A new study from a Colorado-based educational research group takes a comprehensive look at the disparity in punishments handed to minority and disabled students by school administrators.

The issue brief reaffirms work The American Independent has published on the harsh punitive actions taken up by schools in New Orleans. Also nestled in the report is strong language linking poor student behavior to teacher experience.

National Education Policy Center released the paper, written by Daniel J. Losen, offering a series of policy prescriptions schools can adopt to mitigate the moral and instructional sting suspensions and expulsions cause students.

Analyzing data collected by the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights indicates some 28 percent of black male middle school students had been suspended more than once, compared to 10 percent of white males. The suspension rate among black females is even greater than their white counterparts at the middle school level: 18 percent to 4 percent.

The frequency and yawn in minority suspension rates compared to white students has increased since the federal government began tracking these figures in the late 1960s.

Source: National Education Policy Center (NEPC)/Daniel J. Losen

From the report:

“Researchers also find a strong connection between effective classroom management and improved educational outcomes. And these skills can be learned and developed. According to the American Psychological Association: ―When applied correctly, effective classroom management principles can work across all subject areas and all developmental levels…. They can be expected to promote students’ self-regulation, reduce the incidence of misbehavior, and increase student productivity.

Yet despite these apparent connections to classroom management and quality of instruction, policymakers often treat student misbehavior as a problem originating solely with students and their parents. This ignores the potentially key roles played by teachers, teacher training, school leadership, or the school system. In fact, seeing students as wholly responsible for misbehavior has led many to embrace narrow policy interventions such as the kind of tough-love embodied by the iconic principal Joe Clark.

And below, a list of recommended policies:

• When Congress reauthorizes the Elementary and Secondary Education Act and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, it should provide positive incentives for schools, districts and states to support students, teachers and school leaders in systemic improvements to classroom and behavior management where rates of disciplinary exclusion are high – even where disparities do not suggest unlawful discrimination.

• Federal and state policy should specify the rate of out-of-school suspensions as one of several factors to be considered in assessments of school efficacy, especially for low-performing schools.

• Researchers should investigate connections between school discipline data and key outcomes such as achievement, graduation rates, teacher effectiveness, and college and career readiness.

• System-wide improvements should be pursued through better policies and practices at all levels—including an effort to improve teachers’ skills in classroom and behavior management

The study’s stress on instructional experience could give pause to supporters of alternative accreditation programs like Teach For America. According to a report released Tuesday by Phi Delta Kappan that examines retention rates of TFA instructors:

[L]ess than a quarter stay in their initial, low-income school for more than three years. Given TFA’s commitment to closing the achievement gap — a goal shared by many other fast-track preparation programs — this revolving door transfer of teachers from the schools that most need skilled, experienced teachers remains a serious problem.

TAI’s reporting of the New Orleans education scene demonstrated a link between student behavior and teacher experience:

• A typical White high school student attends a school in which 17 percent of the teachers are in their first or second year, but a typical African-American high
school student attends a school in which 37 percent of teachers are in their first or second year.

• For a typical African-American student in a state-run RSD high school, the vast majority of teachers (64 percent) are in their first or second year.

• A typical White student in grades K-8 eligible for free lunch attends a school in which only 15 percent of teachers are in their first or second year, but a typical free lunch-eligible African-American student attends a school in which double that percentage of teachers (29 percent) are similarly inexperienced.

• An African-American student who is ineligible for free lunch is more likely to have a first- or second-year teacher (21 percent) than a White student who is
eligible for free lunch (12 percent).

• In RSD schools, 98 percent of students are African American and 79 percent of students are low income. RSD students are suspended at a rate that is more than three times the rate of suspension in neighboring, mostly white, affluent school districts.

• In St. Tammany Parish, where only 18.5 percent of students are African American and 42.5 percent are low-income, only 8 percent of students were suspended.

• In St. Charles Parish, where only 36.4% of students are African American and 45.1% are low-income, only 4.1% of students were suspended from school.

According to the website describing the documentary, 600 school teachers in Baltimore have come from the Philippines, representing 10 percent of the city’s total teacher corps.

The documentary, titled “The Learning,” follows the teachers, all females, as they stood in front of their largely under-performing classrooms and the pressures they felt from family members back home to send back remittances.

From the PBS website:

“When the United States took possession of the Philippines in 1898, American teachers set up the islands’ public school system. English was established as the language of instruction and remains so to this day. Today in the Philippines, there is a large pool of trained, motivated, English-speaking teachers, especially in high school math, science and special education. In their country, these teachers receive poverty-level salaries, making them prized recruitment targets for many U.S. school districts, especially those in cash-strapped inner cities. While a salary in one of these urban districts may be low by American standards, it can be as much as 25 times a teacher’s salary in the Philippines.”

Though trailing the limelight New Orleans receives for its attempt to turn around a moribund education system with charter schools and a teacher corps with low unionization rates, Baltimore has logged better student results on standardized tests.

Via the United Teachers of New Orleans, The American Independent obtained the following statistics:

From 2005 to 2010, fourth-grade math scores in New Orleans (all Orleans Parish and Recovery School District schools) increased by 18 percentage points in math and 11 percentage points in English.

However, fourth-grade students in Baltimore improved 30 points in math and 11 points in reading between 2005 and 2010. In Detroit, fourth-grade math scores improved 19 points and reading scores improved 8 percentage points between 2006 and 2010.

From 2005 to 2010 at the eighth-grade level, New Orleans’ students’ scores increased 15 points in math and 16 points in English. However, eighth-grade students in Baltimore improved 19 points in math and 22 points in reading between 2006 and 2009. In Detroit, eighth-grade math scores improved 16 points between 2006 and 2010.

