Saturday, May 9, 2009

The Harlem Miracle (from the NY Times)

Our policy-makers can learn a thing or two from The Harlem Children's Zone.--Dr. Louie F. Rodriguez
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NY Times
May 8, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
The Harlem Miracle
By DAVID BROOKS
The fight against poverty produces great programs but disappointing results. You go visit an inner-city school, job-training program or community youth center and you meet incredible people doing wonderful things. Then you look at the results from the serious evaluations and you find that these inspiring places are only producing incremental gains.

That’s why I was startled when I received an e-mail message from Roland Fryer, a meticulous Harvard economist. It included this sentence: “The attached study has changed my life as a scientist.”

Fryer and his colleague Will Dobbie have just finished a rigorous assessment of the charter schools operated by the Harlem Children’s Zone. They compared students in these schools to students in New York City as a whole and to comparable students who entered the lottery to get into the Harlem Children’s Zone schools, but weren’t selected.

They found that the Harlem Children’s Zone schools produced “enormous” gains. The typical student entered the charter middle school, Promise Academy, in sixth grade and scored in the 39th percentile among New York City students in math. By the eighth grade, the typical student in the school was in the 74th percentile. The typical student entered the school scoring in the 39th percentile in English Language Arts (verbal ability). By eighth grade, the typical student was in the 53rd percentile.

Forgive some academic jargon, but the most common education reform ideas — reducing class size, raising teacher pay, enrolling kids in Head Start — produce gains of about 0.1 or 0.2 or 0.3 standard deviations. If you study policy, those are the sorts of improvements you live with every day. Promise Academy produced gains of 1.3 and 1.4 standard deviations. That’s off the charts. In math, Promise Academy eliminated the achievement gap between its black students and the city average for white students.

Let me repeat that. It eliminated the black-white achievement gap. “The results changed my life as a researcher because I am no longer interested in marginal changes,” Fryer wrote in a subsequent e-mail. What Geoffrey Canada, Harlem Children’s Zone’s founder and president, has done is “the equivalent of curing cancer for these kids. It’s amazing. It should be celebrated. But it almost doesn’t matter if we stop there. We don’t have a way to replicate his cure, and we need one since so many of our kids are dying — literally and figuratively.”

These results are powerful evidence in a long-running debate. Some experts, mostly surrounding the education establishment, argue that schools alone can’t produce big changes. The problems are in society, and you have to work on broader issues like economic inequality. Reformers, on the other hand, have argued that school-based approaches can produce big results. The Harlem Children’s Zone results suggest the reformers are right. The Promise Academy does provide health and psychological services, but it helps kids who aren’t even involved in the other programs the organization offers.

To my mind, the results also vindicate an emerging model for low-income students. Over the past decade, dozens of charter and independent schools, like Promise Academy, have become no excuses schools. The basic theory is that middle-class kids enter adolescence with certain working models in their heads: what I can achieve; how to control impulses; how to work hard. Many kids from poorer, disorganized homes don’t have these internalized models. The schools create a disciplined, orderly and demanding counterculture to inculcate middle-class values.

To understand the culture in these schools, I’d recommend “Whatever It Takes,” a gripping account of Harlem Children’s Zone by my Times colleague Paul Tough, and “Sweating the Small Stuff,” a superb survey of these sorts of schools by David Whitman.

Basically, the no excuses schools pay meticulous attention to behavior and attitudes. They teach students how to look at the person who is talking, how to shake hands. These schools are academically rigorous and college-focused. Promise Academy students who are performing below grade level spent twice as much time in school as other students in New York City. Students who are performing at grade level spend 50 percent more time in school.

They also smash the normal bureaucratic strictures that bind leaders in regular schools. Promise Academy went through a tumultuous period as Canada searched for the right teachers. Nearly half of the teachers did not return for the 2005-2006 school year. A third didn’t return for the 2006-2007 year. Assessments are rigorous. Standardized tests are woven into the fabric of school life.

The approach works. Ever since welfare reform, we have had success with intrusive government programs that combine paternalistic leadership, sufficient funding and a ferocious commitment to traditional, middle-class values. We may have found a remedy for the achievement gap. Which city is going to take up the challenge? Omaha? Chicago? Yours?

U.S. Courts--Enemies of Education (from Truthout.org)

So, will it take a legal decision or policy to realize this constitutional principle?--Dr. Louie F. Rodriguez
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U.S. Courts--Enemies of Education

http://www.truthout.org/050809A?n

Friday 08 May 2009

by: David Bacon, t r u t h o u t | Perspective


The first day of desegregated schooling after Brown v. Board of Education, September 8, 1954, depicted here at Fort Myer Elementary School in Virginia. The Supreme Court is still dealing with educational inequality issues. (Photo: Bettmann / Corbis)
Sacramento, California - Is there a "constitutional right to education"?

Legal scholar and civil rights advocate Erwin Chemerinsky says there is. "There has to be a right to education in the Constitution," he declares, "and equal protection is a Constitutional imperative."

But according to Chemerinsky, this right has been fundamentally undermined by the Supreme Court. With the retirement of Justice David Souter, and the possible retirement in the next few years of Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and John Paul Stevens, the role of the court in defending the right to education will be thrust into the national spotlight. What role might their replacements play in guaranteeing education to American children, and reversing the conservative momentum of the last three decades?

