Fifty-eight percent of New Mexico teachers are white, despite minorities constituting an overwhelming majority of the state’s student body.

The findings come out of a set of reports published by a Washington, D.C. think tank that examined the dearth of minority teachers in states having a student body less than 50 percent white.

New Mexico’s student-teacher race disparity ranked in the top 12 nationwide, according to the report. The state’s scored a “29,” meaning the percentage of minority students was 29 percentage points higher than the number of minority teachers.

California scored the highest: 72 percent of the state’s students are of color while only 29 percent of teachers identified as non-white. In Texas, Two-thirds of students are non-white yet only one-third of teachers have similar backgrounds.

Others studies also point to the educational benefits of having more teachers of color.

A 2004 paper  analyzing teacher racial composition and pupil test-results in Tennessee found a small boost in student performance on standardized tests when teachers of the same race taught the class. After four years of receiving instruction from a same-race teacher students improved test scores by a range of 8 to 12 percentage points. Those findings applied to white students as well.

More recently, a 2011 working study by economists focusing on a large community college in California pointed to strong gains by minority students taught by instructors from any minority background.

“Blacks, Hispanics, Asians, and Native Americans are 2.9 percentage points more likely to pass courses with instructors of similar background and 2.8 percentage points more likely to pass courses with underrepresented instructors,” it found.

The authors added: “These effects represent roughly  half of the total gaps in classroom outcomes between white and underrepresented minority students at the college. The effects are particularly large for Blacks. The class dropout rate relative to Whites is 6 percentage points lower for Black students when taught by a Black  instructor.”

Source: Center for American Progress

Center for American Progress, based in Washington, D.C., published two studies: one that provides a state-by-state analysis of teachers of color, noting that while 40 percent of K-12 students are non-white, only 17 percent of teachers share those characteristics. The second study proposed solutions for expanding recruitment and retention of qualified minority instructors.

“While our schools are very diverse, our students aren’t seeing that diversity reflected in their teachers,” said Saba Bireda, one of the two reports’ writers, during a conference highlighting the reports’ findings. “Teachers of color are role models to students of color. They are real-life examples of a career path towards teaching.”

Using 2008 data compiled by the federal National Center for Education Statistics called Schools and Staffing Survey, the CAP researchers found 20 states have gaps of 25 percent or more between minority teachers and students.

California leads all states: 72 percent of students are of color while only 29 percent of teachers identified as non-white. Two-thirds of Texas students are non-white yet only one third of teachers share similar backgrounds.

Ulrich Boser, who compiled the national data, spoke starkly about the results. “Diversity is the litmus test for modern society,” he said.

Others studies also point to the educational benefits of having more teachers of color.

A 2004 paper  analyzing teacher racial composition and pupil test-results in Tennessee found a small boost in student performance on standardized tests when taught by teachers of the same race. After four years of receiving instruction from a same-race teacher, students improved test scores by a range of 8 to 12 percentage points. Inconveniently, those findings applied to white students as well.

More recently, a 2011 working study by economists focusing on a large community college in California pointed to strong gains by minority students taught by instructors from any minority background.

“Blacks, Hispanics, Asians, and Native Americans are 2.9 percentage points more likely to pass courses with instructors of similar background and 2.8 percentage points more likely to pass courses with underrepresented instructors.”

The authors add: “These effects represent roughly  half of the total gaps in classroom outcomes between white and underrepresented minority students at the college. The effects are particularly large for Blacks.  The class dropout rate relative to Whites is 6 percentage points lower for Black students when taught by a Black  instructor.”

But a combination of employer bias, undesirable working conditions and a lag in numbers of minorities with college degrees explains why white teachers are over-represented in U.S. classrooms.

In 2004, researchers at Harvard conducted a famous study  partly titled, “Are Emily and Greg more employable than Lakisha and Jamal?” It determined job applicants with more caucasian-sounding names receive 50 percent more call-backs from potential employers than those with black-sounding names.

High-school graduation rates favor whites to blacks and Hispanics by roughly 20 percentage points, with some 77 percent of whites having graduated in the class of 2007. College completion rates show much of the same, with whites wrapping up their college studies more frequently (by 12 to 20 percentage points).