While the key monitoring tool was dropped for the 2009-2010 school year, the documents from LDOE also show a host of measures — on-site visits and mandatory internal investigations — were taken to monitor schools during the spring and summer high-stakes testing season for academic years 2007-2008, 2008-2009 and 2009-2010.

An erasure analysis — a once-arcane accountability device that has garnered increased public awareness following high-profile testing impropriety scandals in Pennsylvania,New Jersey and Georgia — is part of a portfolio of precautions undertaken by state education officials to prevent cheating on standardized tests. The process consists of examining electronic bubble sheets on which students record their answers for a high rate of wrong-to-right answer erasures. Typical explanations for why students change test answers include copying answers from other pupils, teacher intervention or as one newsletter released by the Louisiana School Board Association alleged, administrative and state-level meddling to change the answers.

Charles Hatfield, a former superintendent in charge of testing and accountability of what was the unified school district (Orleans Parish School Board) in New Orleans before Hurricane Katrina struck, explained erasure analysis in greater detail. “They [the analysts] scan the bubble sheets following a mathematical algorithm,” he said, “meaning from a statistical point of view, it is highly unlikely that so many wrong-to-right erasures can occur.”

The motivations for test tampering are numerous, but many education experts point to No Child Left Behind (NCLB) as incentivizing testing corruption given the high-stakes nature of the national education policy. States are rated by how many of its schools clear cut-marks; schools that post poor results can lose funding or suffer staff layoffs, while in extreme cases of chronic underperformance, the school is handed to charter operators. In recent weeks, high-profile education officials like U.S. Department of Education Secretary Arne Duncan and firebrand education historian and NCLB critic Diane Ravitch have called for the law to be expunged. The two camps disagree on a replacement.

In seeking an explanation for the one-year suspension of erasure analysis, LDOE spokesperson Rene Greer told TAI the economic downturn burrowed an unexpected $247.9 million budget deficit for 2009-2010 into the state coffers, leading to across-the-board cuts. LDOE absorbed $4.15 million in cuts as part of the department’s effort to “provide the maximum support for students and teachers, while maintaining the integrity of the testing program,” said Greer.

As a consequence, however, the cuts included the elimination of the erasure analysis as well as the development, printing and distribution of interpretive guides and other testing reports.  The decision not to have the vendor conduct the erasure analysis saved the department $58,459. According to The Notebook, Pennsylvania — where dozens of schools were flagged recently for wrong-to-right erasures that analysts calculate were very likely the result of testing improprieties– spent nearly double that for its 2009 erasure analysis, though the Keystone State’s population exceeds Louisiana’s, 12.7 million to 4.5 million.

Louisiana’s testing vendor is Data Recognition Corporation (DRC). Through another FOIA request, TAI learned the state entered a contract with the company to the tune of roughly $9 to $13 million a year, spanning a decade of services beginning in 2005. DRC received a no-bid contract extension in 2010 worth nearly $44.5 million. DRC prints, issues, writes, grades and analyzes Louisiana’s No Child Left Behind-compliant state tests. LEAP, iLeap, GEE (the high school exit exam) and several tests geared toward students with limited English proficiency and learning disabilities all fall under the purview of DRC.

“While the erasure analysis is a one tool the agency has used to ensure the integrity of Louisiana’s testing program, as the data indicate, historically this analysis has resulted in an inconsequential percentage of tests being voided statewide,” wrote Greer in an email to TAI. “Thus, the utilization of the erasure analysis alone does not validate nor diminish the reliability of the state’s testing program or accountability system.”

Indeed, for the 2010-2011 school year, 1,533,000 tests were administered statewide, with 214 of those voided for exceeding the number of wrong-to-right answer erasures. In the Recovery School District, the state-run set of campuses that were taken over following Katrina with many then placed under charter operators, 38 tests were voided out of 63,966 administered after an erasure analysis.

The chart below chronicles four academic years of erasure analysis voids, meaning scores for tests flagged are marked with a zero which can impact a school’s overall School Performance Score — the index used by Louisiana in compliance with No Child Left Behind school assessment rules.

LDOE also supplied TAI with testing violations reports beginning in 2007-2008 through 2009-2010.

For ’07-’08, 82 members of LDOE staff visited 238 test sites in 56 school districts during the spring testing season. The report from the Division of Standards, Assessments, and Accountability and Regional Service Centers concluded, “access to test documents was controlled and security procedures were followed.”

However, site visitors recorded springtime violations at 47 sites, 21 of which had “severe testing irregularities.” For heightened violations, the state orders the district to conduct an investigation, identify the cause of the transgressions and form a corrective plan of action to avoid repeat offenses, which is then submitted to the LDOE officials. Violations are represented by a per-incident basis, with the potential for many occurring in one school. At Laurel Elementary in New Orleans, for example, 13 violations were cited over irregularities concerning the answer sheets of six students taking the English Language Arts exam and seven students taking the math portion. Those scores were voided.

Scott Norton, Ph.D., assistant superintendent at LDOE’s office of student and school performance, said districts with significant violations receive follow-up inspections the next year, adding, “sometimes the on-site monitoring is unannounced.”

He elaborated: “The state has a policy in the assessment bulletin that districts have to follow. [These include] a chain of custody for the test documents and a secure locked location for where the testing material is held.”

For 2008-2009, LDOE staff made 257 test site visits in 66 districts, with additional visits to charter special schools. Eighty-three evaluators were sent out, and, according to the report summary, “[a]ny school with a record of prior test security problems was likely to be visited; the remaining visits were scheduled at random.”

