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Nevada's SB 543 Fixing funding

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Interesting article

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School is not the only place helping close the achievement gaps.

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If a mother needs after-school child care to work extra hours but can't afford to pay for it, who is responsible for helping her figure it out? What about helping families find housing after a fire? A summer job for a high school student?

Should city officials step in? Or the school district?

In Salem, Mass., the historic city of about 43,000 on the state's north shore, city and school leaders say it should be both.

"The wheelhouse is the schools," said Kim Driscoll, Salem's mayor. "But this is really about how do we support youth, how do we have thriving young people in our community and make sure they are achieving at their highest potential?"

Salem-and a handful of other small- to mid-size cities-is blurring the lines between the role the school district and the city play in children's lives. It's main vehicle for that work is City Connects, a student-support system that city and school officials rolled out in pre-K-8 schools last year.

Coordinators sit down with each child's teacher and review his or her strengths and weaknesses at the beginning of the school year, then develop an "individualized student success plan" based on the student's needs.

The customized plans can include housing assistance, tutoring, or after-school activities like karate.

The idea is that focusing on student's individual needs in four areas-academics, health, family, and social-emotional well-being-and matching them with the right kinds of assistance and enrichment programs, will lead to more successful citizens in the long run.

Weaving a seamless and tailored web of services for children and families inside and outside of school has been the central tenet of an experiment underway in Salem and five other communities over the past two years.

The cities-Somerville and Newton, Mass.; Louisville, Ky.; Providence, R.I.; and Oakland, Calif.-set off in 2016 on an experimental endeavor with the Education Redesign Lab at the Harvard Graduate School of Education to rethink how they support children and families, in some cases from birth through college. (Newton dropped out of the program before the pilot ended earlier this year.)

The program, now in its second phase, encourages city and district teams to craft customized education plans for students, focus on students' health and social-emotional well-being, and create a governance structure-a "children's cabinet"-comprised of officials from K-12, government, philanthropy, higher education, business, and nonprofits to work on a kind of social compact for children.

Each community chose different priorities for the first phase.

Providence, for example, emphasized summer learning and summer youth employment among its many initiatives, while Louisville pulled together already existing programs, including a goal of adding 55,000 graduates with bachelors and associates degrees by 2020, into one cohesive "cradle to career" initiative.

In the second phase, the Redesign Lab expects the cities to double down on the individual education plans for students, similar to what Salem is rolling out through City Connects.

A Citywide Approach

Paul Reville, the director of Harvard's Education Redesign Lab and a former Massachusetts education secretary who is spearheading the program, said that for too long education reform has focused nearly exclusively on what happens inside the school building, without an equal amount of attention on the children.

"You look at the three ingredients in education-it's the child, it's curriculum, and it's instruction," Reville said. "It's the transaction between the child, the teacher, and the curriculum that's really the core business of education."

But, Reville continued, "We treat the child as a given in the equation. They are just there, and we have to educate them. Instead of saying, 'How do they show up? What's going on in the lives of children that influences them and, in some cases, impedes them from taking advantage of the optimized curriculum and instruction?' "

As important as improving schooling for all students is, Reville argues that civic and education leaders need to also prioritize equal access for poor and rural students outside of school-opportunities such as after-school sports and activities, summer camps, and summer jobs for high school students, he said.

"We are not saying that school isn't important," said Reville. "It's important."

The concept of weaving together city and school services is not exactly novel.

New York City's Harlem Children's Zone and Say Yes to Education are just two examples of initiatives that take a holistic approach to student success. NBA superstar LeBron James generated a lot of buzz last month when he opened his I Promise School in Akron, Ohio, that will provide a robust array of services including a food pantry for families and General Educational Development test and employment assistance for parents.

And a handful of states, including Virginia, Rhode Island, and Louisiana have children's cabinets, which are tasked with collaborating on a range of issues that affect children and families.

What's different here is the citywide approach to children's well-being that extends beyond school walls, with the mayors using their bully pulpit and resources of the cities to play a leading role. A key part of the mission is challenging longstanding inequities and leveling the playing field, reducing achievement gaps, and improving outcomes for low-income children.

Julia Freeland Fisher, the director of education research at the Clayton Christensen Institute, which studies disruptive innovation, agrees with the premise that education reform predicated solely on reworking the academic model was incomplete. There's "plentiful" evidence that nonacademic variables also shape students' learning outcomes, she said.

But for those integrated student-support systems to work, particularly in closing achievement gaps, teachers must be an integral part of the program, Fisher said.

In the successful models that she has studied, Fisher said, teachers, by virtue of "knowing more about what's happening in their students' lives and having these additional resources to address potential barriers to learning, their academic decisions can actually be sensitive to the nonacademic factors present in student's lives."

Without deep teacher involvement, such programs run the risk of layering services upon services, with no connection to what teachers are doing in the classroom.

"I think the wisdom of these integrated student support models is that we are trying to break down silos between school, community, home, after-school, social services," Fisher said. "If teachers are not part of that loop, I think you risk putting dollars and a lot of energy into all sorts of services that are great for students but that don't translate into better test scores necessarily or higher graduation rates."