CAP’s study also found minority teachers are generally less satisfied with their work conditions, with whites showing more approval (78 percent) than blacks (70 percent.) And while the pay gap along racial lines is modest, with whites earning $49,570 to $48,890 and $49,260 for blacks and Hispanics, respectively, satisfaction with pay differed wildly: 53 percent of caucasians were happy with their pay versus 37 percent for blacks and 46 percent for Hispanics. Much of that disparity, the researchers reason, is the result of teacher placement: whites tend to stand in front of more affluent pupils, while minority instructors are more likely to be placed in schools with many low-income and high-risk students.

However, the shortfall of minority teachers should not be blamed on demographics, alone, says Boser during a brief interview with TAI.

“I would argue that the the question is not the relative percentages of graduation rates, but the absolute numbers of available potential teachers, and I do think that a sufficient pool of well-qualified potential teachers of color exists in most areas.”

Source: The New Teacher Project via Center for American Progress

Non-traditional accreditation programs are one way recruiters can bolster the number of minority educators in classrooms across the country, the researchers argue. So far, 25 percent of Hispanic, and 27 of black, school teachers have come through alternative pipelines, compared to 11 percent of whites.

The New Teacher Project, which has placed 37,000 teachers in high-needs urban schools, tries to respond to the demographic needs of school districts by recruiting mid-career and older college graduates. TNTP estimates some 37 percent of their fellows, teachers who receive multi-year on-going education towards a teaching certificate, are of color. Its various fellowship projects are also known to attract minority candidates with professional backgrounds in math and the sciences — despite usually taking pay cuts to enter the teaching profession.

Source: Teach for America via Center for American Progress (percentages are rounded)

And unlike fellows of Teach For America, a teacher accreditation program that boasts of recruiting young graduates from top national universities, TNTP fellows teach longer, especially minority candidates. 60.5 percent of TFA teachers continue working as public school instructors after their two year commitment. 35.5 percent taught after four years. Comparatively, 72 percent of TNTP fellows come back for a fourth year of teaching. Among blacks and Latinos, 78 percent remain.

Leaders of non-traditional teacher programs sharing their experiences at the CAP event placed additional emphasis on retention. “I want to sure [new teachers] are growing in their profession,” said Rachelle Rogers-Ard, a teacher who manages a recruitment and retention program in Oakland  that seeks out teachers of color. “We’re recruiting folks because we want them to remain in education.”

But targeting minority populations to staff classrooms does not mean the instructors will be highly qualified or effective. “We wouldn’t support lowering certification standards, they are really low to start with,” says Sandi Jacobs of the National Council on Teacher Quality, an advocacy group that is critical of teacher assessment standards nationwide.” Still, she sees value in alternative accreditation routes to help add more diversity in the teaching profession. “There are things that alt routes do that help remove … barriers for anyone, specifically to promote that diversity.”

Rogers-Ard, however, thinks nurturing new talent is an aspect of education many critics of the teaching profession overlook: “That first year doctor might not be as effective as a fifth year physician.”

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.

Leaders from a dozen or so faith affiliations submitted the open letter Wednesday as pastors and rabbis lobbied lawmakers. Religious leaders denounced in the letter the “hate-filled rhetoric” surrounding the debate over attempts to repeal the law.

Holly Beaumont, Director of Interfaith Worker Justice New Mexico, said around 115 pastors, clergy, rabbis and other religious leaders signed the letter.

Religious leaders have proven a strong ally to immigrant rights activists seeking to prevent the rise in immigration enforcement legislation across the country. In Alabama, an immigration enforcement law of unprecedented scale has been greeted with protests which include many religious leaders, and the ongoing lawsuit to block implementation of the law has multiple bishops from different faiths in the state as plaintiffs. In Georgia, a similar law prompted religious leaders to embark on a self-described “pilgrimage” across the state to spread awareness about the law’s potential effects and their belief that religious people should oppose it.

On reading comprehension, the 1.65 million students who filled out answer sheets earned a mean score of 497 out of a possible 800 — a three-point drop off from 2010. Comparatively, the results in 2005 showed a mean score of 507.

