pipeline that our young people get caught up in.3
The purpose of this issue of the journal is to bring awareness and understanding to this complex nexus of events. The issue is going online at a very opportune moment. The United States Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Human Rights held its first ever hearing on the school-to-prison pipeline on December 12, 2012, an event that brought national attention to the problem. In this issue, our authors complement the testimony that was given at the hearing with a deeper, multidimensional analysis.
The following controversy was posed for authors to address:
The School to Prison Pipeline refers to a national trend in which school policies and practices are increasingly resulting in criminalizing students rather than educating them. Statistics indicate that the number of suspensions, expulsions, dropouts or “pushouts,” and juvenile justice confinements is growing. Moreover, there is a disproportionate impact on students of color and students with disabilities and emotional problems. In this issue, we invite authors to examine the policy implications, the political ramifications, and the causes and possible solutions to this problem. Moreover, what are these policies teaching our children?
There are five different sections.
Section 1 includes authors’ responses to the controversy itself and covers multiple perspectives and dimensions of the problem.
Section 2 looks at other related pipelines like the “School to Deportation” Pipeline.
Section 3, entitled, “From Theory To Activism: Perspectives from Youth Advocacy Groups In Washington State,” brings together a description of the activism and recommendations by groups in the trenches who have been trying to dismantle the school-to-prison pipeline. The groups include the Center for Children and Youth Justice, Team Child, the League of Education Voters and the Washington State Education Ombudsman, an office that may be the first of its kind in the nation.
Section 4 provides the reader with a video of an interview with one of our authors. Justice Bobbe Bridge, former justice of the Washington State Supreme Court, who started the Center for Children and Youth Justice, discusses a more proactive approach that the courts can use to reach young people who are truant and disengaged from the school before they enter the school-to-prison pipeline. We have also inserted a video from an earlier forum that the journal sponsored in which Rose Spidell, an attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union of Washington, talks about the cases that have come to the ACLU and the actions that were taken. In the near future, we will put online other video interviews with our authors. The videos can be accessed by clicking on the “Authors Talk” link on the journal’s menu.
We finally conclude in Section 5 with three book reviews on the subject.
I want to thank my guest co-editor, Daniel Larner, for all his work in helping to conceptualize this issue and select the included papers from our many submissions. Dan is a professor at the Fairhaven College of Interdisciplinary Studies at Western Washington University and has been a longtime member of the ACLU Board of Directors in Washington State. In addition to his courses in theatre arts, Dan also teaches courses in civil liberties at the college. His editorial reflects his own unique perspective on this topic from a lifetime devoted to promoting civil liberties and teaching young people to understand the meanings and significance of these cornerstones of our democracy. Readers can read an earlier article by Dan that was published in the Winter 2010 issue of the journal, entitled, “Educating Politicians as Playwrights: Toward a Sustainable World in Creative Conflict.”
1Department of Education, Office for Civil Rights, Civil Rights Data Collection, available at http://ocrdata.ed.gov/.
2Bridge, B.J., Curtis, L.E., Oakley,N., “No Single Source, No Simple Solution: Why We Should Broaden Our Perspective of the School-to-Prison-Pipeline and Look to the Court in Redirecting Youth from It,” Journal of Educational Controversy, Fall 2012/Winter2013.
3Gebhard, A., “Schools, Prisons and Aboriginal Youth: Making Connections,” Journal of Educational Controversy, Fall 2012/Winter2013.
An Editorial Preview of Upcoming Issue
The School-to-Prison Pipeline stands as a direct contradiction to the vision of the public school as an institution for promoting and sustaining a democratic republic. Each year thousands of students are funneled through the public schools into the juvenile justice system as a result of school policies and practices that increasingly criminalize students rather than educate them. Most are students of color, students with disabilities, and students from impoverished neighborhoods. How and why this is happening is the focus of this issue of the Journal of Educational Controversy.
Research indicates that both the number of school suspensions and expulsions have increased dramatically as well as the kind of behaviors and infractions that result in suspensions and expulsions. Data from the United States Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights indicate that over three million students are suspended and over 100,000 students are expelled each year. 1 This rate has almost doubled in the past thirty years. Research also shows a relationship among expulsions, suspensions and school dropouts and subsequent involvement in the juvenile justice system. According to national figures, “high school dropouts are three and one-half times more likely than high school graduates to be arrested, and more than eight times as likely to be incarcerated.”2
Zero-tolerance policies, the overuse of school discipline and juvenile court referrals, exclusionary discipline policies, excessive policing in schools, the criminalization of disability-related behaviors, and pressures and abuse from the high-stakes testing environment are often cited as contributing factors. Together these policies and practices have resulted in the violation of three of our most basic democratic principles:
1. Right to an Education
2. Right to Non-Discrimination
3. Right to Due Process
The disruptions and denial of education as a result of suspensions, expulsions and exclusionary disciplinary policies have threatened the right to an education, especially when students are given indefinite expulsions without recourse to an alternative education route. The disproportionate impact on different student populations, especially on students of color and students with disabilities and emotional problems, has resulted in discriminatory treatment. And the process that often funnels students from the public school into the juvenile justice system often violates fundamental due process procedures. Most important, if the philosopher and educator, John Dewey, was correct in his theory that children learn what they experience, what are these school policies and practices teaching our children about the fundamental principles of our democracy?
A reconstructed example illustrates all three violations. A young student of color in an urban school in an impoverished neighborhood is confronted by a police resource officer in the hallway. Suddenly the young student finds himself in handcuffs and arrested for speaking back and for defiant and disrespectful behavior. Infractions that would have been treated as a school disciplinary incident have now become a criminal act. This often results when the concepts of school discipline and criminal acts are not clearly defined in a school policy, and the role of school administrators and police resource officers are not clearly distinguished. The role of police is to ensure safety and stop criminal acts, not to discipline students for breaking school rules. Are these misunderstandings that result in criminal arrest due to a lack in the training of school resource officers in cultural differences and a failure to understand the special needs of adolescent development? How aware is the student of his or her rights to due process at this point. How will this experience lead to school alienation and future dropout? What has this incident taught the student about our democratic principles? The complexity of any specific incident has led many authors in our issue to talk about a “persistent nexus or a web of intertwined, punitive threads” rather than a simple pipeline that our young people get caught up in.3
The purpose of this issue of the journal is to bring awareness and understanding to this complex nexus of events. The issue is going online at a very opportune moment. The United States Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Human Rights held its first ever hearing on the school-to-prison pipeline on December 12, 2012, an event that brought national attention to the problem. In this issue, our authors complement the testimony that was given at the hearing with a deeper, multidimensional analysis.