The report noted that during the springtime monitoring sessions, 50 sites had minor testing irregularities, while 18 had more severe violations that required a corrective action plan. The Recovery School District, unpopular to teacher and labor groups as well as community activists for its swift school turnaround process and what they call misleading student performance data, had 26 springtime violations noted in ’08-’09. For 2007-2008, RSD was flagged for 27 of the total 137 violations recorded throughout the state. RSD schools are, according to the state, long-struggling schools.

RSD students in New Orleans, a city in which most of the district’s schools are concentrated, struggle with high rates of poverty and higher rates of suspensions, arrests, and draconian school enforcement policies.

Despite the budget cuts and no erasure policy, in 2009-2010, there was a surge in LDOE personnel conducting on-site testing evaluations: 157 LDOE employees were sent out to 378 sites, plus charter and special schools. 54 violations were recorded, of which 12 were significant. 27 occurred at RSD.

Greer told TAI, “Louisiana has the most notable and recognizable accountability processes in the country.”

Relying on 2009 Pennsylvania state data that was never published, The Notebooklearned that in some instances, the likelihood of wrong-to-right erasure marks on student bubble sheets happening in earnest was smaller than the equivalent of dividing one by the product of a trillion multiplied by a trillion. Some 60 Pennsylvania schools were nabbed for possible cheating through the erasure analysis.

New York Daily News reported in early August that the New York State Education Department stopped using erasure analysis in 2001, though is considering reinstating the oversight tool in light of cheating scandals in Atlanta and Philadelphia.

Citing unnamed sources, the LSBA entry stated:

Irregular “scrubbing” practices that appear to have been imported to the RSD by Paul Vallas leave many test units administered by unaccounted for in school performance scores (SPS). Apparently, a set of computer filters are set to screen out from consideration any student scores that meet select criteria (less than 120 days in school, failing the test, failing to enroll in summer remediation, and failing to pass the summer retest).

Paul Vallas served as the superintendent of RSD after a contentious stint in Philadelphia where he was CEO of the city’s school district. New Orleans schools improved at a faster rate than the rest of Louisiana under his helm, though over 90 percent of RSD schools will have a D or F grade for student assessment scores in the coming school year,according to outside reports.

SPS values rely in large part on student achievement in the state’s standardized tests, LEAP, iLEAP and the Graduation Exit Exam (GEE). Those scores determine which schools are in compliance with the state’s achievement standards as part of the accountability measures established by No Child Left Behind. Schools that fall behind face funding restrictions, closure and layoffs depending on how long they tread at below-minimum benchmarks.

Scott Norton, assistant superintendent on student and school enforcement in Louisiana, explained to The American Independent the process districts use to report state test scores obviates the opportunity to fudge the figures.

“We send out the test booklets and the test is taken,” says Norton. “The tests go back to the contractor of the test [and] the schools are out of the loop.”

Norton adds: “But from that point on… the deparment has the data files. Districts can’t take test scores…there’s no place in process where that could happen. I can’t imagine anyone could do that.”

Acting state superintendent of education Ollie S. Tyler contacted TAI with a remonstrative statement after she was asked for comment:

Louisiana has gained national recognition for its accountability program. Critical to this is ensuring the integrity of testing and performance scores at every level.  Therefore, the Louisiana Department of Education (LDOE) allocates significant resources to the design, administration and scoring of statewide assessments. These services are coordinated by LDOE, not local districts, through professional service contracts with certified and reputable national vendors. Test results are not routed to local districts to calculate School Performance Scores, nor do local districts have the ability to manipulate the data. To suggests (sic) a district, any district, including the Recovery School District, has the ability to filter or eliminate test scores prior to the calculation of School Performance Scores or at any point is unreasonable.

Likewise, the Department has an aggressive monitoring program to actively make certain students, teachers, administrators and districts are operating in accordance with stringent state policies and procedures. Through the support of our testing vendor, for example, we are able to identify patterns of excessive wrong-to-right erasures on state tests.

We are disappointed that the Louisiana School Boards Association (LSBA) would make these unfair and unsubstantiated claims. These allegations call into question the state’s accountability model and therefore the progress Louisiana students, teachers, districts and communities have demonstrated through the state’s accountability program over the last decade.

The state has come under scrutiny by critics of RSD who maintain the district disguises poor test results by dumping the records of low-achieving schools and high-risk students likely to underperform. A paper written in 2010 by Barbara Ferguson, an education professor and analyst at Research on Reforms who once served as superintendent in New Orleans, showed (PDF) the following:

In 2009-10, there were 71 schools in the RSD.  A total of 21 schools did not have baseline School Performance Scores; yet, only 9 of them without scores were new schools. Compare that with the 2008-09 year, when the RSD had 66 schools, and a total of 10 did not have baseline School Performance Scores, of which 7 were new schools.

LSBA also accused LDOE of forbidding staff from commenting on department investigations, formally alluding to a culture of fear and intimidation that was addressed in cheating-ravaged cities like Atlanta.

Rene Greer, a spokesperson for LDOE, explained the directive in question was actually an email urging staff members to swiftly respond to Freedom Of Information Act requests. “In order to respect the FOIA process … we want everyone to check their own documents to help the process,” Greer told TAI. She supplied TAI with a redacted copy of that email, available here [PDF].

She added: “It’s very much about our transparency and our due diligence.”

The audience, mostly teachers representing states from all over the U.S., listened on as leading education reformers like Linda Darling-Hammond, former assistant secretary of the U.S. Department of Education and professor Diane Ravitch and film star Matt Damon condemned the high-stakes testing they say are inimical to public education.

