EEUU: The disturbing reason why charter schools may have higher test scores

TheModerJones/03-18-2016/Por: Kristina Rizga

Resumen: Un escritor de Filadelfia redactó un ensayo en donde expresaba su
preocupación por la clausura de las escuelas públicas donde él había
asistido cuando era niño, las cuales hoy en día habían sido reemplazada en
su totalidad por escuelas Charter. Dembry, el ensayista, dice en su
escrito, algo así: “Nuestras escuelas son señal de la historia que contamos
de nosotros mismos y nuestras comunidades”. El número de escuelas públicas
cerradas ha ascendido a más de 30 desde 2012 hasta la fecha, siendo una de
las ciudades más afectadas: Detroit. Las escuelas Charters exhiben una gama
de estilos de enseñanza, que en algunos casos siguen el modelo Montessori,
con enfoques etnocéntricos. La doctrina centra al estudiante en la creencia
de castigar inmediatamente las infracciones más pequeñas; se pueden ver a
niños castigados de pie en un rincón del aula por alguna infracción
cometida en el aula. Algunos niños ya ha denominado el programa disciplinar
de las escuelas Charters como “prisiones públicas”. Por otro lado, en ellas
la apertura para estudiantes con discapacidades o inmigrantes residentes
que no hablan inglés, es escasa, igualmente, para aquellos estudiantes cuyo
color los sentencia a recurrir en faltas que ponen en riesgo su permanencia
en el sistema educativo estadounidense. El artículo es una reflexión sobre
el futuro de la educación pública, el racismo y la inclusión en Estados
Unidos.

Last September, Gene Demby ,
a writer with NPR’s Code Switch team, penned anessay mourning
the loss of public schools in his native Philadelphia. The elementary and
middle schools he’d attended as a kid had closed in recent years and were
eventually replaced by charters.

«Our schools are signposts in the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves
and our communities,» Demby said. As more public schools shutter—Philadelphia has shut down
more than 30 of them since 2012, while hard-hit cities such as Detroit have
closed since 2002—that story increasingly revolves charter schools. And a new study raises
intriguing questions about how these schools discipline students and how
such rules disproportionately affect black children and students with
disabilities.

And while charter schools encompass a broad range of teaching styles—some
follow the Montessori model or have an ethnocentric focus, for example—many
in urban areas follow a «no excuses» philosophy.

This approach borrows heavily from a «zero tolerance» policing ideology
that emphasizes cracking down on minor offenses, including by searching the
pockets of teenagers living in low-income neighborhoods for drugs and
weapons, to prevent major crimes such as drug dealing down the road.

«No Excuses»

In a classroom setting, this translates into a belief that the smallest
infractions, such as passing a note during class, is to be met with an
immediate consequence. Depending on the offense, that can escalate from
being asked to stand up for the rest of the class to being sent home on an
«out-of-school suspension.» Schools such as the Knowledge is Power Program
(KIPP), Success Academy, and Uncommon Schools, among others, use various
parts of «no excuses» ideology.

«If you don’t tuck in your shirt, if you space out for a minute and don’t
track your teacher with your eyes, if your binder is messy, you lose
points,» one former KIPP student told me in 2014 of his middle school
experience.

«If you lose enough points, you are not allowed to go on field trips or be
a part of graduation ceremony. My homeroom teacher was really young and
didn’t know how to control the classroom. She kicked me out a lot and I was
sent home a lot. Some of us called it the Kids in the Public Prison Program,» he said.

A famous example of «no excuses» charter school is the Roxbury Preparatory
Charter School near Boston that was founded by Secretary of Education John
King Jr., in 1999. Roxbury Prep became the highest-performing urban public school in
Massachusetts, according to NPR. It is these high test scores—more than any other measure—that charter
school advocates cite as a strong argument for replacing traditional
schools.

Discipline data

But as more «no excuses» charter schools open, a growing number of critics
have been raising serious concerns: Do charters truly admit all
students—such as kids who face great challenges like severe disabilities or
recent immigrants who don’t speak English—like traditional schools do? And
do some charters engage in practices that artificially raise kids’ test scores?

Yesterday, the UCLA’s Center for Civil Rights Remedies published a study that
for the first time looked at discipline data for 5,250 charter schools and
95,000 public schools. The study, «Charter Schools, Civil Rights and School
Discipline: A Comprehensive Review,» focused on how often students were
sent home on detention (or «out-of-school suspensions,» in education
jargon) during the 2011-12 academic year.