Community Support

Reville and the mayors involved in the Harvard experiment known as By All Means say their citywide approach to supporting students and families is critical, particularly at a time when the federal education department has scaled back its local footprint and the absence of "education governors" in the mold of former South Carolina Gov. Richard Riley and former President Bill Clinton when he was governor of Arkansas.

And many of the cities involved in the By All Means program already had the backbone of such initiatives in place before Reville came calling.

For superintendents, having backing from the mayor and key local players affords them more leverage and credibility when seeking community support, including funding, for programs.

"It's easier to secure funding from investors when they see that this is not just a pet project of the superintendent," said Margarita Ruiz, the schools chief in Salem.

For Libby Schaaf, the Oakland mayor, the school-city partnership is an equity issue.

The city's big project through By All Means is known as The Oakland Promise, made up of several smaller initiatives to support children from birth through college.

One effort, Brilliant Baby, provides up to $500 toward a college fund for babies born to low-income families as well and up to $500 in financial incentives to their parents.

Another initiative, Future Centers, provides college-assistance offices at select middle and high schools that help students with such tasks as filling out financial-aid applications, going on college visits, preparing for interviews with admissions officials, and seeking scholarships.

A third is a college fund, the East Bay College Fund, which provides scholarships, peer mentors, and counseling to students during their college careers.

Nearly $8.5 million in scholarships had been awarded to Oakland students through the East Bay College Fund, with a goal of increasing the awards to more than $20 million and impacting about 10,000 students by 2025. The city has similarly ambitious plans to expand the initiatives in Oakland Promise.

"It's always been our intention that we touch every single public school student in our entire city, and that's a lot," said Schaaf, whose city hired a "sustainability consultant" to help figure out how to keep Oakland Promise going in the long term.

"We are tired of programs that only serve a few. We are tired of nibbling around the edges," she said.

The program has already brought in multimillion-dollar donations, including from Kaiser-Permanente, which is based in the city, and Salesforce founder and CEO Marc Benioff and his wife, Lynne.

Oakland hopes to fund the Promise programs through a combination of philanthropy, a quasi-endowment that it hopes to grow to $50 million, and public money, from the city, county, state, and, possibly, funds from a November ballot measure to raise taxes on middle- and upper-income property owners to support children's initiatives in the city.

Schaaf points to students like Jailene Lopez, 18, as tangible evidence that the programs are changing lives.

Lopez, the first in her family to go to college, said she would not have been able to navigate the complex application process without the help of counselors at the Future Center at Castlemont High School. She started classes at the University of California, Berkeley, last month.

Future Center counselors helped her complete financial-aid applications, find a school that best fit her interests and background, and prep her for scholarship interviews when those were necessary, she said.

Her parents, who had big dreams for their daughter, appreciated the weekly calls from counselors to provide updates and remind them of approaching deadlines.

But the biggest benefit "was helping me get into that mindset that I do belong here," she said of being on the Berkeley campus.

In its 2018 report on Oakland Promise, the city said that students who attended schools with Future Centers were more likely to apply to at least one postsecondary institution when compared with students in schools without such centers. And four-year college-enrollment rates for African-American students rose 14 percent between the 2014-15 school year and the 2015-16 at schools with Future Centers, according to the report.

Part of the problem with sizing up the impact of the By All Means work in its first two years is that the communities chose to focus on different aspects of child development.

Measuring Effectiveness

But officials can point to individual programs that they say are making a difference in students' lives. In Providence, for example, where about 21 percent of elementary students scored proficient in reading and math in the 2016-17 school year, officials say students who have attended a free summer learning program run by the Boston-based nonprofit Building Educated Leaders for Life (BELL) notched important gains in math and reading. Students, who are assessed at the beginning and end of the program, gained the equivalent of two months of literacy and three months of math, according to BELL. But the program still serves only a small number of students in the city-fewer than 500 last year and 525 this year.

Reville of the Harvard Redesign Lab said that he never expected to see fast academic results after the first two years-he describes the initiative as "generational work" that takes time. Rather, he said, those initial years were about creating the environment and systems for the school-community partnerships, coming up with financing the programs, and forging the structure to ensure the partnerships outlive current mayors and superintendents.

And there have been bumps along the way, he said.

Figuring out who should serve in a children's cabinet and ensuring the members reflect the communities they serve were two.

Another is data-sharing among district, city, and community groups without running afoul of student-privacy laws. And perhaps the most vexing: keeping efforts going strong when leadership turns over. It was one of the reasons that Newton withdrew from the program not long after a new mayor was elected.

But in Louisville, Mayor Greg Fischer and Martin Pollio, the still-new superintendent of the Jefferson County school district, are moving full steam ahead despite the early departure last year of the district's former schools chief.

Even with the threat of a state takeover of the district earlier this year, Fischer said that the By All Means initiatives will put the school system on firmer footing.

Salem officials acknowledge they are still figuring out how to optimize their City Connects work. But the city is proud of strides it has made so far, including brokering a deal with a local hospital, North Shore Community Health, to provide outpatient therapy, case management, and referral at school sites.

Officials are working on a local ride-sharing service to ensure that students can get to and from after-school and sports programs. The children's cabinet is contemplating a citywide report card that will provide a snapshot of how children are doing on a variety of indicators, including health, academics, access to food, and transportation.