Here is a break down of the scores compared to previous years, provided by College Board, with CR standing for critical reading, and M and W standing for math and writing:

Accounting for the declining scores is the growth in the diversity of students participating in the exam. The College Board wrote in a press release:

And just as school performance is linked to socio-economic conditions, so goes the trend among test takers who qualified for a fee-waiver of the exam, an indicator of lower economic means:

Brian Stecher, Senior Social Scientist at the RAND Corporation, told The American Independent a researcher’s analytical strategy for looking at how factors might have been related is to consider the change in the pool of students taking the SATs.

“As the population that takes the test expands beyond, say, the most successful and most college-ready, and includes a larger number of students, then we can expect the scores to decline,” Stecher said.

He added, however, that the relationship between the volume of students and the variation in mean scores is not a fixed one. He said researchers should evaluate whether the rate of increased diversity among test takers is in sync with the rate in decline of the scores. Stecher also pointed out the ACT took over the SAT this year in student participation, skewing historical trends.

Students enrolled in advanced courses performed better on average than the rest of the pool. The College Board provided the following numbers:

Some organizations took the published results as an opportunity to criticize the education landscape at large. Bob Schaeffer of FairTest.org said, “[P]roponents of [No Child Left Behind] and similar state-level testing programs promised that overall achievement would improve while score gaps would narrow. Precisely the opposite has taken place.”

He added: “Policymakers need to embrace very different policies if they are committed to real education reform.”

A press release by the group expounded on Schaeffer’s criticism:

A FairTest analysis shows that overall SAT averages dropped significantly under the NCLB federal testing mandate. At the same time, gaps between Whites, Asians, and historically disadvantaged African-Americans and Hispanics have been growing larger. ACT scores, made public last month, demonstrated similar patterns.

But Matthew Di Carlo of the Albert Shanker Institute warns against drawing too many conclusions from the SATs.

“These tests are voluntary, and the sample of students who choose to take one or both can be very different from one year to the next in terms of their demographic, academic and other characteristics,” Di Carlo told TAI. “Overall score changes between years, especially small changes, might just as easily be due to this self-selection as to any ‘real’ change in aptitude of U.S. students.”

Beyond the increased diversity of the test pool, the College Board pointed to additional good news: 43 percent of test takers scored above a 1550 cumulatively, the score the firm says separates students who are likely to perform well in college to those who will struggle. Breaking that threshold, the press release explains, means students have a 65 percent change of averaging a B- or better in their first year of college.

His report begins with an example of a student creating a “Whites-Only” scholarship under what he calls the “myth” that minority students are catered to with financial rewards on a non-merit basis. He argues the outcry against perceived unfair treatment from a small number of white students belies the data.

Kantrowitz continues:

These “Whites Only” scholarships are usually created by students who are frustrated at their own inability to find and win scholarships. Nationwide, only about 1 in 20 (5.5%) of undergraduate students and about 1 in 8 (12.1%) of full-time Bachelor’s degree students at 4-year colleges and universities pay for college with private scholarships. The average amount per recipient used per year is only about $2,500 to $3,000.

While the odds of winning a private scholarship are somewhat higher for Caucasian students, most families tend to overestimate their eligibility for merit-based scholarships.

A chart breaking down funds received by race:

Mark Kantrowitz Publisher of Fastweb.com and FinAid.org

The report does note a pivot in distribution when need-based awards come into play, like the Pell Grant. Kantrowitz writes:

Minority students receive more need-based grants because minority students are more likely to be low income than Caucasian students. Of students who submitted the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA), 83.0% of African-American students, 79.6% of Latino students and 69.5% of Asian students are low-income, compared with only 55.3% of Caucasian students.

Elsewhere, federal data tracking education and benchmarks like high school dropout rates and college acceptance rates along racial lines show a gap in performance among Hispanics, African-Americans and Caucasians.

According to state-by-state high school graduation rates for 2008-2009 published by the U.S. Department of Education, the most recent year for which data was collected, 82 percent of white 9^th graders graduate from high school, compared to 63.5 percent for African-Americans, and 65 percent for Hispanics. Asian Americans lead the field with a graduation rate of 91.8 percent.

The department also compiles data on all persons over the age 25 who possess a degree by race. Among blacks, 17 percent have earned a bachelor’s degree or higher; whites 30.4 percent; Hispanics 12.6 percent; Asians 49.7 percent; while the country on a whole has 27.4 percent of its over-25 population possessing a bachelor’s degree or higher according to 2011 numbers spanning 2006-2008.