The following controversy was posed for authors to address:
The School to Prison Pipeline refers to a national trend in which school policies and practices are increasingly resulting in criminalizing students rather than educating them. Statistics indicate that the number of suspensions, expulsions, dropouts or “pushouts,” and juvenile justice confinements is growing. Moreover, there is a disproportionate impact on students of color and students with disabilities and emotional problems. In this issue, we invite authors to examine the policy implications, the political ramifications, and the causes and possible solutions to this problem. Moreover, what are these policies teaching our children?
There are five different sections.
Section 1 includes authors’ responses to the controversy itself and covers multiple perspectives and dimensions of the problem.
Section 2 looks at other related pipelines like the “School to Deportation” Pipeline.
Section 3, entitled, “From Theory To Activism: Perspectives from Youth Advocacy Groups In Washington State,” brings together a description of the activism and recommendations by groups in the trenches who have been trying to dismantle the school-to-prison pipeline. The groups include the Center for Children and Youth Justice, Team Child, the League of Education Voters and the Washington State Education Ombudsman, an office that may be the first of its kind in the nation.
Section 4 provides the reader with a video of an interview with one of our authors. Justice Bobbe Bridge, former justice of the Washington State Supreme Court, who started the Center for Children and Youth Justice, discusses a more proactive approach that the courts can use to reach young people who are truant and disengaged from the school before they enter the school-to-prison pipeline. We have also inserted a video from an earlier forum that the journal sponsored in which Rose Spidell, an attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union of Washington, talks about the cases that have come to the ACLU and the actions that were taken. In the near future, we will put online other video interviews with our authors. The videos can be accessed by clicking on the “Authors Talk” link on the journal’s menu.
We finally conclude in Section 5 with three book reviews on the subject.
I want to thank my guest co-editor, Daniel Larner, for all his work in helping to conceptualize this issue and select the included papers from our many submissions. Dan is a professor at the Fairhaven College of Interdisciplinary Studies at Western Washington University and has been a longtime member of the ACLU Board of Directors in Washington State. In addition to his courses in theatre arts, Dan also teaches courses in civil liberties at the college. His editorial reflects his own unique perspective on this topic from a lifetime devoted to promoting civil liberties and teaching young people to understand the meanings and significance of these cornerstones of our democracy. Readers can read an earlier article by Dan that was published in the Winter 2010 issue of the journal, entitled, “Educating Politicians as Playwrights: Toward a Sustainable World in Creative Conflict.”
1Department of Education, Office for Civil Rights, Civil Rights Data Collection, available at http://ocrdata.ed.gov/.
2Bridge, B.J., Curtis, L.E., Oakley,N., “No Single Source, No Simple Solution: Why We Should Broaden Our Perspective of the School-to-Prison-Pipeline and Look to the Court in Redirecting Youth from It,” Journal of Educational Controversy, Fall 2012/Winter2013.
3Gebhard, A., “Schools, Prisons and Aboriginal Youth: Making Connections,” Journal of Educational Controversy, Fall 2012/Winter2013.
Friday, February 8, 2013
A Look at Today’s Immigration Policy Debate within the Context of U.S. Immigration Legislative History
Editor: As we mentioned in our earlier post, we have supplemented our upcoming issue on the school-to-prison pipeline with a section on the school-to-deportation pipeline. Warren Blumenfeld, Associate Professor at Iowa State University, has just published the article below on the Education Liberation Listserv and has given his permission to circulate it. In his article, Professor Blumenfeld helps us to see the current debate within a larger context of U.S. immigration legislative history.
“Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free;
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore,
Send these, the homeless,
Tempest-tossed to me.
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!...”
Like the noble words from Emma Lazarus’s sonnet “The New Colossus” engraved on a bronze plague affixed to the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty, these sentiments express a foundational tenet on which the United States itself stands. In direct contradiction to this sentiment, however, immigration policy has not lived up to these guiding principles, based instead on essentialist and stereotypical notions of race, ethnicity, and religion.
In the current national debates over immigration reform, in its January 30, 2013 editorial, for example, the conservative National Review referred to “Hispanics” as “hostile to free enterprise,” and “[t]hey are disproportionately low-income and disproportionately likely to receive some form of government support. More than half of Hispanic births are out of wedlock.”
These racially- and ethnically-charged representations of minoritized people perpetuate a long and dishonorable tradition of preventing “the huddled masses to breathe free.”
We need to keep in mind that the notion of “race” is socially constructed. The concept of “race” arose concurrently with the advent of European exploration as a justification and rationale for conquest and domination of the globe beginning around the 15th century of the Common Era. Though “race” is a human-imposed invention, however, its implications have far reaching consequences impacting individuals and groups in profound ways.
While given the option of living in peaceful co-existence, European invaders stepped upon this land guided by the conviction that Providence destined them to expand from Atlantic to Pacific (from “sea to shining sea”) led by the so-called Anglo-Saxon “race.” This they used as justification in their unquenchable thirst for land ultimately resulting in their forced removal and physical and cultural genocide of indigenous peoples, and an unjustified imperialist-inspired war with Mexico.
“This continent,” a congressman declared, “was intended by Providence as a vast theatre on which to work out the grand experiment of Republican government, under the auspices of the Anglo-Saxon race” (quoted in Takaki, 1993, p. 176).
The Puritans fled England for the “New World” to practice their “Purer” form of Christianity, believing God had chosen them to form “a biblical commonwealth,” which would not tolerate any separation of “church and state,” or, indeed, any religious beliefs outside their own.
The newly constituted United States Congress passed the Naturalization Act in 1790 excluding all nonwhites from citizenship, including Asians, enslaved Africans, and American Indians, the latter whom they defined in oxymoronic terms as “domestic foreigners,” even though they had inhabited this land for an estimated 35,000 years. The Congress refused to grant American Indians rights of citizenship until 1924 with the passage of the Indian Citizenship Act, though it continued to deny Asians naturalized citizenship status.