Teachers, students, and education reformers await a keynote speaker during the July 30 Save Our Schools March (Mikhail Zinshteyn)

Slam poets and union leaders told protesters to overwhelm the inboxes and landlines of policy makers; country music performers sang tongue-in-cheek tunes like “Test Teacher,” with many in attendance singing along to the lyrics: “Work on Math and English and forget about the rest,” and “get off the monkey bars and stay behind a desk.”

Another performer, George Mason professor Mary Stone Hanley, likened NCLB to snake oil while reciting her poem, “The Mess,” saying the maligned and decades-old education policy is “a simple answer to a complex question.”

George Mason professor Mary Stone Hanley shares her poem as a sign linguist translates during the July 30 Save Our Schools March

Policy specifics

Diane Ravitch, in an interview with The American Independent before she came on stage, said, “[policy makers] don’t understand what good education looks like. These congressmen went to great schools; if they want the same for today’s students they need to get rid of punitive testing.”

Under NCLB, schools that persistently underperform must allow students to enroll in other programs within the district, taking valuable state and federal funding that rides with every pupil. The penalties continue to snowball until downright school closure or charter-school takeover is prescribed. Other consequences include hiring a private company to take over operations or placing the school under direct state control.

Recently many districts have adopted value-added metrics, a set of data collected that link student standardized test performance to teacher quality, in evaluating teachers. Value-added approaches have been shown to be highly volatile and statistically unpredictable.

NCLB, the current iteration of the longstanding Early and Secondary Education Act passed under President Lyndon B. Johnon, uses a federal measure called Annual Yearly Progress to determine the progress of a school; U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan told reporters in June over 80 percent of schools are slated to fail according to AYP next year. Under NCLB, by 2014, nearly every school in the country is expected to have 100 percent of its students proficient according to state-administered tests used to fulfill NCLB regulations.

At the heart of the grievances voiced by groups like Save Our Schools is the diluting of traditional forms of education in favor of a one-size-fits-all legislative makeover they contend has not improved student proficiency in core subjects, nor have they led to increased graduation rates.

Recently, that rebuke gained new credibility with a May report from the National Academies of Science that concluded [PDF] “[i]ncentives will often lead people to find ways to increase measured performance that do not also improve the desired outcomes. As a result, different performance measures—that are not being used in the incentive system—should be used when evaluating how the incentives are working.”

On standardized exit exams for graduates, the report found these “high school exit exam programs, as currently implemented in the United States, decrease the rate of high school graduation without increasing achievement. The best available estimate suggests a decrease of 2 percentage points when averaged over the population.”

Consequences of the system

“Data is meaningless by itself without context,” Ravitch told TAI, explaining socio-economic conditions often dwarf the impact a teacher can have on a student. “Testing is good for collecting information to help students, not punishing them and their teachers.”

Nancy Carlsson-Paige, a professor of early childhood education who mentors new teachers at Lesley University (and the mother of Matt Damon), told TAI her principal policy prescription would be to eschew applying “business standards on human value.” Lawmakers are making policies that are harmful to students, she said, and erode community control of schools.

In New Orleans, for example, charter schools operate chiefly under a type of self-contained school regulatory code that critics argue has undermined parental involvement in student affairs. Since Hurricane Katrina, only a handful of schools in New Orleans are neighborhood schools, meaning students are forced to attend classrooms miles away from their homes.

In a brief exchange with Matt Damon, he told TAI high-stakes testing and the attendant punishment applied to teachers of under-performing students is narrowing the curriculum for children and educators. “You wouldn’t allow business people to design military policy — why do we allow them to shape our education policy?” Damon asked.

Matt Damon speaks to reporters during the Save Our Schools rally (Mikhail Zinshteyn)

An increasing amount of school organizations including the National Education Association — the nation’s largest teacher union — have called out the coziness superintendents in Chicago, Los Angeles and New York City, as well as senior officials in the U.S. Department of Education, have with billionaire-affiliated foundations like the Melinda and Bill Gates Foundation and the Broad Foundation.

Union Input

Many local and regional union bodies attended the rally, their ranks made up chiefly of teachers and education specialists who have watched governors in Indiana and Wisconsin strip portions of their collective bargaining rights.

During a series of crowd interviews, Melissa Patterson, a Milwaukee school teacher of special education students ranging from the third- and fifth-grade level, told TAI she joined the march because “schools are falling apart, and the teachers are being blamed.” She pointed the finger at “politicians with no classroom experience” passing high-stakes testing legislation onto students. “We need adequate funding, and we have to kill Race to the Top,” Patterson said.

Nathan Saunders, president of the Washington Teachers Union, a labor group operating in the nation’s capital that experienced a series of setbacks under former Chancellor of D.C. Schools Michelle Rhee, told TAI increased community involvement and a pared-down reliance on test results in evaluating teachers and students would be at the front of his policy wish-list.

Mary Cathryn Ricker, an educator and local union president in St. Paul, Minnesota, balked at the notion parents and teachers wrangle for unrealistic spending promises from state and federal legislators.

“We need to change the discussion: move away from what we think schools need to what students need,” she said. “We need more teachers, students, and parents in the decision process [with lawmakers]; we should make a list of experiences we believe students should have, agree on those, and learn the cost,” she proposed.

The Student Program Chair of NEA, Tommie Leaders, also insisted more community involvement is necessary in education reform. He helps coordinate the labor group’s commitment to the 70,000 student teachers enrolled in traditional teacher colleges across the country.

“We have 50 states with separate and different education policies; a one-size-fits-all approach to the solution is not the policy prescription,” he said.

Next Steps

The traditional ally of teachers, the Democratic Party, and President Obama have turned from its base, said New York University Professor Pedro Noguera to the crowd. “When you lose your base, you lose your vote,” he cautioned.

