District Administration - November/December 2010 - (Page 32)

Black children Still left Behind Schools, for example, had 75 percent of its black male students graduate last year. Holzman attributes Newark’s success— which could multiply with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s recent $100 million donation to the district—to state Supreme Court-mandated reforms under the Abbott v. Burke case of the late 1990s. It required per-pupil funding in 31 poor urban communities to be similar to that of successful suburban districts, along with supplemental early literacy, health and social services. Blacks Still Punished Federal statistics on suspensions and expulsions lend credence to the claim that African-American students are punished disproportionately. Out of the 48.5 Baltimore City Public Schools’ Graduation/Dropout Rates from 2006-2007 to 2008-2009 GRADUATION RATES American Indian Alaskan Native African American Asian/ Pacific Islander White Hispanic District Average SY 2006-07 SY 2007-08 SY 2008-09 53.33 78.57 65.00 9.76 9.59 10.77 59.69 62.24 62.22 9.51 8.02 6.39 90.63 88.37 77.14 DROPOUT RATE 2.38 4.91 1.73 61.93 62.02 66.20 8.94 7.77 4.92 71.15 79.49 75.34 5.84 3.76 1.96 60.05 62.65 62.69 9.37 7.91 6.20 SY 2006-07 SY 2007-08 SY 2008-09 Source: Baltimore City Public Schools Students at the Promise Academy 1 charter school in the Harlem Children’s Zone in New York have longer school days compared to students in most public schools. million total students in the 2006 DOE Office of Civil Rights report, 17 percent were African-American, but blacks were more than double the percentage of those impacted by corporal punishment (36 percent), out-of-school suspension (37 percent) and expulsions (38 percent). 32 November/December 2010 A recent study from the Southern Poverty Law Center, which draws upon four decades of federal data on 9,220 of the country’s 16,000 public middle schools, reveals that black boys were three times as likely to be suspended as white boys, and black girls were four times as likely to be suspended as white girls. The study, “Suspended Education: Urban Middle Schools in Crisis,” showed increases in suspension rates overall and for black students. Between 1973 and 2006, the figure climbed from 4 percent to 7 percent of all students, and from 6 percent to 15 percent of all black students. “The suspensions and expulsions are out of control in a lot of our high schools,” Cook says. “It’s pushing a lot of kids into juvenile justice, directly, or pushing them out into the streets. When children are suspended for 35 and 45 days, you can’t make up that year of school—ever. It’s creating dropouts. And it’s often for very arbitrary reasons—three strikes and you’re out—or just being late to school.” Freeman agrees that strict zero-tolerance discipline often leads to many students falling below grade-level testing targets, which is also prevalent in dropout factories. “These places that have very high suspension and expulsion rates, and excessive reliance on law enforcement— those are the students who are creating the achievement gap,” he says. “We’re talking about two weeks or a month out of class.” Baltimore’s Ambassadors Advancement Project has been working closely with Baltimore City Public Schools, where Freeman says CEO Andres Alonso has “taken school discipline issues very seriously. They’ve been focusing more on prevention and intervention techniques rather than punitive measures,” he says. Brice says the district three years ago overhauled its code of conduct, saving outof-school suspensions for the most egregious offenses while attempting to return kids to the straight-and-narrow through a “comprehensive and robust level of support for students” that includes an IEPlike team of psychologists, social workers and administrators that’s deployed whenever a student’s behavior and/or academic record raises red flags. “It’s the code of conduct. It’s the support for kids, so kids aren’t acting up. It’s the early identification,” Brice says. “When you put all those things in place, kids respond, parents respond. You change the culture from one in which it’s about putting kids out on the street, to one in which it’s about helping young people be successful.” Chief Academic Officer Sonja Santelises adds that the district has worked to identify students who have leadership potential but seem in danger of using those skills to the wrong ends, such as on behalf of street gangs, and has encouraged them to join a leadership development program called “youth ambassadors.” These ambassadors become a sounding board for other students and a “student cabinet” of sorts that speaks with the principal about concerns. Although such initiatives don’t specifically target African-Americans, Santelises says they might be the most beneficial. “It is important for young African-American students to know they can lead … because they live in a culture where, our current District Administration

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of District Administration - November/December 2010

District Administration - November/December 2010
Contents
From the Editor
News Update
Administrator Profile
District Profile
Black Children Still Left Behind
ARRA Funds Empower Schools to Power Down
A Call for Technology Leadership
Readers Pick Top 100 Products of the Year
Going Mobile
Superintendent’s Insights
Supervisor’s Opinion
Professional Opinion
Student Counsel

District Administration - November/December 2010