Protestant American “Nativist” prejudices against Irish Catholics escalated in the mid-1850s when the so-called “Know Nothing” movement attempted to prevent Catholics from ascending to public office. After 1860, Irish were met with “HELP WANTED: IRISH NEED NOT APPLY” signs hanging in store windows.
Congress passed the first law specifically restricting or excluding immigrants on the basis of “race” and nationality in 1882. Attempting to eliminate entry of Chinese (and other Asian) workers who often competed for jobs with U.S. citizens, especially in the western United States, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act to constrict their entry into the U.S. for a 10-year period, while denying citizenship to Chinese people already on these shores. The Act also made it illegal for Chinese people to marry white or black U.S.-Americans.
The editor of a newspaper in Butte, Montana summarized the exclusionist sentiment regarding the Chinese held by many U.S. citizens: “The Chinaman’s life is not our life, his religion is not our religion….He belongs not in Butte” (Swartout, 1992, p. 78).
The Immigration Act of 1917 further prohibited immigration from Asian countries, in the terms of the law, the “barred zone,” including parts of China, India, Siam, Burma, Asiatic Russian, the Polynesian Islands, and parts of Afghanistan.
Fearing a continued influx of immigrants, legislators in the U.S. Congress in 1924 enacted an anti-immigration law (Origins Quota Act, or National Origins Act) setting restrictive quotas of immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe, specifically Poles, Italians, Greeks, and Slaves (so-called “PIGS” groups viewed as representing Europe’s lower “races”), including Jews (the later referred to as members of the so-called “Hebrew race,” considered the lowest of all the European “races”). The law, however, permitted large allocations of immigrants from Great Britain and Germany.
In addition, the law included a clause prohibiting entry of “aliens ineligible to citizenship,” which was veiled language referring to Japanese and other Asians dating back to the Naturalization Act of 1790 restricting citizenship to only “white” people and affirmed by a 1922 U. S. Supreme Court ruling (Takao Ozawa v United States) in which the government denied Takao Ozawa, a Japanese immigrant, the right to become a naturalized citizen because he “clearly” was “not Caucasian.”
Congress, in 1939, refused to pass an emergency measure, the Wagner-Rogers Act, which would have permitted entry of 20,000 children, primarily Jewish, from Eastern Europe over existing quotas. According to Laura Deleno Houghteling, cousin of F.D.R. and wife of the U.S. commissioner of immigration, who spoke out against the proposed legislation: “20,000 charming children would, all too soon, grow into 20,000 ugly adults.”
The 1952 the McCarran-Walters Act overturned the 1924 law. Later, framed as an amendment to McCarran-Walters, the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 removed “natural origins” as the basis for U.S. immigration. The 1965 law increased immigration from Asian and Latin American countries and religious backgrounds.
Horace Kallen, a Jewish immigrant and sociologist of Polish and Latvian heritage coined the term “cultural pluralism” to challenge the image of the so-called “melting pot,” which he considered inherently undemocratic. Kallen envisioned a United States in the image of a great symphony orchestra, not sounding in unison (the “melting pot”), but rather, one in which all the disparate cultures play in harmony and retain their unique and distinctive tones and timbres.
Returning to today, if we learn anything from our immigration legislative history, we can view the current debates as providing a great opportunity to pass comprehensive federal reform based not on “race,” nationality, ethnicity, religion, or other social identity categories, but rather, on humane principles of fairness, compassion, and equity. We have a wonderful chance now to avoid the mistakes of the past and finally to “lift [the] lamp beside the golden door!”
References:
Swartout, R. R., Jr. (1992). From Kwangtung to the big sky: The Chinese experience in frontier Montana. In R. R. Swartout, Jr. & H. W. Fritz (Eds.), Montana heritage: An anthology of historical essays (pp. 63-82). Helena: Montana Historical Society.
Takaki, R. (1993). A different mirror: A history of multicultural America. Boston: Little Brown.
Warren J. Blumenfeld is author of Warren’s Words: Smart Commentary on Social Justice (Purple Press); editor of Homophobia: How We All Pay the Price (Beacon Press), and co-editor of Readings for Diversity and Social Justice (Routledge) and Investigating Christian Privilege and Religious Oppression in the United States (Sense).
Permission granted to forward, post, or publish this commentary: warrenblumenfeld@gmail.com
Immigration and Racism
By Warren Blumenfeld
Ohio State University
“Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free;
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore,
Send these, the homeless,
Tempest-tossed to me.
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!...”
Like the noble words from Emma Lazarus’s sonnet “The New Colossus” engraved on a bronze plague affixed to the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty, these sentiments express a foundational tenet on which the United States itself stands. In direct contradiction to this sentiment, however, immigration policy has not lived up to these guiding principles, based instead on essentialist and stereotypical notions of race, ethnicity, and religion.
In the current national debates over immigration reform, in its January 30, 2013 editorial, for example, the conservative National Review referred to “Hispanics” as “hostile to free enterprise,” and “[t]hey are disproportionately low-income and disproportionately likely to receive some form of government support. More than half of Hispanic births are out of wedlock.”
These racially- and ethnically-charged representations of minoritized people perpetuate a long and dishonorable tradition of preventing “the huddled masses to breathe free.”
We need to keep in mind that the notion of “race” is socially constructed. The concept of “race” arose concurrently with the advent of European exploration as a justification and rationale for conquest and domination of the globe beginning around the 15th century of the Common Era. Though “race” is a human-imposed invention, however, its implications have far reaching consequences impacting individuals and groups in profound ways.
While given the option of living in peaceful co-existence, European invaders stepped upon this land guided by the conviction that Providence destined them to expand from Atlantic to Pacific (from “sea to shining sea”) led by the so-called Anglo-Saxon “race.” This they used as justification in their unquenchable thirst for land ultimately resulting in their forced removal and physical and cultural genocide of indigenous peoples, and an unjustified imperialist-inspired war with Mexico.
“This continent,” a congressman declared, “was intended by Providence as a vast theatre on which to work out the grand experiment of Republican government, under the auspices of the Anglo-Saxon race” (quoted in Takaki, 1993, p. 176).
The Puritans fled England for the “New World” to practice their “Purer” form of Christianity, believing God had chosen them to form “a biblical commonwealth,” which would not tolerate any separation of “church and state,” or, indeed, any religious beliefs outside their own.