Cathryn-Ricker believes a number of Democratic public representatives “stopped asking the teachers what the classrooms are like.” She says the Save Our Schools series of events, held on Thursday, Friday and at Saturday’s rally, is a launching pad for more action, telling TAI a return to addressing community-oriented education policy is key.

Throughout the event the subject of poverty was raised as the chief adversary of student learning. Melissa Patterson, the teacher from Milwaukee, told TAI she taught in the suburbs of Chicago as well, “and the support those students have financially makes a big difference.”

“I didn’t change the way I teach,” she added, “but the performance of those students and the ones I teach in Milwaukee was obviously different.”

Tomorrow, the Save Our School committee members will gather at American University to draft a new platform and determine what the group’s next steps should be. Bob Schaeffer, a test accountability specialist and one of the main organizers of the four-day event said the meeting would be closed to the media.

“When Bill Gates opens up his executive committee meetings [on education],” Schaeffer told TAI, “we’ll open up ours as well.”

Flickr/Carissa GoodNCrazy

John, an eighth grader at the time, gives another student on school grounds a candy bar. He is spotted by a security guard and told he now faces suspension. Frightened, John runs, getting caught twice and slapped with handcuffs as many times, acquiring bruises along his wrists in the process. A jacket his grandmother purchased is torn during the scuffle with the much larger security personnel.

“Knowing how my dad has been in and out of jail his whole life and always had handcuffs on… I promised myself it would never happen to me,” John says. “I’m a kid, and kids shouldn’t have handcuffs on them. It disgusts me putting kids in handcuffs and jail.”

Another student, identified as Chris, is handcuffed to a radiator in the central office of the school after completing an out-of-school suspension. He’s shackled for three hours, and not even the protestations of a teacher, and finally his mother, lead to the release of the boy.

“They just kept handcuffing me. Even other students got handcuffed,” shares Chris. “One kid was in special-ed and he would holler and cry when they handcuffed him.”

Last December, the Southern Poverty Law Center transcribed these stories of Chris and John, students attending New Orleans schools, along with half a dozen other first-person accounts of the increasing penalization on the playgrounds and hallways throughout the city.

Yet the brute force chronicled speaks to a much larger dissonance affecting New Orleans public education, supplying more ammunition to critics of New Orleans schools that bulk up on young, cheap and inexperienced teachers to educate a community particularly blighted by poverty.

Poverty and punishment explained

The intersection of punishment, student poverty and teacher experience begins, strangely enough, with a paper comparing transfer rates and international test scores in over five dozen countries.

In a study published (PDF) July 6, researchers for the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) noted countries that hold students back an additional year or shuffle students out of schools for academic or behavioral problems are more likely to support education systems marked by inequity, low student performance and unnecessarily bloated budgets.

In gathering the data, the writers of the brief collected results from the 2009 Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) in 65 member and partner countries, representing a wide spectrum of GDP per capita, and principal surveys from participating schools.

The authors conclude that:

PISA 2009 reveals that countries in which more schools transfer students for the abovementioned reasons show poorer overall performance. In fact, over one-third of the variation in student performance across countries can be explained by the rate at which schools transfer students, regardless of the wealth of the country.

School systems that transfer students more frequently also tend to show a stronger relationship between students’ socio-economic background and performance, and a wider gap in performance between schools, even after accounting for countries’ national income. This suggests that transferring students tends to be associated with socio-economic segregation in school systems, where students from advantaged backgrounds end up in better-performing schools while students from disadvantaged backgrounds end up in poorer-performing schools. However, this does not necessarily mean that if countries abolish their transfer policies, their performance will automatically improve; PISA doesn’t measure cause and effect.

In New Orleans, dismissing students from schools for behavioral infractions or poor academic performance is a common occurrence, and one disproportionately affecting students of color or living in low-income households.

During a conversation with The American Independent, a doctor of education and radio host Raynard Sanders said, “In this city, we have a system where the kids are separated by race and class. Kids that … are expelled are placed into schools that are not close to home, with bad facilities.”

And while the state-managed Recovery School District (RSD) — part of a dramaticdeconstruction of the city’s school system following Hurricane Katrina that resulted in the majority of the schools being taken over by Baton Rouge and turned over to charter schools — is often skewered for a chronically underperforming student body, charter schools are guilty of their own quick-triggered dismissal of students.

The Big Easy is rather breezy with its expulsion rates: As previously reported by The American Independent, the rate of expulsion among RSD students in 2008 was ten times the national average. Suspensions were also extremely high, with 29 percent of RSD students losing at least one instructional day — over four times the national average. The punitive landscape is exacerbated further by the number of security personnel in RSD schools. The year before Katrina, the city-wide school district Orleans Parish School Board spent (according to according to a 2010 report from the National Economic and Social Rights Initiative) $46 per student on security. The first full year of RSD in 2006-2007 saw that number soar to $2,100. And though that figure went down in 2008-2009, it was still nearly $700 per student.

The reasons students are dismissed are often egregious and can have a deleterious effect on a child’s long-term academic prospects. The Southern Poverty Law Center reported on a U.S. Department of Justice study that found abusive punishment inflicted on a student by school authorities increases the child’s risk of developing post-traumatic stress disorder five-fold. The SPLC document continued:

An over-reliance on these disciplinary methods can lead to the loss of valuable learning time, while contributing significantly to dropout rates. The Alliance for Excellent Education estimates that Louisiana loses more than $6.9 billion annually in wages as a result of policies that push students out of school before graduation.