The City Connects program comes close to what By All Means project leaders hope the teams in other cities will craft in the second phase.

Students are placed in "tiers," depending on the level of need after they are assessed. With teachers, coordinators probe into understanding children's academic profile, asking about favorite subjects, their understanding of concepts taught in class, their track record in finishing homework, and if they appear happy at school. Similarly, coordinators find out if a child has friends, who he or she sits with at lunch, and if the child has a peer he or she seeks out for activities.

Once supports are arranged for students, coordinators monitor progress to see whether they are receiving services and if those are having the intended effect. Students with greater needs get more attention, but the program is meant to be for all students, said Ellen Wingard, the supervisor of City Connects Salem and student and family engagement.

Within a decade, when the program is available in all of Salem's schools, a high school City Connects coordinator would be able to see not just a student's academic record but also the activities the student has participated in since childhood, city services that the student and family used over the years, and challenges the student encountered in their educational journey. (To protect student privacy, information in the student's individual success plan is not shared with the school's principal.) That fuller picture of the child will allow the schools to better serve students, she said.

Brad Maloon, a City Connects coordinator at Collins Middle School, served as a school adjustment counselor-a kind of social worker-before taking on the new role. He said the program has allowed him to spot problems before they escalate.

As a counselor, he was often reacting to crises, which was not always the best approach, he said.

"You're solving problems, but those problems don't need to exist in the first place if certain structures are in place," he said.

Accounting for Every Need

To protect student privacy, the district has adopted a consent process that puts parents in the driver's seat in determining whether, what, and how much information they want to share about their children with agencies that are working with the city's schools.

The program has created a database of resources, agencies, organizations and services-more than 100 to date-that coordinators can tap into.

Some of the new partnerships with community organizations came from surveys and sit-downs with parents.

"It's just much more efficient, and it's created lines of communication and relationships," Wingard said. "And it doesn't rely just on relationships to get things done. It relies on a system."

Not all principals were on board with City Connects in the beginning. For one, many were afraid they would lose a staff member to the role (the district restructured positions and gave the school adjustment counselors the option to apply to become City Connects coordinators.) Principals like Thomas Milaschewski, a former principal of Bates Elementary School, felt they were already doing what City Connects was promising.

Before using City Connects, if one of his students had been affected by a fire, Milaschewski would have been the one racing around to find housing, an after-school program, transportation, or food for the student. Now, he no longer has to do that.

"There was no way for me to be able to do that effectively for all of our kids across the building, and I don't have the background in counseling or in understanding the community at the level that our City Connects coordinator does," he said. The intensive student reviews have allowed the school to pinpoint issues with children who were doing well academically and may not have been flagged for assistance because of an issue at home.

The program also changed the culture in the building to one in which everyone thinks of the well-being of the whole child, not just his or her academic performance. Milaschewski expects that will pay off in the long run.

"The primary reason is that we're more proactive and consistent in meeting all the needs of our kids," he said.

"If a kid comes to school hungry, it's going to be hard to learn. If a kid comes to school with some social and emotional challenges that aren't being supported, they are not going to learn. If a child is coming to school and they didn't sleep at night because there was an issue in their home, they are not going to be as successful academically.

"I think that by having this kind of support for all of our kids and this focus on all of those needs-I have a hard time believing that wouldn't make a huge difference on academic outcomes."

Published in Print: September 12, 2018, as Thriving Students Are the Goal of City, District Partnerships

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In Some Cities, Closing Achievement Gaps Is Not for Schools to Fix Alone

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If a mother needs after-school child care to work extra hours but can't afford to pay for it, who is responsible for helping her figure it out? What about helping families find housing after a fire? A summer job for a high school student? Should city officials step in?

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I found this TedTalk. I haven't looked too much ahead, so this may be a talk we see in the future. But I found it informative.

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Empowering Children through Urban Education: Christopher Emdin at TEDxColumbiaSIPA

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I found this article by Gloria Ladson-Billings to be useful on the topic of urban school reform.  The title is:  "Yes, But How Do We Do It?:  Practicing Culturally Relevant Pedagogy"  This site includes a link to the full text.  https://digitalcommons.georgiasouthern.edu/esed5234-master/37/

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What the military might teach public schools

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Commentary

Three decades ago, a panel appointed by then-U.S. Secretary of Education Terrel H. Bell issued a scathing critique of America's schools in a report titled A Nation at Risk. It triggered an avalanche of top-down and bottom-up reforms that engulf public schools to this day. While the achievement gap between African-American and Latino students and their white peers has narrowed, and high school graduation rates are climbing, the achievement gap between poor and rich children has widened significantly.

And far too many children continue to struggle. Roughly half of black and Latino 4th graders score "below basic" in reading, according to the 2013 National Assessment of Educational Progress. Minority students are disproportionately disciplined, suspended, and held back in grade. The suspension rate among students with disabilities, which includes those with learning difficulties, is outrageous. Disaffected youngsters still drop out in droves.

The modest gains of those students prompted the Schott Foundation for Public Education in 2012, in its "Urgency of Now" report, to venture this arresting projection: "[A]t the current pace of progress, ... it would take nearly 50 years for black males to secure the same high school graduation rates as their white male peers."