The newly constituted United States Congress passed the Naturalization Act in 1790 excluding all nonwhites from citizenship, including Asians, enslaved Africans, and American Indians, the latter whom they defined in oxymoronic terms as “domestic foreigners,” even though they had inhabited this land for an estimated 35,000 years. The Congress refused to grant American Indians rights of citizenship until 1924 with the passage of the Indian Citizenship Act, though it continued to deny Asians naturalized citizenship status.
Protestant American “Nativist” prejudices against Irish Catholics escalated in the mid-1850s when the so-called “Know Nothing” movement attempted to prevent Catholics from ascending to public office. After 1860, Irish were met with “HELP WANTED: IRISH NEED NOT APPLY” signs hanging in store windows.
Congress passed the first law specifically restricting or excluding immigrants on the basis of “race” and nationality in 1882. Attempting to eliminate entry of Chinese (and other Asian) workers who often competed for jobs with U.S. citizens, especially in the western United States, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act to constrict their entry into the U.S. for a 10-year period, while denying citizenship to Chinese people already on these shores. The Act also made it illegal for Chinese people to marry white or black U.S.-Americans.
The editor of a newspaper in Butte, Montana summarized the exclusionist sentiment regarding the Chinese held by many U.S. citizens: “The Chinaman’s life is not our life, his religion is not our religion….He belongs not in Butte” (Swartout, 1992, p. 78).
The Immigration Act of 1917 further prohibited immigration from Asian countries, in the terms of the law, the “barred zone,” including parts of China, India, Siam, Burma, Asiatic Russian, the Polynesian Islands, and parts of Afghanistan.
Fearing a continued influx of immigrants, legislators in the U.S. Congress in 1924 enacted an anti-immigration law (Origins Quota Act, or National Origins Act) setting restrictive quotas of immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe, specifically Poles, Italians, Greeks, and Slaves (so-called “PIGS” groups viewed as representing Europe’s lower “races”), including Jews (the later referred to as members of the so-called “Hebrew race,” considered the lowest of all the European “races”). The law, however, permitted large allocations of immigrants from Great Britain and Germany.
In addition, the law included a clause prohibiting entry of “aliens ineligible to citizenship,” which was veiled language referring to Japanese and other Asians dating back to the Naturalization Act of 1790 restricting citizenship to only “white” people and affirmed by a 1922 U. S. Supreme Court ruling (Takao Ozawa v United States) in which the government denied Takao Ozawa, a Japanese immigrant, the right to become a naturalized citizen because he “clearly” was “not Caucasian.”
Congress, in 1939, refused to pass an emergency measure, the Wagner-Rogers Act, which would have permitted entry of 20,000 children, primarily Jewish, from Eastern Europe over existing quotas. According to Laura Deleno Houghteling, cousin of F.D.R. and wife of the U.S. commissioner of immigration, who spoke out against the proposed legislation: “20,000 charming children would, all too soon, grow into 20,000 ugly adults.”
The 1952 the McCarran-Walters Act overturned the 1924 law. Later, framed as an amendment to McCarran-Walters, the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 removed “natural origins” as the basis for U.S. immigration. The 1965 law increased immigration from Asian and Latin American countries and religious backgrounds.
Horace Kallen, a Jewish immigrant and sociologist of Polish and Latvian heritage coined the term “cultural pluralism” to challenge the image of the so-called “melting pot,” which he considered inherently undemocratic. Kallen envisioned a United States in the image of a great symphony orchestra, not sounding in unison (the “melting pot”), but rather, one in which all the disparate cultures play in harmony and retain their unique and distinctive tones and timbres.
Returning to today, if we learn anything from our immigration legislative history, we can view the current debates as providing a great opportunity to pass comprehensive federal reform based not on “race,” nationality, ethnicity, religion, or other social identity categories, but rather, on humane principles of fairness, compassion, and equity. We have a wonderful chance now to avoid the mistakes of the past and finally to “lift [the] lamp beside the golden door!”
References:
Swartout, R. R., Jr. (1992). From Kwangtung to the big sky: The Chinese experience in frontier Montana. In R. R. Swartout, Jr. & H. W. Fritz (Eds.), Montana heritage: An anthology of historical essays (pp. 63-82). Helena: Montana Historical Society.
Takaki, R. (1993). A different mirror: A history of multicultural America. Boston: Little Brown.
Warren J. Blumenfeld is author of Warren’s Words: Smart Commentary on Social Justice (Purple Press); editor of Homophobia: How We All Pay the Price (Beacon Press), and co-editor of Readings for Diversity and Social Justice (Routledge) and Investigating Christian Privilege and Religious Oppression in the United States (Sense).
Permission granted to forward, post, or publish this commentary: warrenblumenfeld@gmail.com
Monday, January 14, 2013
Journal of Educational Controversy to Take Part in MLK Activities
The Journal of Educational Controversy will be participating in the Martin Luther King, Jr. Human Rights Conference here in Bellingham, Washington. The conference is an annual event sponsored by the Whatcom Human Rights Task Force that is now part of the Whatcom Peace and Justice Center. It will take place at the Whatcom Community College on Saturday, January 19, 2013. The theme of the conference this year is: “Gaining a Voice in a Democracy: Tools for Empowerment.” Our session will complicate the vision of the American school as an institution for gaining a voice in our democracy by looking at the contradictions posed by our upcoming issue on the school-to-prison pipeline. The session will be facilitated by editor, Lorraine Kasprisin, and author, Maria Timmons Flores. Professor Flores will discuss her paper, “A DREAM Deported: What Undocumented American Youth Need their Schools to Understand.” A section on the “School-to-Deportation Pipeline” will supplement articles on the “School-to-Prison Pipeline” in the issue. Our session will provide the political and legal context of the problems, causes and possible solutions, along with suggestions on what schools can do. Young students will join us to talk about their lived experiences, the messages they hear, and the barriers and bridges that drive them one way or another.
Other events honoring the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr. in Bellingham include:
Providing a context for this national day of remembrance, Professor Nolet writes:
Other events honoring the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr. in Bellingham include:
A free breakfast at Bellingham High School at 10 a.m.; Rosalinda Guillen, director of Community to Community Development, will be the featured speaker on Jan 21.Readers can read an excellent article, “Martin Luther King’s Legacy: Gaining a Voice in Democracy” by Victor Nolet, Professor at Western Washington University and member of the Whatcom Human Rights Task Force Planning Committee at the website of the Bellingham Herald.