The degree to which race and class factor into disciplinary measures is also highlighted by SPLC:

• In RSD schools, 98% of students are African American and 79% of students are low income. RSD students are suspended at a rate that is more than three times the rate of suspension in neighboring, mostly white, affluent school districts.

• In St. Tammany Parish, where only 18.5% of students are African American and 42.5% are low-income, only 8% of students were suspended.

• In St. Charles Parish, where only 36.4% of students are African American and 45.1% are low-income, only 4.1% of students were suspended from school.

Charter schools expel, suspend and fine students for being late or snacking

Charter schools in the city, motivated by a desire to demonstrate high student-proficiency numbers according to state tests, use both selective admissions processes and implement codes of conduct that allow them to dismiss students not making the academic cut, says Lance Hill, a former professor of cultural studies who now heads the Southern Institute for Education and Research.

“Most of the charters enroll students by way of lottery to exclude high-needs, high-costs students,” he begins. “Yet a lot of the selectivity is after the admissions process — they use minor excuses for expulsion in case they enroll low-performing students.”

Research on Reforms (ROR), a collection of education scholars critical of the charter movement, and Learning Matters, an education reporting unit regularly featured on PBS, provided the legal justification and details of New Orleans charter school dismissal policies in a report on the ROR website. What follows is a sampling of their findings, along with original reporting by TAI.

At Lafayette Academy, “Removal of food from cafeteria” “Lying/falsehood,” “Sleeping in class” and “Leaving classroom without teacher’s permission,” along with 48 other infractions are described as risking “an orderly environment for learning” and can lead to suspension or expulsion, according to the school handbook.

Miller-McCoy Academy for Mathematics and Business also warnsstudents and parents cutting class, school, detention and related mandatory school events can lead to suspension or expulsion. Other offenses that warrant out-of-class dismissal include possession of electronics and printed text deemed vulgar or profane. The handbook also states items confiscated can be held by the school permanently, irrespective of costs and fees.

According to the 2010 handbook of the New Orleans Charter Science and Math Academy, a child with 12 unexcused absences for the year can lead to the school reporting the parent to the Louisiana Department of Social Services. Hill says the school included the ‘can’ only recently, meaning prior to the switch, the school did report parents to child services.

KIPP Central City Primary appears to be the most draconian: The handbook explains five or more instances of the student being tardy or absent can result in a $250 fine, an official police report, a summons to perform 25 hours of community service by the parent, guardian or child or permanent removal from the school. If a child is missing from school for twenty consecutive days, even with parental notification, that child is automatically withdrawn from the school.

Charles Roemer, an RSD committee chair and member of the Louisiana Board of Early and Secondary Education, said in an early-June public meeting that, “The charter school determines what they can and cannot do autonomously. So that is their decision, their discipline policy, their expulsion policy, their attendance policies, which can be determined at a school by school basis for charter schools.”

In a follow-up question that asked if state law permits that type of autonomy, he said: “It is consistent with the Louisiana Charter School Law. That’s what it is consistent with. It is. Absolutely.”

If more experienced teachers keep students calm — do better test scores follow?

Given the increase in disciplinary punishment meted out in New Orleans schools, what changed after the storm? Some could point to poverty as an excuse for ramping up security in the playgrounds and hallways, but the leading indicator of low-income status in schools, qualifying for reduced lunch programs, hardly changed enough since the antediluvian period to warrant constant surveillance.

In 2004, before the state put the city’s school system through a tectonic shift and wound up with an archipelago comprising dozens of self-governing academies (and the abrupt dissolution of the collective bargaining agreement between teachers and the city,resulting in 8,500 layoffs), 77 percent of Orleans Parish students qualified for the lunch programs; 89 percent of New Orleans public school students are eligible today.

But while poverty increased, the experience level of teachers took a turn in the opposite direction, and with it, a talent for managing at-risk pupils.

“There is a saying in teaching if you cannot manage your classroom, there’s no way you can transfer your knowledge,” begins Davina Allen, a Teach For America alumna in New Orleans currently earning a post secondary degree in educational leadership. “If you’re struggling with behavioral issues, then there’s a very good chance you’re not teaching well.”

TAI spoke to Allen about the tandem force of keeping teachers in schools over a longer period of time and how a high turnover of labor in education hobbles the community.

“No one is saying all old teachers are better, but the new paradigm is that you don’t want veteran teachers around” is flawed, she said.

According to an internal document from the American Federation of Teachers obtained by TAI that uses 2008-2009 Times Picayune teacher experience data in New Orleans, experience matters. For RSD schools, which tend to perform poorly, 42 percent of teachers in K-8 classrooms have less than two years of experience. One in six eighth-grade students are proficient in math. At Orleans Parish, which was spared a handful of schools following the state takeover of schools in the city, thirteen percent of teachers had less than two years of experience and two out of three eighth-graders were proficient in math.

The class and race criticisms Dr. Sanders imputed for the region’s schools are likely fueled by these findings, also from AFT:

• A typical White high school student attends a school in which 17 percent of the teachers are in their first or second year, but a typical African-American high
school student attends a school in which 37 percent of teachers are in their first or second year.

• For a typical African-American student in a state-run RSD high school, the vast majority of teachers (64 percent) are in their first or second year.

• A typical White student in grades K-8 eligible for free lunch attends a school in which only 15 percent of teachers are in their first or second year, but a typical free lunch-eligible African-American student attends a school in which double that percentage of teachers (29 percent) are similarly inexperienced.

• An African-American student who is ineligible for free lunch is more likely to have a first- or second-year teacher (21 percent) than a White student who is
eligible for free lunch (12 percent).