Students who struggle perpetually in school often lack the social and emotional skills needed to succeed academically. They act out, interact poorly with teachers and classmates, pay scattered attention in class, and skip school. Social and emotional competence matters in the workplace as well; employers depend on their employees to possess self-esteem and interpersonal skills; feel pride in work accomplished; and understand goal-setting, self-motivation, and teamwork.

Low-income and minority children are more likely to exhibit academic indifference and behavioral difficulties associated with social and emotional deficits. They face life hazards, such as poverty, divorce, maltreatment, and neglect, that undermine healthy development. Instead of growing out of these problems, they increasingly disengage and eventually drop out of school. And the presence of large numbers of such students can overwhelm teachers who face withering pressure to improve test scores.

Research and real-world experience show that student interventions focused on fortifying social and emotional skills can help improve academic performance and behavior in school and beyond. If asked which American institution embraces this robust commitment to the academic and social development of young people, the U.S. military is probably the least likely to come to mind. Yet the military enjoys a well-deserved reputation for reaching, teaching, and training young people who are rudderless and drifting through life.

One military initiative that offers guidance to young people is the National Guard Youth ChalleNGe Program. A civilian intervention program devoted to turning around the aspirations and life prospects of high school dropouts, it treats academic and social development as coequal objectives. The basic experience consists of a 22-week residential stint on a military base.

Currently, ChalleNGe operates in 27 states, Puerto Rico, and the District of Columbia, serving roughly 5,000 16- to 18-year-olds a year. Since its inception in 1993, more than 115,000 former dropouts have graduated from the program.

While the program attracts high school dropouts from all walks of life, these young people share certain characteristics, including disenchantment with school, truancy, disruptive and violent behavior, disrespect for teachers, family conflict, poverty, parental and personal substance abuse, drug dealing, gang membership, and physical abuse.

Eight core components reflect the program's commitment to academic and social development. The "academic excellence" component prepares students to obtain a high school diploma or GED certificate or, at a bare minimum, become functionally literate and employable. Through leadership and "followership" training, cadets earn opportunities to lead their peers, while also learning to heed the instructions of their teachers and mentors. "Responsible citizenship" covers the rights and obligations of citizens, voting, the role of government, and the legal system.

Cadets devote at least 40 hours to community service, such as building a walking path in a park. These activities provide opportunities for experiential learning, where the participants practice their reading, math, planning, and teamwork skills. Military researchers have found that, compared with general literacy instruction, this kind of learning-to-do instruction generates rapid and robust gains in job-related literacy that endure over time.

Through instruction in life-coping skills, participants develop techniques for dealing with anger, stress, and frustration; handling peer pressure; and making constructive choices. Job-skills instruction focuses on exploring career options, developing résumés, filling out job applications, and preparing for interviews. There are also physical-fitness and health- and hygiene-components to the program.

The dual mission of fostering academic and social development drives the staffing configuration. The unique feature of ChalleNGe is the "cadre" staff of military veterans, retirees, and National Guard reservists who are considered the heart of the program. They sit in classrooms and patrol the corridors to keep order so that cadets can learn and teachers can teach. They listen to and counsel the young people. They make sure homework gets done, correct wayward behavior on the spot, and ensure that cadets dress appropriately.

A random-assignment evaluation by the nonpartisan education and policy-research organization MDRC provides convincing evidence that ChalleNGe works. Roughly two years after graduating, cadets were much more likely than members of a control group to have obtained high school diplomas and GED certificates. They were also more likely to have received vocational training, earned college credits, or enrolled in college. And 58 percent of participants held jobs, compared with 51 percent of nonparticipants. They also earned an average of 20 percent more annually.

Although MDRC reported no significant differences in criminal activity or civic engagement, there are promising indications from some sites that ChalleNGe may help curb teenage pregnancy.

The RAND Corp. conducted a cost-benefit analysis using MDRC's results and concluded that ChalleNGe pays tangible dividends to society. In fact, per cadet, the estimated return on investment is 166 percent. For every dollar spent on the program, it generates $2.66 in benefits to program graduates and society. (Actually, RAND believes that the payoff might even be greater, because the benefits of higher education attainment are not fully captured by the program outcomes in the MDRC evaluation.)

An MDRC survey of ChalleNGe graduates in conjunction with its three-year report revealed that, like other young people their age, they labored to gain and maintain their footing in a job market ravaged by the Great Recession. Nevertheless, the interviewees recounted enthusiastically how ChalleNGe enabled them to break habits and generate profound, positive changes in their attitudes, expectations, and self-confidence. ChalleNGe convincingly demonstrates the value of investing in a new educational paradigm for deeply disengaged students who are ill-served by public schools, as we know them.

I can envision public schools devoted explicitly to both the academic and social development of struggling youngsters. This dual mission would drive the structure, size, curriculum and extracurricular offerings, staffing, schedule, and funding for this enterprise. And such schools should be staffed with an adequate-not skimpy-contingent of "life coaches" who are carefully screened and trained to mentor, monitor, and minister to the social and emotional needs of the students.

Yes, these schools might cost more per student at the outset. But RAND's cost-benefit analysis provides reason to believe they would save money by graduating more students on time and, ultimately, increase their education levels, employability, and earnings.