Poverty Action March begins at 11 am at Bellingham High School on Jan. 21. (The march is inspired by the 1968 Poor People’s March on Washington D.C. that was being planned by Dr. King and others, only months before his assassination, to bring attention to economic and social disparities for Americans living in poverty.)
Service projects include a Read-In at Village Books, painting at the Boys and Girls Club and volunteering to support the elderly through the Chore Program.
Tangled Web Conference on Race, Immigration, Poverty and Prisons; Western Washington University, Jan. 17-18.
Martin Luther King Conference, Whatcom Community College, Jan. 19.
Providing a context for this national day of remembrance, Professor Nolet writes:
Imagine a year in which you are invited to the White House to meet with a sitting president, your daughter is born, you are arrested and placed in solitary confinement, you deliver a historic and nationally televised speech, and you are named person of the year by Time Magazine. That was Martin Luther King’s year in 1963! In 1963, at the age of just 34, Martin Luther King was considered by many to be the moral leader of the Civil Rights movement. He was an ordained clergyman, a gifted orator, a labor activist, and an accomplished scholar with a doctorate from Boston University. He also was considered by many to be a revolutionary, a radical, and according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, an enemy of the United States. By all accounts, Martin Luther King was a complicated and controversial figure.To read the entire article, go to: http://www.bellinghamherald.com/2013/01/13/2824796/mlk-legacy-gaining-a-voice-in.html
Thursday, January 10, 2013
Testimony at U.S. Senate Hearing Links High-Stakes Testing to the School-to-Prison Pipeline
Editor: In a post below we announced that the U.S. Senate had planned to hold hearings on the school-to-prison pipeline problem. Monty Neill, Executive Director of the National Center for Fair & Open Testing (FairTest), argued at the hearing that high-stakes testing has been a contributing factor leading to the school-to-prison pipeline. Below is his testimony. Watch for our upcoming issue on the topic in the Journal of Educational Controversy.
FairTest ____ National Center for Fair & Open Testing
P.O. Box 300204
Jamaica Plain, MA 02130
December 10, 2012
U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary
Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Human Rights
224 Dirksen Senate Office Building
Washington, D.C. 20510
Re: Hearing on Ending the School-to-Prison Pipeline
Dear Chairman Durbin, Ranking Minority Member Graham, and Members of the Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Human Rights:
Thank you for the invitation to submit testimony for the subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Human Rights of the Senate Committee on the Judiciary hearing on ending the school-to-prison pipeline.
My name is Monty Neill, and I am Executive Director of the National Center for Fair & Open Testing (FairTest). FairTest advances quality education and equal opportunity by promoting fair, open, valid and educationally beneficial evaluations of students, teachers and schools. FairTest also works to end misused and flawed testing practices that impede those goals. We place special emphasis on eliminating the racial, class, gender, and cultural barriers to equal opportunity posed by standardized tests.
As part of its mission, FairTest has addressed how the high-stakes uses of standardized tests, particularly as a result of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), have led to increased disciplinary sanctions against students. This has disproportionately affected students of color, students with disabilities, and those from low-income families and communities. High-stakes tests are those that play the sole or primary role in educational decisions, such as determining high-school graduation or school sanctions under NCLB (FairTest, 2004, 2012).
Zero tolerance discipline and high-stakes testing policies have similar philosophical underpinnings and similarly destructive results. Both stem from a 1980s movement to impose more punitive policies in criminal justice and public education. Together, they have helped turn schools into hostile environments for many students. The result is a “school-to-prison pipeline,” in which large numbers of students are pushed out of school and into the juvenile and criminal justice systems. Too many young people end up in prison, at a cost many times greater than that of a good education. It is a senseless waste of resources and human potential, damaging to both individuals and society.
How does high-stakes testing contribute to the pipeline?
High-stakes testing turns many classrooms and schools into test prep centers rather than offering rich, engaging, well-rounded instruction. Narrow, rote instruction bores and alienates students. Many tune out, feeling they are little more than their scores (FairTest, 2004), and leave school. In addition, exit exams result in many thousands of students leaving high school without diplomas (FairTest, 2008). These tests have been found to lower graduation rates without improving the quality of education (Hout & Elliot, 2011). Some students see no realistic option other than dropping out. Others fail the tests or are deliberately pushed out to manipulate school performance statistics. Regardless of which specific cause, young people who leave or are pushed out are much more likely to end up in trouble or in prison.
Tests and zero tolerance work hand in glove.
NCLB has raised the stakes attached to test results, especially in urban, low-income districts, which face severe sanctions for failure to boost test scores. Zero tolerance imposes harsh penalties for nonviolent infractions, some as harmless as drawing on desks with erasable markers (Herbert, 2010). It provides a pretext for removing low-scoring students and improving a school’s test score bottom line. The superintendent of the El Paso public schools was convicted and imprisoned for initiating district policies to remove low-scoring students from school (Fernandez, 2012). In Florida, researchers found schools gave low-scoring students longer suspensions than high-scoring students who committed similar infractions (Figlio, 2003). Zero tolerance and high-stakes testing reinforce each other, creating a downward spiral.
Punitive culture promotes strategies to weed out ‘troublemakers’/low scorers.
The damage to school climate and decreased engagement with school foster problem behaviors, which schools and districts too often counter with zero tolerance discipline. Since NCLB, the use of strategies such as withdrawing students from school rolls or sending them to alternative schools or GED programs has increased. Out-of-school suspensions and expulsions are also on the rise nationally, with startling increases in many states (Advancement Project, 2010).
Students of color and the disabled increasingly bear the brunt.
Racial disparities in student suspensions and expulsions are large and increasing. Black students are more than three times as likely to be suspended (Losen and Gillespie, 2012). Between 2002-03 and 2006-07, expulsions decreased by 2% for white students, but increased 33% for blacks and 6% for Latinos. Similar disparities exist for students with disabilities (SWD). In Ohio, for example, SWDs were twice as likely to be suspended out-of-school as their peers in 2007-08. And in Texas, in 2005-06, students enrolled in special education accounted for 11% of the student population but 26% of all out-of-school suspensions (Advancement Project, 2010). Vastly disproportionate numbers of low-income, racial minority, SWDs and English language learners fail state exit tests and do not obtain diplomas (FairTest, 2009).
Prison populations reflect disparate impact of zero tolerance, testing.