Part of the blame for the disparity in performance falls squarely on the shoulders of the Recovery School District at large. As a report on education strategies in New Orleans and other large cities from the Annenberg Institute for School Reform states, “Many respondents [New Orleans educators, school officials] felt that, with the possible exception of some charter and [Orleans Parish School District] schools, teachers and leaders overall are not getting the level of support they need either from administrators or the system at large.”

But RSD appears satisfied with its human resources model. This year alone, 250 experienced teachers will lose their jobs, with a cadre of Teach for America fellows filing through in replacement to help educate the some 40,000 students in New Orleans. That decision continues a trend of favoring younger educators.

An education scholar who requested not to be named offered a moral vignette: “Knowing how to manage behaviors with kids who watched their parents drown in Katrina is not something a French Literature major from Long Island can learn overnight.”

Information on student test scores and teacher experience levels in other cities buoys the data mining at AFT. A 2009 study out of the University of Virginia observed that teacher effectiveness continues to slope upward at a steep incline into the 21st year of being on the job.  And while the instructor’s performance begins to sag in the subsequent decade of experience, the 30th year on the job posts higher levels of effectiveness than was achieved after ten years of teaching.

Is it fair to draw conclusions from low socio-economic status and high transfer rates among affected students? The writers of the OECD study do little to betray that notion, putting some of the onus on educators:

These results suggest that, in general, school systems that seek to cater to different students’ needs by having struggling students repeat grades or by transferring them to other schools do not succeed in producing superior overall results and, in some cases, reinforce socio-economic inequities. Teachers in these systems may have fewer incentives to work with struggling students if they know there is an option of transferring those students to other schools.

While other cities have had trouble implementing major changes, Duncan said, New Orleans educators have shown “amazing courage and no complacency” in radically remaking the public schools.

Another reformer, Leslie Jacobs, whose education credentials include a career in insurance and serving as a member on Louisiana’s State Board of Elementary and Secondary Education, founded the advocacy group Educate Now, which presents evidence of RSD’s education gains. The figures Educate Now presents (PDF) chronicle a rate of improvement relative to the state, which is different from displaying hard numerical data. Comparing results to analysis (PDF) conducted by Research on Reforms (ROR), an education policy group composed of education researchers, those relative gains still leave most of the district’s schools in poor shape.

For example, when School Performance Score (SPS) values are used to demonstrate large gains, Educate Now is repeating ROR data but with a patina of celebratory rhetoric. For example, under “Growth and Performance” in the Educate Now study, RSD and the traditional Orleans Parish schools are shown to have an average SPS of 75.4. That’s an apparent jump of 18.5 points since 2005 (the year before RSD’s first budget); the state as a whole increased 9 points in that same period to 91.8.

However, on the graded scale Louisiana Department of Education (LDOE) is adopting this coming school year, that combined RSD-Orleans Parish average is good for a D. Applying the new LDOE breakdown to the 2010 performance indicators shows 46 percent of RSD schools earned a D, and the same number of schools earned an F.

From Research on Reforms. Letter grade breakdown using 2010 SPS scores 

Of the RSD schools, 86 percent that are charters, and all of the non-charter schools (called RSD-Direct), would earn a D or below.

That passage, taken from a July 1 letter education historian Diane Ravitch wrote to the New York Times disputing columnist David Brooks’ characterization of her public policy views, can easily be superimposed onto the current national education portrait.

Ever since Congress and President George W. Bush reauthorized the Early and Secondary Education Act in 2002 to become No Child Left Behind (NCLB), schools have been under the gun to up state-mandated student test scores or face financial and structural consequences. Results from those exams are notoriously inflated or teased with public relations precision, not out of the malfeasance of school administrators but as a function of what happens when students are taught to a series of exams that determine a great portion of the state’s education funding.

“The central premise of NCLB was that states would be free to set their own version of what would constitute proficiency,” says Kristen Amundson, a former Virginia state legislator and school board member who now heads communications at Education Sector. “In a serious effort to not create a federal system of education, that legislation allowed states carte blanche.”

The result, she says, is “an institutional bias in states and local districts to believe that things are better than they really are.”

This week, 44 of the just over 100 schools in the Atlanta school district were implicated in a cheating scandal that calls into question years of high gains on the state’s annual Criterion-Referenced Competency Tests (CRCT). The investigation ordered by a former governor of Georgia was triggered in part due to a set of reports published by the Atlantic Journal Constitution. The American Independent has reported on comparisons between the state’s high scores on the CRCT to the much more dour results on the federal National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), putting the limelight on how federal education policy compels schools to cook their statistics to demonstrate adequate yearly gains.

Even without outright cheating, school systems are eager to fend off the punitive sting of state and federal stipulations for school progress with ethically dubious procedures. In New Orleans’ Recovery School District, administrators invited charter schools to cauterize the low-score bleeding of their districts; some improvements followed but critics allege serious collateral damage as mostly high-needs children are still being shipped around schools that are either underfunded or unwilling to tend to their needs.

The trouble, critics allege, began with decisions made in Baton Rouge after Hurricane Katrina.

In November 2005, the Louisiana Legislature passed Act 35 that put most of New Orleans’ schools in the hands of RSD, a school system introduced in 2003 by a separate piece of legislation that manages troubled institutions. Prior to the passage of Act 35, RSD operated five city schools. The new law increased the minimum performance threshold schools had to meet, deeming many in the city as failing.

As a result, between 107 and 115 schools were shuffled from the city’s original district — The Orleans Parish School Board (OPSB) — into either RSD or Louisiana Board of Elementary and Secondary Education (BESE) control. As of March 2011, there were five school classifications totaling 88 schools within the city headed by three public authorities. Only 29 are not charters. This map illustrates the extent to which the city’s schools are balkanized (PDF).