The U.S. military figured out long ago how to nurture the potential of aimless young people. Let's borrow from its playbook and create a new type of school devoted to the academic and social development of students who are laboring academically and in life.

Published in Print: February 4, 2015, as What the Military Might Teach Schools

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Commentary Three decades ago, a panel appointed by then-U.S. Secretary of Education Terrel H. Bell issued a scathing critique of America's schools in a report titled A Nation at Risk. It triggered an avalanche of top-down and bottom-up reforms that engulf public schools to this day.

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On School Discipline Reform

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The U.S. Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights announced this spring that the number of suspensions and expulsions in the nation's public schools had dropped 20 percent between 2012 and 2014.

The news was welcomed by those who oppose the frequent use of suspensions and expulsions, known as exclusionary discipline. In recent years, many policymakers and educators have called for the adoption of alternative disciplinary strategies that allow students to stay in school and not miss valuable learning time. Advocates for discipline reform contend that suspensions are meted out in a biased way, because minority students and those with disabilities receive a disproportionate share of them. Some also assert that reducing suspensions would improve school climate for all students.

Government leaders have taken steps to encourage school discipline reform. The Obama administration has embarked on several initiatives to encourage schools to move away from suspensions and toward alternative strategies. In 2011, the Department of Education (DOE) and the Department of Justice (DOJ) launched the Supportive School Discipline Initiative to coordinate federal efforts in this area. In January 2014, the DOE released a resource package with a variety of informational materials designed to support state and local efforts to improve school climate and discipline. The package included a "Dear Colleague" letter, issued jointly by DOE and DOJ, warning against intentional racial discrimination but also stating that schools unlawfully discriminate even "if a policy is neutral on its face-meaning that the policy itself does not mention race-and is administered in an evenhanded manner but has a disparate impact, i.e., a disproportionate and unjustified effect on students of a particular race."

Discipline reform efforts are also underway at the state and school-district levels. As of May 2015, 22 states and the District of Columbia had revised their laws in order to require or encourage schools to: limit the use of exclusionary discipline practices; implement supportive (that is, nonpunitive) discipline strategies that rely on behavioral interventions; and provide support services such as counseling, dropout prevention, and guidance services for at-risk students. And as of the 2015-16 school year, 23 of the 100 largest school districts nationwide had implemented policy reforms requiring nonpunitive discipline strategies and/or limits to the use of suspensions. In an April 2014 survey of 500 district superintendents conducted by the School Superintendents Association (AASA), 84 percent of respondents reported that their districts had updated their code of conduct within the previous three years.

What evidence supports the call for discipline reform? How might alternative strategies affect students and schools? In this article, we describe the critiques of exclusionary discipline and then examine the research base on which discipline policy reform rests. We also describe the alternative approaches that are gaining traction in America's schools and present the evidence on their efficacy. Throughout, we consider what we know (and don't yet know) about the effect of reducing suspensions on a variety of important outcomes, such as school safety, school climate, and student achievement.

In general, we find that the evidence for critiques of exclusionary discipline and in support of alternative strategies is relatively thin. In part, this is because many discipline reforms at the state and local levels have only been implemented in the last few years. While disparities in school discipline by race and disability status have been well documented, the evidence is inconclusive as to whether or not these disparate practices involve racial bias and discrimination. Further, the evidence on alternative strategies is mainly correlational, suggesting that more research is necessary to uncover how alternative approaches to suspensions affect school safety and student outcomes.

Addressing such questions is vitally important, because a safe school climate is essential for student success. A recent National Center for Education Statistics report documented downward trends in suspensions, student victimization, and reports of bullying. Since 2006, out-of-school suspensions have declined, with more recent declines in expulsions (see Figure 1). Still, more than one-third of teachers in 2012 reported that student behavior problems and tardiness interfered with their teaching. Regardless of the kind of discipline districts choose to employ, policymakers and school leaders must recognize that school disorder and violence have adverse effects on all students. For example, students who were exposed to Hurricane Katrina evacuees with significant behavior problems experienced short-term increases in school absences and discipline problems themselves. Recent evidence also shows that exposure to disruptive peers during elementary school worsens student achievement and later life outcomes, including high school achievement, college enrollment, and earnings (see " Domino Effect," research, Summer 2009). These findings highlight the importance of closely monitoring the effects of discipline reform on all students.
Critiques of Exclusionary Discipline
Disproportionate suspension rates. There is little doubt that students of color and those with disabilities face exclusionary discipline much more often than their peers do. Racial disparities in suspensions begin as early as preschool, with black children comprising 18 percent of enrollment in preschools but 48 percent of preschool children experiencing one or more suspensions, according to the federal Office for Civil Rights. These disparities extend through primary, middle, and high school, where black students comprise 16 percent of all enrolled students but 34 percent of students suspended once (and 43 percent of students receiving multiple out-of-school suspensions) (see Figure 2). Furthermore, gaps in suspension rates between black students and white students have grown over time, doubling between 1989 and 2010. Youth enrolled in special education also experience higher rates of suspension: in 2011, students with disabilities were suspended at twice the rate of nondisabled students.