The student groups affected by these policies are more likely to drop out and become caught up in the juvenile justice system, making them more likely to land in prison. People of color and those with disabilities are overrepresented in U.S. prisons. Approximately 8.8% of public school children have been identified as having disabilities that impact their ability to learn, but students with disabilities are represented in jail at a rate nearly four times that (Quinn, 2005). One in nine black males between the ages of 20 and 34 is behind bars, compared to one in 30 for men in that age group in general (Pew, 2008).
To undo the damage: reform assessment, reverse zero tolerance.
Zero tolerance is not working. However, alternative prevention and intervention strategies being implemented around the country have been proven successful. For example, a community push for new discipline policies in Denver Public Schools led to a 63% reduction in referrals to law enforcement and a 43% reduction in out-of-school suspensions (Advancement Project, 2010). tThe New York Performance Standards Consortium (2012), a network of New York high schools that have state permission to use performance tasks instead of standardized tests, reports its 5% suspension rate is less than half the city’s 11%. This success, they conclude, is rooted in using alternatives to standardized tests.
The work of the Judiciary Committee, therefore, could positively influence not only juvenile justice legislation but have a positive impact on the Senate’s reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. We recommend that this Committee, perhaps together with the Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, investigate the ways in which high-stakes testing interacts with overly harsh disciplinary policies to harm young people, undermine school climate and damage educational outcomes. To end the Pipeline, it will be necessary to also end the overuse and misuse of standardized tests.
I would be pleased to discuss these issues with you further. I can be reached at 617-477-9792 or by email at monty@fairtest.org.
Thank you.
Monty Neill, Ed.D.
Executive Director
FairTest
References
Advancement Project (2010). Test, Punish, and Push Out: How “Zero Tolerance” and High-Stakes Testing Funnel Youth Into the School-to-Prison Pipeline. http://www.advancementproject.org/resources/entry/test-punish-and-push-out-how-zero-tolerance-and-high-stakes-testing-funnel
Advancement Project, Education Law Center – PA, FairTest, The Forum for Education and Democracy, Juvenile Law Center, NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. (2010). Federal Policy, ESEA Reauthorization, and the School-to-Prison Pipeline. http://www.fairtest.org/position-paper-nclb-and-school-prison-pipeline.
FairTest (2004). Failing Our Children: How "No Child Left Behind" Undermines Quality and Equity in Education; An Accountability Model that Supports School Improvement. http://www.fairtest.org/node/1778
FairTest (2008). Why Graduation Tests/Exit Exams Fail to Add Value to High School Diplomas. http://www.fairtest.org/gradtestfactmay08
FairTest (2009). What’s Wrong with Graduation and Promotion Tests. http://www.fairtest.org/whats-wrong-graduation-and-promotion-tests
FairTest (2012). NCLB’s Lost Decade for Educational Progress: What Can We Learn from this Policy Failure? http://fairtest.org/NCLB-lost-decade-report-home Fernandez, M. (October 13, 2012). “El Paso Schools Confront Scandal of Students Who ‘Disappeared’ at Test Time,” The New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/14/education/el-paso-rattled-by-scandal-of-disappeared-students.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
Figlio, D. (2003, November). “Testing, crime and punishment.” Gainesville: University of Florida. http://bear.cba.ufl.edu/figlio/.
Losen, D., and Gillespie, J (2012). Opportunities Suspended: The Disparate Impact of Disciplinary Exclusion from School. The Civil Rights Project. http://www.otlcampaign.org/sites/default/files/resources/opportunity-suspended-center-civil-rights-remedies-aug-2012.pdf.
Neill, M. (June 18, 2010) “A Better Way to Assess Students and Evaluate Schools.” Education Week. Available at http://www.fairtest.org/sites/default/files/better-way-to-assess-EdWeek6-18-10.pdf.
Herbert, B. (March 5, 2010). “Cops vs. Kids,” The New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/06/opinion/06herbert.html
Hout, M. & Elliott, S., Editors (2011). Incentives and Test-Based Accountability in
Education. Committee on Incentives and Test-Based Accountability in Public Education;
National Research Council. Available online at http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=12521
The Pew Center on the States (2008). One in 100: Behind bars in America 2008, 5. http://www.pewcenteronthestates.org/uploadedFiles/8015PCTS_Prison08_FINAL_2-1-1_FORWEB.pdf
Quinn, M., et al. (2005). Youth with Disabilities in Juvenile Corrections: A National Survey, Council for Exceptional Children. Vol 71, No. 3, pp. 339-345. http://www.helpinggangyouth.com/disability-best_corrections_survey.pdf
FairTest ____ National Center for Fair & Open Testing
P.O. Box 300204
Jamaica Plain, MA 02130
December 10, 2012
U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary
Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Human Rights
224 Dirksen Senate Office Building
Washington, D.C. 20510
Re: Hearing on Ending the School-to-Prison Pipeline
Dear Chairman Durbin, Ranking Minority Member Graham, and Members of the Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Human Rights:
Thank you for the invitation to submit testimony for the subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Human Rights of the Senate Committee on the Judiciary hearing on ending the school-to-prison pipeline.
My name is Monty Neill, and I am Executive Director of the National Center for Fair & Open Testing (FairTest). FairTest advances quality education and equal opportunity by promoting fair, open, valid and educationally beneficial evaluations of students, teachers and schools. FairTest also works to end misused and flawed testing practices that impede those goals. We place special emphasis on eliminating the racial, class, gender, and cultural barriers to equal opportunity posed by standardized tests.
As part of its mission, FairTest has addressed how the high-stakes uses of standardized tests, particularly as a result of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), have led to increased disciplinary sanctions against students. This has disproportionately affected students of color, students with disabilities, and those from low-income families and communities. High-stakes tests are those that play the sole or primary role in educational decisions, such as determining high-school graduation or school sanctions under NCLB (FairTest, 2004, 2012).
Zero tolerance discipline and high-stakes testing policies have similar philosophical underpinnings and similarly destructive results. Both stem from a 1980s movement to impose more punitive policies in criminal justice and public education. Together, they have helped turn schools into hostile environments for many students. The result is a “school-to-prison pipeline,” in which large numbers of students are pushed out of school and into the juvenile and criminal justice systems. Too many young people end up in prison, at a cost many times greater than that of a good education. It is a senseless waste of resources and human potential, damaging to both individuals and society.