MLive.com reports the announcement came in Southfield:

“We need the best, and that’s why I’m proud to be here today to endorse Pete Hoekstra,” Snyder said this morning at a press conference in Southfield. “It’s a great opportunity because he’s a person — through the campaign process — I gained a lot of respect for in recognition that he is the right person for this position.”

Hoekstra is a former U.S. Congressman who left Congress to run for governor last year. Snyder bested Hoekstra, former Michigan Attorney General Mike Cox, and Oakland County Sheriff Mike Bouchard.

During the his campaign to be governor, Hoekstra brought a wide range of extreme right wing political activists to the state to stump for him. He also admitted to participating in activities with the shadowy The Family group.

The GOP primary to challenge U.S. Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-Lansing) is a field of five candidates. The candidates include Detroit charter school executive Clark Durant, former Kent County Probate Judge Randy Hekman, Roscommon businessman Peter Konetchy and Midland resident Gary Glenn, president of the American Family Association of Michigan.

State Democrats were quick to respond to the endorsement Monday morning:

“It is going to take a lot more than an endorsement from one of the most unpopular Governor’s in the country to make the people in Michigan support a Congressman-turned lobbyist like Pete Hoekstra. Even conservatives are troubled by Hoekstra’s support of bailout money paying for the bonuses of Wall Street CEOs and his long track record of backing tax giveaways for special interests like oil companies. Does the Governor seriously think a lobbyist is the best person to fight for the people of Michigan in Washington?”

In the Houston Chronicle, Veasey complained that “statewide, 90 percent of the growth has been minority. …(Republicans) figured out how to draw another seat for voters who are shrinking in population.”

“Minorities accounted for almost all of the state’s population growth during the past 10 years, which resulted in Texas gaining four new seats in the U.S. House of Representatives,” the Chronicle reported. Veasey’s suit argues the state’s map should include one new Hispanic-majority district, and one with an African-Americans majority.

Under the 1965 U.S. Voting Rights Act, any redistricting plan in Texas must be submitted for federal approval either to the Department of Justice or to a federal court, under a preclearance requirement of the law that’s increasingly contentious, as Stateline pointed out in an in-depth piece today.

That requirement, in Section 5 of the law, applies to Texas and at least part of 15 other states where, as the Pew Center on the States’ Stateline explains, there was a history of “low levels of voter participation and rules in place designed to reduce voter participation” — at least in the 1960s and 1970s, when the law took shape.

It’s the same process that Texas’ new voter ID law must clear. Those who’ll be challenging that law are waiting for Texas to submit it for federal preclearance so they can challenge it.

As Stateline explains, to clear the process, a state with a redistricting plan must prove it’s avoided watering down minority voting power in its new map. In the past, states would choose one path to preclearance or the other, but this year at least two states went for both at once:

This is a major change from previous rounds of redistricting and it comes with a politically loaded subtext: Conservative lawmakers mistrust the Obama administration’s Justice Department. They’re looking to either pressure Justice to approve their plans or to sidestep it in court.

Stateline goes on to explain why this year’s preclearance process has a whole new set of political issues at play, not least of all in Texas, where mistrust of the Obama administration runs deep:

For one thing, for the first time since the Voting Rights Act passed, a Democrat is in the White House during redistricting. While career staff in the Justice Department make preclearance recommendations, political appointees can overrule them — as George W. Bush’s Justice Department did for Texas and Georgia maps last decade. One of the big questions this cycle is whether the Obama administration will interpret the law differently than the Bush administration did.

Meanwhile, for the first time, most Southern states are firmly in the hands of Republicans: Alabama, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Texas all are preclearance states and in all of them Republicans are in complete control of redistricting. Already, these Republican lawmakers are sparring with the Obama administration on health care, environmental rules and a host of other issues.

Texas hasn’t announced which route it’ll take to preclearance — Department of Justice approval, a federal court ruling or both.

Update at 4:29: Attorney General Greg Abbott just announced Texas had submitted its plan for preclearance today, doubling down and submitting plans to both the Department of Justice and U.S. District Court in Washington:

By informally submitting the State’s redistricting plans – along with relevant documents and data about those plans – to DOJ, the State is attempting to ensure that the Civil Rights Division and Attorney General Eric Holder have the information necessary to confirm that Texas has fully satisfied the Voting Rights Act’s requirements and is therefore entitled to preclearance.