Raynard Sanders, a former professor of education who monitors the RSD, told TAI the district was given large sums of money following Hurricane Katrina, but not enough of it went to students.

“When they opened up the direct-run schools, they hired Teach for America, cheaper teachers but with very little experience,” he begins. “They didn’t put in a lot of social workers … but in the first year’s budget (2006-2007), $2,100 was spent per child on security.”

Before Katrina, Orleans Parish spent $46 on security per child, according to Ralph Adamo, author of “NOLA’s Failed Education Experiment.” For the 2008-2009 school year, RSD was spending $690 per student. And it is difficult to underplay the role of race and class: 89 percent of students in RSD and Orleans Parish, which make up the bulk of the city’s student population, are (PDF) black, and 91 percent of RSD students receive free or reduced-price lunch, a leading indicator of low income.

A 2010 study assembled(PDF) by the National Economic and Social Rights Initiative (NESRI) and Families and Friends of Louisiana’s Incarcerated Children (FFLIC) examined the harsh disciplinary action RSD uses against its students. It found the rate of expulsion among RSD students in 2008 to be ten times the national average. Suspensions were also extremely high, with 29 percent of RSD students losing at least one instructional day — over four times the national average. The report quoted Thena Robinson, an attorney at the Southern Poverty Law Center, explaining that:

In most cases expulsions are a way to hide a school’s failure to address the educational needs of students. Our current education system is flawed by design as it focuses far too much on high stakes testing to measure academic success. As a result, schools are compelled to expel and push out “problem” students in an effort to meet state-wide performance standards.

The behavioral issues did not emerge from a vacuum:

In 2006, 42% of the students displaced by Hurricane Katrina had respiratory problems that might be linked to formaldehyde in FEMA trailers, and more than half had mental-health problems. In a 2009 article in The Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, researchers found that 9.3% children in hurricane- affected areas have a “serious emotional disturbance … that is directly attributable” to the storm.

In a joint statement with Michael Bromwich, director of the U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement, U.S. Interior Department Secretary Ken Salazar said, “This exploration plan meets the new standards for environmental review and marks another important step toward safer deepwater exploration.”

Bromwich added, “Shell’s submission has satisfied the heightened environmental standards that we are now applying and I am confident that other operators can satisfy the same standards.”

Shell intends to dig three exploratory wells. The company’s plan was the first to be approved of 14 proposals to re-initiate deepwater drilling in the Gulf. WGNO, New Orleans’ ABC affiliate, reports that the approval will likely lead to many more proposals coming in.

The news comes on the heels of reports of a 30-mile-long oil slick on the surface of the water off the coast of Louisiana. Late last week, several locals reported seeing what they thought was oil creating a sheen on the coastal waters outside New Orleans. Those early reports have since been confirmed by the appearance of petroleum and tar balls washing up on the shores of several barrier islands near New Orleans. Officials are puzzled as to the source of the oil and are currently testing samples to see if it might have a connection to the Deepwater Horizon spill, it it’s leakage from a Coast Guard oil well plugging project or if it’s from some other source.

Update: The AP:

The Coast Guard says a miles-long patch of discolored goop floating in the Gulf of Mexico appears to be caused by river sediment.

The Coast Guard tested the patch Sunday and found only trace amounts of petroleum that were well below the state of Louisiana’s standard for clean water. A news release says The Coast Guard believes the discoloration is the result of sediments brought down the Mississippi River.

In a post on the White House blog, Michael Bromwich, head of the newly formed Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, blasted a New Orleans Times-Picayune editorial that criticized the way inspections were conducted in the Gulf before the oil spill.

“These statements substituted rhetoric for factual accuracy and provided an extremely misleading picture of the roles of offshore drilling inspectors and more generally of the process by which our agency monitors and regulates offshore drilling,” Bromwich said.

What Bromwich doesn’t mention in the blog post, however, is that the Times-Picayune editorial is responding to allegations made by the national oil spill commission, which was formed by President Obama himself. Referring to conversations with inspectors, William Reilly, chairman of the oil spill commission, said last week:

When we asked about cementing and centralizers, they said very freely, ‘We don’t know about that stuff; we have to trust the companies. All they get is on-the-job training. It really is fairly startling, considering how sophisticated the industry has become. And the inspectors themselves are quite aware of their needs.

Yet none of this comes up in Bromwich’s post. Instead, he bashed the Times-Picayune, which has done fantastic reporting on the oil spill. Bromwich’s defensiveness is the latest indication that the White House is worried about the findings of the spill commission’s investigation. After a series of staff reports were released last month that criticized the White House’s response to the spill, Press Secretary Robert Gibbs denied many of the allegations and raised questions about the process.

In the post, Bromwich does acknowledge a number of shortcomings with the inspection process:

While our inspectors have been criticized for not routinely observing drilling operations, the fact is that our regulations don’t require it and our resources don’t permit it.  Unfortunately, it has taken the tragedy of Deepwater Horizon to awaken the country to the critical shortage of resources that has prevented us from having a more robust, aggressive, and sophisticated inspections process.

And later:

Our own personnel have repeatedly identified shortcomings in the inspections process but have been stymied in their efforts to reform and upgrade the process because of decades of neglect of the agency and its resource needs.

But Bromwich places some of the blame for these inadequacies on a lack of funding for new inspectors from Congress:

Although Congress has provided us with an extra $23 million to help address this deficit, we need the President’s full request of $100 million to be enacted so we can do the job the public deserves.

As I’ve reported before, there are a total of 56 inspectors in the Gulf. Though Congress gave BOEM $23 million to hire new inspectors, the hiring process could take a great deal of time.