How does high-stakes testing contribute to the pipeline?
High-stakes testing turns many classrooms and schools into test prep centers rather than offering rich, engaging, well-rounded instruction. Narrow, rote instruction bores and alienates students. Many tune out, feeling they are little more than their scores (FairTest, 2004), and leave school. In addition, exit exams result in many thousands of students leaving high school without diplomas (FairTest, 2008). These tests have been found to lower graduation rates without improving the quality of education (Hout & Elliot, 2011). Some students see no realistic option other than dropping out. Others fail the tests or are deliberately pushed out to manipulate school performance statistics. Regardless of which specific cause, young people who leave or are pushed out are much more likely to end up in trouble or in prison.
Tests and zero tolerance work hand in glove.
NCLB has raised the stakes attached to test results, especially in urban, low-income districts, which face severe sanctions for failure to boost test scores. Zero tolerance imposes harsh penalties for nonviolent infractions, some as harmless as drawing on desks with erasable markers (Herbert, 2010). It provides a pretext for removing low-scoring students and improving a school’s test score bottom line. The superintendent of the El Paso public schools was convicted and imprisoned for initiating district policies to remove low-scoring students from school (Fernandez, 2012). In Florida, researchers found schools gave low-scoring students longer suspensions than high-scoring students who committed similar infractions (Figlio, 2003). Zero tolerance and high-stakes testing reinforce each other, creating a downward spiral.
Punitive culture promotes strategies to weed out ‘troublemakers’/low scorers.
The damage to school climate and decreased engagement with school foster problem behaviors, which schools and districts too often counter with zero tolerance discipline. Since NCLB, the use of strategies such as withdrawing students from school rolls or sending them to alternative schools or GED programs has increased. Out-of-school suspensions and expulsions are also on the rise nationally, with startling increases in many states (Advancement Project, 2010).
Students of color and the disabled increasingly bear the brunt.
Racial disparities in student suspensions and expulsions are large and increasing. Black students are more than three times as likely to be suspended (Losen and Gillespie, 2012). Between 2002-03 and 2006-07, expulsions decreased by 2% for white students, but increased 33% for blacks and 6% for Latinos. Similar disparities exist for students with disabilities (SWD). In Ohio, for example, SWDs were twice as likely to be suspended out-of-school as their peers in 2007-08. And in Texas, in 2005-06, students enrolled in special education accounted for 11% of the student population but 26% of all out-of-school suspensions (Advancement Project, 2010). Vastly disproportionate numbers of low-income, racial minority, SWDs and English language learners fail state exit tests and do not obtain diplomas (FairTest, 2009).
Prison populations reflect disparate impact of zero tolerance, testing.
The student groups affected by these policies are more likely to drop out and become caught up in the juvenile justice system, making them more likely to land in prison. People of color and those with disabilities are overrepresented in U.S. prisons. Approximately 8.8% of public school children have been identified as having disabilities that impact their ability to learn, but students with disabilities are represented in jail at a rate nearly four times that (Quinn, 2005). One in nine black males between the ages of 20 and 34 is behind bars, compared to one in 30 for men in that age group in general (Pew, 2008).
To undo the damage: reform assessment, reverse zero tolerance.
Zero tolerance is not working. However, alternative prevention and intervention strategies being implemented around the country have been proven successful. For example, a community push for new discipline policies in Denver Public Schools led to a 63% reduction in referrals to law enforcement and a 43% reduction in out-of-school suspensions (Advancement Project, 2010). tThe New York Performance Standards Consortium (2012), a network of New York high schools that have state permission to use performance tasks instead of standardized tests, reports its 5% suspension rate is less than half the city’s 11%. This success, they conclude, is rooted in using alternatives to standardized tests.
The work of the Judiciary Committee, therefore, could positively influence not only juvenile justice legislation but have a positive impact on the Senate’s reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. We recommend that this Committee, perhaps together with the Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, investigate the ways in which high-stakes testing interacts with overly harsh disciplinary policies to harm young people, undermine school climate and damage educational outcomes. To end the Pipeline, it will be necessary to also end the overuse and misuse of standardized tests.
I would be pleased to discuss these issues with you further. I can be reached at 617-477-9792 or by email at monty@fairtest.org.
Thank you.
Monty Neill, Ed.D.
Executive Director
FairTest
References
Advancement Project (2010). Test, Punish, and Push Out: How “Zero Tolerance” and High-Stakes Testing Funnel Youth Into the School-to-Prison Pipeline. http://www.advancementproject.org/resources/entry/test-punish-and-push-out-how-zero-tolerance-and-high-stakes-testing-funnel
Advancement Project, Education Law Center – PA, FairTest, The Forum for Education and Democracy, Juvenile Law Center, NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. (2010). Federal Policy, ESEA Reauthorization, and the School-to-Prison Pipeline. http://www.fairtest.org/position-paper-nclb-and-school-prison-pipeline.
FairTest (2004). Failing Our Children: How "No Child Left Behind" Undermines Quality and Equity in Education; An Accountability Model that Supports School Improvement. http://www.fairtest.org/node/1778
FairTest (2008). Why Graduation Tests/Exit Exams Fail to Add Value to High School Diplomas. http://www.fairtest.org/gradtestfactmay08
FairTest (2009). What’s Wrong with Graduation and Promotion Tests. http://www.fairtest.org/whats-wrong-graduation-and-promotion-tests
FairTest (2012). NCLB’s Lost Decade for Educational Progress: What Can We Learn from this Policy Failure? http://fairtest.org/NCLB-lost-decade-report-home Fernandez, M. (October 13, 2012). “El Paso Schools Confront Scandal of Students Who ‘Disappeared’ at Test Time,” The New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/14/education/el-paso-rattled-by-scandal-of-disappeared-students.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
Figlio, D. (2003, November). “Testing, crime and punishment.” Gainesville: University of Florida. http://bear.cba.ufl.edu/figlio/.
Losen, D., and Gillespie, J (2012). Opportunities Suspended: The Disparate Impact of Disciplinary Exclusion from School. The Civil Rights Project. http://www.otlcampaign.org/sites/default/files/resources/opportunity-suspended-center-civil-rights-remedies-aug-2012.pdf.
Neill, M. (June 18, 2010) “A Better Way to Assess Students and Evaluate Schools.” Education Week. Available at http://www.fairtest.org/sites/default/files/better-way-to-assess-EdWeek6-18-10.pdf.