What accounts for these disparities? Do they stem from discrimination and racial bias? The possibility of such bias is one justification for the Office of Civil Rights' involvement in the issue of school discipline. However, it could be that special-education and minority students are disciplined more often because they commit more infractions than their peers. If that is so, the greater frequency of violations among minority students could be caused by factors outside of the school's purview, such as more exposure to poverty, crime, and life trauma resulting from residential and economic inequality. Many disabled students also face heightened life stresses that could contribute to misbehavior.

Some evidence does suggest that students with disabilities and racial minorities tend to be punished more severely than their peers for the same offenses. In 2011, Russell Skiba and colleagues analyzed school-level data on disciplinary referrals in 364 schools and found that black and Hispanic students were more likely than white students to receive suspensions or expulsions for "minor misbehavior," such as inappropriate verbal language, minor physical contact, disruption, and defiance. Unfortunately, the study was unable to control for students' prior infractions in school, a factor that may influence the severity of the response to a given offense. In a separate study, Russell Skiba and Natasha Williams further revealed that black students in the same schools or districts were not engaged in levels of disruptive behavior that would warrant higher rates of exclusionary discipline than white peers.

Recent evidence from Arkansas confirms that black students attending public schools there are punished more harshly than their white peers, but also suggests that most of the difference is attributable to the schools that students attend. Researchers found that, over the course of three school years, black students received, on average, 0.5 more days of punishment (including in-school and out-of-school suspension and expulsion days), even when controlling for special-education status and comparing students at the same grade level. However, they showed that cross-school differences explained most of this aggregate difference; that is, when the researchers looked only at students attending the same school, the racial differences became much more modest, with black students receiving only about 0.07 more days of punishment than whites. Within schools, the authors also found a statistically significant, though modest, difference in the length of punishment for special-education students, approximately 0.10 days more per suspension.

One recent study using nationally representative longitudinal survey data considered the role of prior problem behavior in disparate suspension rates. When the study authors controlled for whether these students exhibited prior behavioral problems (in kindergarten, 1st, and 3rd grades), they found that the racial gap in 8th-grade suspension rates disappeared, leading them to conclude that the disproportionate use of suspensions was probably not the result of racial bias. This conclusion is subject to question, however, since the authors compared results from statistical models that relied on different underlying samples, owing to student attrition within the study. Further, the study was unable to address any biases implicit in the measure of prior behavioral problems; nor did it consider that a child might be labeled as a "troublemaker" early on, which might predispose authorities to mete out harsher consequences.

One of us (Steinberg) has shown that schools in Chicago serving students from communities with lower poverty and crime rates tend to be safer schools, especially where there are social resources available in the community. Furthermore, schools serving students from neighborhoods with the highest crime rates and the fewest social resources predominantly serve African American students; thus, most of the schools in Chicago where students and teachers report the lowest levels of safety serve a majority African American student population. These findings suggest the need for increased attention to how neighborhood disadvantage influences student conduct, and for policymakers and school leaders to consider the kinds of school resources that could support students facing adverse home and community circumstances.

Overuse of suspensions for minor offenses. Critics also say that exclusionary discipline is used too frequently in response to lower-level, nonviolent student behavior. For example, nearly half of all suspensions issued in California public schools during the 2011-12 school year were for "willful defiance," a category of student misconduct that includes refusing to remove a hat or turn off a cell phone, or school uniform violations. Nationwide, insubordination has accounted for an increasing share of all serious disciplinary actions-that is, suspensions for five or more days, transfers to specialized schools, and expulsion-from 22 percent during the 1999-2000 school year to 43 percent in 2007-08 (see Figure 3). Over the same period, the proportion of serious disciplinary actions for more serious student misconduct (such as possession of alcohol, drugs, or a weapon) declined from 50 to
22 percent.

Negative effects on school climate. Advo-cates of discipline reform contend that exclusionary discipline may have adverse consequences for school climate. While zero-tolerance policies aim to improve school climate and safety by removing disruptive students, research evidence finds that teachers and students in schools with high suspension rates report feeling less safe than their counterparts in schools serving similar students that have lower suspension rates. Schools with higher suspension rates also have greater teacher attrition and turnover. According to the American Psychological Association's Zero Tolerance Task Force, there is no hard evidence that exclusionary policies reduce school violence.

While the evidence does suggest that school climate is worse when exclusionary discipline practices are more widespread, this evidence is not causal. We don't know whether the use of exclusionary discipline causes school climates to deteriorate, or if administrators respond to unruly climates by clamping down on school discipline. Therefore, policymakers and practitioners must remain cautious about the potential effects that newly implemented reforms may have on school climate and student safety. And even if schools reduce their use of exclusionary practices, it doesn't necessarily follow that they will cease to mete out these punishments disproportionately by race.

Negative effects on student outcomes. Critics also contend that exclusionary discipline can trigger a downward spiral in students' lives inside and outside of school, leading to the so-called school-to-prison pipeline. Unfortunately, research on the causal effect of suspensions on academic achievement and other student outcomes is limited. Students who are removed from school do tend to have lower achievement on standardized exams; are less likely to pass state assessments; and are more likely to repeat a grade, drop out of school, and become involved in the juvenile justice system. The AASA's 2014 survey found that 92 percent of superintendents believe that out-of-school suspensions are associated with negative student outcomes, including lost instructional time and increased disengagement, absenteeism, truancy, and dropout rates. These correlations, however, do not tell us whether suspended students would have experienced these adverse outcomes even if they hadn't received suspensions.
Alternative Practices
What are the alternative approaches to exclusionary discipline that are currently being implemented? And what is the evidence that they "work"-that is, do they reduce suspensions and expulsions without leading to increased disorder or violence?