While the federal government has approved two other states’ plans this year, Texas’ map is even “more complex” than others, Stateline writes:

The debate centers on Hispanic voters, but there’s no agreement on how many Hispanics have to be in one district to elect the Hispanic community’s candidate of choice.

While Congress extended Section 5, and the preclearance rule, for another 25 years pair, a pair of suits, in Shelby County, Ala., and Kinston, N.C., could force a Supreme Court decision that would put an end to preclearance entirely.

In one blog post, AFA’s director of issue analysis for government and public policy Bryan Fischer, claimed government welfare encourages the African-American community to “rut like rabbits.”

Despite the ensuing controversy over those and other racially charged remarks from AFA leaders, 11 of the prayer event’s 58 endorsers are black. When contacted by the Texas Independent, some said they hadn’t been aware of the AFA’s involvement or Fischer’s comments, but that they weren’t bothered and hoped the event could be an occasion to pray for the end of racism.

Fischer made his remarks in an April blog post on the AFA website, “Jesus groomed his apostles for public office“:

Welfare has destroyed the African-American family by telling young black women that husbands and fathers are unnecessary and obsolete. Welfare has subsidized illegitimacy by offering financial rewards to women who have more children out of wedlock. We have incentivized fornication rather than marriage, and it’s no wonder we are now awash in the disastrous social consequences of people who rut like rabbits.

And children are the ones who get chewed up. Welfare, as Walter Williams has pointed out, has done what slavery, racism and Jim Crow laws could not do: destroy the black family.

Fischer later changed that language in the post, as Right Wing Watch noted, perhaps in response to charges of racism, supplanting the phrase ‘rut like rabbits’ with a broader demographic of those affected by welfare:

We have incentivized fornication rather than marriage, and it’s no wonder we are now awash in the disastrous social consequences of those who engage in random and reckless promiscuity, whether they are Caucasian, Hispanic, or African-American.

The post drew criticism from the Southern Poverty Law Center and various media outlets, adding to Fischer’s prolific record of targeting minority and non-Christian communities, including homosexuals, Muslims, Jews and Native Americans.

“Response” endorser Timothy Johnson, founder and national chairman of the Fredrick Douglass Foundation, a North Carolina public policy organization that promotes free market thinking and limited government, told the Texas Independent he was unfamiliar with AFA, its controversial commentary or its sponsorship of the prayer event.

“I was not invited by AFA. I didn’t even know they were sponsoring the event, but I don’t think it would have made a difference,” he said. “Praying for this country is more important than the singular comments made to certain groups.”

Johnson, who is black, said the focus of the Aug. 6 event is simply to address the challenges facing the nation.

As a liaison to black, faith-based organizations and conservative candidates and elected officials, Johnson said his organization routinely diverges from opinions expressed by the Republican Party. He said he is accustomed to working with groups he may not agree with.

“Some things can be said with better word choice but not every statement that comes out as derogatory is wrong. Some statements that come across as offensive should not be taken offensively by the entire community,” said Johnson. “We too often get caught up assuming all minorities will be offended by certain comments directed at them.”

Pastor Fred Berry of the Los Angeles-based Azusa Street Mission, another “Response” endorser, told the Independent he is also unfamiliar with AFA.

Berry, who is black, said he joined the event, in part, to pray for the removal of deep-seated racism and the “old ways” that have separated people. But he said he agrees with Fischer that welfare has done a “great deal of damage” to black families.

“This is a typical statement echoed by a lot of people, I am not surprised by it. My concern would be if it is meant as a racial slur or as a statement of fact,” said Berry. “Welfare has been more destructive to the African-American community than slavery, racism or all the other ‘isms’ because it has taken away the culture of work–families were stronger before welfare.”

Despite the controversy, Berry said the call to prayer is more important than comments or opinions expressed by AFA, however offensive they may seem.

Rev. Carolyn Stovall Gilbert, president and founder of Texas-based Missionaries With The Vision, was also not familiar with AFA or its comments directed toward minority communities. Gilbert, another “Response” endorser who is black, did not wish to directly address Fischer’s statements. She would rather, she said, focus on prayer that will “repent us all.”

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.