Herbert, B. (March 5, 2010). “Cops vs. Kids,” The New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/06/opinion/06herbert.html
Hout, M. & Elliott, S., Editors (2011). Incentives and Test-Based Accountability in
Education. Committee on Incentives and Test-Based Accountability in Public Education;
National Research Council. Available online at http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=12521
The Pew Center on the States (2008). One in 100: Behind bars in America 2008, 5. http://www.pewcenteronthestates.org/uploadedFiles/8015PCTS_Prison08_FINAL_2-1-1_FORWEB.pdf
Quinn, M., et al. (2005). Youth with Disabilities in Juvenile Corrections: A National Survey, Council for Exceptional Children. Vol 71, No. 3, pp. 339-345. http://www.helpinggangyouth.com/disability-best_corrections_survey.pdf
Friday, January 4, 2013
Thoughts for the New Year from Dean Francisco Rios
Editor: We begin the new year with both sorrow and inspiration. The horrific events in Newtown, Connecticut brought a deep sorrow over an inexplicable, senseless act of a violence on innocent children, but it also reminded us of the selfless acts of courage and dedication by those who stepped forth to protect the children. Below is a moving piece from the dean of the Woodring College of Education at Western Washington University that was recently published in our local newspaper, the Bellingham Herald. We thank Dean Francisco Rios for his permission to reprint his reflective thoughts for our readers. Readers can read another article by Dean Rios in the current issue of the Journal of Educational Controversy.
School tragedy shines light on teachers as everyday heroes
by Francisco Rios
After more than 35 years as a teacher, teacher educator and now the dean of Wooding College of Education at Western Washington University, I listened with sorrow and dismay to the details as they emerged from the terrible tragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn.
I sent a difficult-to-compose notice to our faculty and staff asking that they take a moment to reflect, in the way they best believe, on the horrific events and the pain being felt by bereaved families and a devastated community. I welcomed the moment of silence offered by Western President Bruce Shepard on Saturday during commencement to honor those whose lives had been taken needlessly and unexpectedly. I was deeply moved as I listened to President Obama's compassionate message to an interfaith gathering on Sunday in Newtown, looking for hope in the nearly hopeless.
Something deeply profound happens in the consciousness of the nation whenever these catastrophic events occur. But this was different in that it included the lives of 20 six- and seven-year-old children, each shot multiple times. Nothing will take away from the heart-breaking loss of young people who died before much of their lives had begun.
In returning to work in the college on Monday, I was thinking about the murder of these children and adults, and its implications for our work as students, staff and faculty in a college of education. Perhaps more than any other academic unit on a university campus, we feel compelled to respond because our work is centered on children and adolescents in families, schools and communities.
With the pain of loss of children in the forefront of our minds, I also thought about the six education professionals whose lives were also lost: two teachers (Lauren Rousseau and Victoria Soto), two teachers' aides (Rachel D'Avino and Anne Marie Murphy), a school counselor (Mary Sherlach) and the school principal (Dawn Lafferty Hochsprung). These are the roles we prepare individuals to assume, the work we undertake most closely and directly.
The people who choose to come into a profession where service to children and adolescents is a guiding light inspire us day in and day out. We know that they learn how to write lesson plans, organize classrooms, create assessments and modify instruction accordingly. But we also work diligently to ensure that they foster positive relationships with children and their caregivers. We ask them to regard classrooms, and the teaching/learning that occurs there, as sacred places. We teach them about the importance of being good stewards of the school, the local community and the profession. We foster an understanding that we are not just teachers, administrators, human service professionals and counselors - but our work is central to the very vitality of our nation's democracy as we pursue the broad public purposes of education: an informed and engaged citizenry.
Teachers are often thought of as "unforgotten heroes." As we grieve and mourn the tragic deaths of 20 children whose lives gave meaning to a community, let us not forget the courage and commitment of these six who were acting heroically to carry out their work as education professionals. Let us not forget the teachers who calmed their students and ushered them out of the school and into safety. We do so by ensuring that teachers who grace classrooms in our own local communities, states and a grieving nation are recognized for who they are: the forgotten heroes.
Francisco Rios is dean of Woodring College of Education at Western Washington University.
Read more here: http://www.bellinghamherald.com/2013/01/03/2821815/school-tragedy-shines-light-on.html#storylink=cpy
Monday, December 10, 2012
Journal's Upcoming Issue on the School -to-Prison Pipeline will be the Topic of Hearing by the U.S. Senate
As our readers know, the next issue of the Journal of Educational Controversy will focus on the School-to-Prison Pipeline. We posed the following controversy in the issue:
This may be the first Congressional hearing to investigate the growing increase in the number of students who are being funneled out of the public schools and into the juvenile justice system. Our upcoming issue of the journal will examine some of the possible causes and solutions to the problem and will include a video interview with former Washington State Supreme Court Justice, Bobbe Bridge, who started the Center for Children and Youth Justice, after leaving the Court.
We invite readers who attend the congressional hearing in Washington, DC to share their insights with us on the blog.
The School to Prison Pipeline refers to a national trend in which school policies and practices are increasingly resulting in criminalizing students rather than educating them. Statistics indicate that the number of suspensions, expulsions, dropouts or “pushouts,” and juvenile justice confinements is growing. Moreover, there is a disproportionate impact on students of color and students with disabilities and emotional problems. In this issue, we invite authors to examine the policy implications, the political ramifications, and the causes and possible solutions to this problem. Moreover, what are these policies teaching our children?We have just learned that Assistant Majority Leader Dick Durbin (D-IL), Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Human Rights, has announced he would hold a hearing on the school-to-prison pipeline this Wednesday, December 12, 2012. The focus will be on the overuse of school discipline and juvenile court referrals. It will take place at 2:00pm (ET) in Room 226 at the Dirksen Senate Office Building in Washington, D.C.
This may be the first Congressional hearing to investigate the growing increase in the number of students who are being funneled out of the public schools and into the juvenile justice system. Our upcoming issue of the journal will examine some of the possible causes and solutions to the problem and will include a video interview with former Washington State Supreme Court Justice, Bobbe Bridge, who started the Center for Children and Youth Justice, after leaving the Court.
We invite readers who attend the congressional hearing in Washington, DC to share their insights with us on the blog.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