Discipline reforms fall into two main categories: programs and policies. Some reforms are implemented at the district or state level, some at the school level, and some are targeted directly toward specific individuals or groups of students. Table 1 provides an overview of reforms by type and level of implementation.

Which of these alternatives are most effective at reducing suspensions and improving student outcomes? Some of the approaches are "evidence-based," meaning they have been the subject of evaluation research that can support causal conclusions about their effectiveness. However, many have yet to be rigorously evaluated. As reform efforts quickly outpace research evidence, many administrators, teachers, and policymakers are left to wonder: Are the new approaches having the intended effect? And what unintended effects might they have on students?
Program-Based Interventions
Targeted programs. Programs that use the Response to Intervention (RTI) model provide services to specific youth, with the goal of preventing further behavioral problems by responding to behavioral issues as they arise. A key goal of the approach is to tailor the intervention to the student: if a student does not appear to respond to a given approach, a more intensive intervention is applied. While one case study by Sarah Fairbanks and colleagues in 2007 suggests that office referrals decreased following implementation of RTI, and teachers rated student misbehavior to be less intense and less frequent, few rigorous evaluations of RTI have been conducted.

Another targeted program, restorative justice, uses peaceful and nonpunitive approaches to address misbehavior and solve problems in school. While rigorous evidence on the causal impact of restorative justice on student outcomes is scarce, Trevor Fronius and colleagues reviewed the descriptive literature and found that all studies documented decreases in the use of suspensions, expulsions, or violent student behavior, as the program was implemented.

Some programs combine multiple approaches, such as the Preventing Recidivism through Opportunities, Mentoring, Interventions, Supports, and Education (PROMISE) program in Broward County, Florida. PROMISE employs both restorative justice principles and an RTI approach to promote conflict resolution and prevent gang involvement, drug use, and violence among students. Qualitative research by Joan Collins-Ricketts and Anne Rambo suggests that PROMISE is associated with lower suspension rates. However, given the lack of empirical evidence on the program, we cannot discern whether such outcomes result from PROMISE or from other, independent factors. Nor do we know about the impact of the program on school climate, order, and safety-or outcomes for students in general.

Not all studies of targeted programs show promise. The Reconnecting Youth program provided classroom-based instruction for high school students at risk of dropping out or who exhibited problematic behavior. Hyunsan Cho and colleagues conducted an experimental study of the program's impact and found no significant effect on delinquency immediately following the intervention or at the six-month follow-up.

School-based programs. Schoolwide Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports (SWPBIS) takes a "systems approach," targeting a school's overall social culture and providing intensive behavior supports, such as functional behavioral assessments, identifying contexts where behaviors occur, and teaching communication, social, and self-management skills, as needed. The approach aims to change school culture by setting clear behavioral expectations, designing a continuum of consequences for infractions, and reinforcing positive behavior. SWPBIS is one of the only interventions supported by strong evaluation research. Multiple experimental studies, including those by Catherine Bradshaw and Robert Horner and their colleagues, find that SWPBIS decreases school suspensions and improves student perceptions of school safety.

While SWPBIS focuses primarily on building social and emotional skills, the Safe and Responsive Schools (SRS) project aims to reduce school violence and improve student behavior. SRS focuses on preventative efforts, such as conflict resolution and crafting a civility code, and on developing specific responses to disruptive behaviors, such as behavior-support classrooms as an alternative to office referrals. A descriptive analysis of four schools using SRS conducted by Russell Skiba and colleagues in 2006 found overall decreases in suspensions from the first year of SRS implementation to the end of the fourth year, with larger decreases in suspensions for students with disabilities.

District-level programs. Programs at the district level often involve redefining how teachers and school resource officers (SROs) interact with students. (An SRO is a law enforcement or security officer assigned to a school who has the ability to make arrests and respond to calls for service.) Teacher training programs, such as the My Teacher Partner Program (MTP), provide support for teachers to reflect on interactions with students and develop strategies to address behavior issues to achieve positive outcomes. One experimental study in 2014 by Anne Gregory and colleagues found that teachers in the MTP program suspended students less often than teachers in the control group, and when suspensions did occur, MTP teachers had equal suspension rates for African American and white students.

Another district-level approach involves working with SROs to improve interactions with students and prevent the escalation of school-based incidents that are referred to juvenile court. SRO programs can provide training for SROs in cultural competence and teen psychology; forge agreements between districts, family courts, and police departments to resolve discipline issues using alternative strategies; and limit the ability of SROs to arrest students. Some school districts have reported decreases in court referrals after implementation of SRO programs, especially for minority students, but there is little rigorous evidence on the efficacy of this approach.
Policy-Based Interventions
In contrast to programmatic approaches, some reforms involve changing the policies that guide districts, schools, and teachers as they respond to student misbehavior.