Chemerinsky believes that without popular pressure and new judicial appointments that reverse the present course, the right to education will be further constricted, and even lost. Education itself in the United States is in greater danger than ever because of the steady "deconstitutionalization" of this right, he asserts. "The Supreme Court has followed a steady course over the last 35 years of undermining the right to education."

Chemerinsky has a long history as a civil rights advocate, which turned his appointment in 2007 as the founding dean of the University of California, Irvine School of Law into a fight. Although the university regents approved him, UCI Chancellor Michael V. Drake, who originally hired him, withdrew the invitation, saying Chemerinsky's views were "polarizing."

While Drake claimed that he had not received any pressure to withdraw the nomination, media reports unearthed efforts by conservative California Supreme Court Chief Justice Ronald George, Los Angeles Supervisor Mike Antonovich and a group of Orange County Republicans to kill the appointment. Although Chemerinsky is of one of the country's most respected constitutional scholars, they cited his opposition to the death penalty and his support for civil rights. In the end, his reputation and his defense by legal authorities nationwide moved UCI to restore the appointment.

In speaking to a meeting of California teachers earlier this year, Chemerinsky gave ample indication of the reasons why some of the most right-wing elements in California politics might not want to see him head one of its most prestigious law schools. He recalled the case of Rodriguez vs. the San Antonio Board of Education, decided in 1973. In that case, he explained, the plaintiffs proved a disparity in funding of 4 or 5 to one, between poor Latino communities and more affluent Anglo ones in that city. In a 5-4 decision, however, the Supreme Court held, in a decision written by Justice Louis Powell, that there is no right to education in the US Constitution. Wealth disparities, therefore, were permissible, even under the equal protection language of the 14th Amendment.

"Many expressed surprise," he noted, "since states require the education of minors in their own Constitutions. But Powell ruled there was no right to this on a federal level." Other similar decisions followed. The funding disparities noted in Texas, he says, are no different from those in California districts.

Chemerinsky connected this philosophy to the Supreme Court's decision upholding the legality of school vouchers. "They have one purpose only," he asserted. "That is to take funds out of the public school system and transfer them to parochial schools. In a 1982 decision, the court found that in Cleveland, where 95 percent of voucher money went to religious parochial schools, the system did not amount to state support of religious instruction. "Fortunately," he said, "the voucher system hasn't caught on, but the court has ruled it legal."

In this legal environment it's no surprise, therefore, that he views political action as necessary to the preservation and extension of civil rights. In fact, while he paints a dark picture of the legal panorama, he sees the main possibility for change arising from the election of the new administration of President Barack Obama. A window for change has opened, but Chemerinsky warns it will not stay open long. He cites the early years of the Clinton administration, which delayed on the appointment of new judges. After two years in office, and the loss of Congress to the Republicans in 1994, that administration began appointing judges as conservative as those appointed by Clinton's predecessor. The appointments were justified as political necessity - only those would "slide through."

Chemerinsky is a legal authority on the impact of race on education, and says that political action in support of desegregation has been integrally connected with extending the right to education. Some people believe, he says, that the watershed Brown vs. Board of Education immediately desegregated schools, thus ensuring the right to equal education for all students. In reality, while the Supreme Court held that segregation, the system of "separate but equal," was unconstitutional in 1954, for the next ten years there was no movement to comply with the decision. It was only after Title 6, the Civil Rights Act, threatened to withhold funds from schools that didn't desegregate that compliance began. "From 1964 to 1988, schools became less racially segregated as a result," he recalled. "But since 1988, they've become more segregated, and at an accelerating rate."

He traced the change to a 1974 case that prohibited the transfer of students between different school districts in order to desegregate schools. "In Chicago, where I grew up, the schools are now 95 percent black and Latino, yet just over the border, they're 95 percent white, and this is true in almost every metropolitan area. Yet the court said there's no remedy for this." This was followed by other decisions in the early 1990's, holding that once desegregation orders had been in effect for a brief time, those orders should end, whether or not the effect of doing so would lead to further resegregation. Then even voluntary desegregation plans that used race as one factor in assigning students were held unconstitutional by further 5-to-4 Supreme Court rulings.

In California, Chemerinsky described a similar impact from Proposition 209, which he campaigned unsuccessfully to defeat. He cites the disparity in racial diversity between private law schools, which are not constrained by Proposition 209's prohibition on affirmative action, and public law schools, which are. "Five years afterwards, the Stanford Law School had 9.5 percent African-American students, and USC 11 percent. UC Berkeley's Boalt Law School had 3 percent and UCLA 2 percent. One student told me that in her three years at Boalt she never had a black student in her class. The Supreme Court," he warned, "is likely soon to constitutionalize Prop 209."

Even the erosion of academic freedom, Chemerinsky asserts, is connected to court decisions undermining the right to education and desegregation. He cited the Supreme Court's decision in the Garcetti case in Los Angeles, holding that public employees have no First Amendment protection for speech on the job, even when they're fired for carrying out their responsibilities. The court has similarly eroded the rights of students to free speech, he says. "How can you teach students about the First Amendment if the people teaching them, and they themselves as students, have no First Amendment rights?" he asks.

"This can be changed, however, and it must be changed," he concludes.