Targeted policies, such as early-warning indicator systems, use large administrative databases to systematically predict which students will struggle with academics or behavioral problems, with the intention of targeting those students early, before problems escalate. While little impact-evaluation research exists on the efficacy of early-warning indicator systems in reducing the use of exclusionary discipline, implementation research suggests that if early-warning systems are not paired with a behavioral-support approach, they are unlikely to be effective.

School-level policies. Schoolwide disciplinary codes, such as the "no excuses" policies employed in KIPP schools, aim to set high behavioral expectations for all students. Under such a policy, students often receive detentions for minor infractions (such as uniform violations) and automatic suspensions for other offenses. While this approach would seem to resemble an exclusionary policy, it aims to remove a sense of unfairness from the disciplinary scheme by holding all students to uniformly high standards. Evidence on the impact of no-excuses discipline on student behavior and suspensions is rigorous, but results are mixed. Two recent studies, one by Joshua Angrist and colleagues and another by Matthew Johnson and colleagues, found that attendance at urban charter middle schools with high behavioral expectations is associated with a higher number of days suspended relative to attendance at traditional schools in the same districts. Another study by Philip Gleason and colleagues found no difference in suspensions between charter school attendees and students who did not win the admissions lottery. A fourth study by Christina Tuttle and colleagues found no difference in student perceptions of the disciplinary environment among middle school KIPP lottery winners relative to lottery losers.

District-level policies. Changes to district policies guiding school discipline and student conduct constitute a direct approach to reducing exclusionary discipline. Many states and districts across the country have revised their student codes of conduct in recent years to remove harsh responses to minor disciplinary infractions and shorten the length of suspensions. Revising student codes of conduct to reduce the use of suspensions, particularly for lower-level offenses, shows promise as a strategy to reduce suspension usage (as in a study we conducted in Philadelphia). Notably, new evidence from Nick Mader and colleagues in Chicago finds that there may be few (if any) costs to school climate associated with reducing the length of out-of-school suspensions for more serious student misconduct. Ninth-grade students there reported neither increases in bullying behavior nor a worsening of peer relationships in the year the code of conduct reform was implemented. In fact, students reported that student-teacher trust improved by the second post-reform year.
Looking Ahead
Across the country, disciplinary programs and policies are trending away from exclusionary practices and toward a variety of alternatives, with the endorsement of federal and state governments. Yet the evidence base about the harm caused by suspensions, and the potential benefits of other approaches, is surprisingly thin. Clearly, there is a great need for rigorous evaluation research, which should focus both on the impact of school discipline reforms and on their potential unintended consequences.

Future research should address some key questions. First, is the reform an effective approach to reducing suspensions? Has it been implemented with fidelity? Second, even if reforms succeed in decreasing the number of suspensions, do they also succeed in reducing disproportionate suspension rates by race and disability? Descriptive evidence from Buffalo, New York, suggests that they may not. A report by Citizen Action of New York in 2015 found that after the district reformed its code of conduct to limit suspensions for nonviolent and minor misbehavior, the use of short-term suspensions decreased in 60 percent of Buffalo's public schools, and long-term suspensions dropped in half of them. Yet black and Hispanic students continued to receive 80 percent of all suspensions, and were 6.5 and 3.7 times more likely to be suspended than white students, respectively.

Third, what are the impacts of discipline policy reforms on students who are disciplined, and do reforms have "spillover" effects on their peers? Making significant changes to codes of conduct or implementing programs to shift the culture of a school may cause difficulties for teachers and students, at least in the short term. Evidence from Chicago indicates that, following a district reform aimed at reducing the length of suspensions for more serious offenses, school attendance increased among disciplined students with no adverse effect on the attendance of their peers. Though the increase in school attendance among disciplined students led to only very modest improvements in their academic performance on state reading exams, it did not have a substantively negative effect on their peers' academic performance.

With further research focused on these key questions, we may come to better understand the implications of discipline policy reforms-how they affect suspension use, and also how they change school climate; interactions among students, peers, and teachers; and the academic performance of all students. Children need a safe, secure learning environment if they are to thrive in school. Until we fully understand the benefits and costs of the various approaches to discipline, both exclusionary and alternative, we will fall short of providing that supportive climate.
Matthew P. Steinberg is assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania's Graduate School of Education. Johanna Lacoe is a researcher at Mathematica Policy Research. Download a version of this piece with full citations here.

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What Do We Know About School Discipline Reform?

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Assessing the alternatives to suspensions and expulsions

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This is a link to a local paper that is published independently.  I included the education page. Enjoy.

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The Nevada Independent - Your State. Your News. Your Voice.

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The Nevada Independent is a nonpartisan, nonprofit news and opinion website founded in 2017 by veteran political journalist and commentator Jon Ralston. The site and its supporting channels are focused on ethical, unbiased and transparent journalism. In general, we aim to gather and disseminate important public information and increase civic engagement.

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If not familiar with this site you will want to be. It's a great news source to discover topics relevant to education and educators and often includes an op-ed or two as well.

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Education Week American Education News Site of Record - Education Week

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Find breaking news, analysis, and opinion on K-12 education issues affecting school and district leaders, teachers, policymakers, and ed-tech professionals.