Researchers have found that
being suspended is a strong indicator that a student will eventually drop
out. And students who drop out are much more likely to
end up in prison, becoming part of the «school to prison pipeline.» This issue
disproportionately affects black students (in charter and noncharter
schools), who are suspended at a rate three times greater than white students.

Here are the most significant findings in the report:

Suspensions are falling, but there is a disturbing trend. The good news
is that early data suggests suspension rates have been declining in many
districts since 2012, thanks in part to a recent push by the federal
government and various advocates to encourage schools to consider
alternative discipline approaches grounded in strong research.

That said, there were troubling exceptions in two states, the authors
write. Last year, charters in Connecticut suspended and expelled higher
percentages of students in preschools and elementary schools (14 percent)
than the public schools did (3 percent). And in Massachusetts, data from
2015 showed that charter schools made up a disproportionate share of the
state’s highest-suspending schools. Secretary of Education John King’s
Roxbury Prep had the highest suspension rate of all charter schools in the
state: 40 percent of all students and 58 percent of its students with
disabilities were suspended in 2014. (Nationally in all schools, that number
was 10 percent and 18  percent, respectively, in the 2011-12 academic year.)

Charter schools suspended higher percentages of black students and
students with disabilities than traditional schools did.* The overall
difference between suspension rates in charters versus traditional schools
isn’t huge: In the 2011-12 academic year, charters suspended 7.8 percent of
all students, compared with 6.7 percent for noncharters. But these gaps
increase when you look at who is getting suspended: In charter schools,
black students and students with disabilities were suspended at higher
percentages in all grades than their peers in traditional schools. In
middle and high schools, 12 percent more students with disabilities and 2.5
percent more black students were suspended in charters compared with
noncharters.

What the authors of the report found especially worrisome was that close to
half of all black students at middle and high school charter schools went
to one of the 270 schools that was highly segregated (80 percent black) and
where the suspension rate for black students was extremely high: 25
percent. Even more disconcerting, 235 charter schools suspended more than
50 percent of their enrolled students with disabilities, the researchers
wrote.

The patterns among some charter schools of having high test scores and very
high suspension rates prompted the authors of the report to conclude,
«Although beyond the scope of this report, the possibility certainly exists
that some charter schools are artificially boosting their test scores or
graduation rates by using harsh discipline to discourage lower-achieving
youth from continuing to attend.»

Charter schools may benefit from another advantage that potentially boosts
test scores: so-called «selection bias.» Many scholars have pointed out,
the report says, that since charter schools require parents to apply for a
charter or enter lotteries, the schools typically attract more students who
have engaged parents, or who are higher achieving or better behaved. A 2015
study by the University of California-Berkeley showed that in fact students who
entered charter schools in Los Angeles were already higher achieving, as
measured by their standardized test scores, than their peers in traditional
schools.

Charter schools teach fewer students with disabilities and fewer kids who
are learning to speak English. While the report found that charter schools
enroll higher percentages of black students and poor students than
traditional schools, the researchers also found that charters tend to have
smaller percentages of students with learning disabilities (ranging from
attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and autism to kids in wheelchairs)
and kids just learning to speak English. Yet students who live in poverty
are more likely to be diagnosed with learning disabilities and to be
learning English, so researchers were surprised to find that these two
groups were underrepresented at charters. This data raised additional
concerns with the study authors about enrollment and suspension policies in
charter schools.

Many charter schools don’t suspend a lot of students, and some «no
excuses» followers are reforming their discipline tactics. The report
found that among middle schools and high schools, only 332 schools were
classified as «high-suspending» (meaning these schools suspended more than
25 percent of any group). With elementary grades, the 240 high-suspending
charter schools were far outnumbered by the 486 lower-suspending schools
(those with a suspension rate around 10 percent or less).

And while some charter schools such as the widely known Success Academy
have publicly defended their suspension policies, others like KIPP are embracing
reform. Just last month, many KIPP school leaders at a national meeting attended
sessions on the «restorative justice» approach to school discipline—which uses misbehavior and conflict as
opportunities for self-reflection and learning with the help of a trained
coach—as an alternative to «zero tolerance» discipline. And California and
Connecticut have recently prohibited the use of suspensions for minor
infractions for young students in all schools in those states.

The new federal Every Student Succeeds Act now
requires that states include many measures in their school grading
formulas—not just standardized test scores—including «school climate»
indicators such as suspensions.

«Currently, half of all states do not report discipline data broken up by
race and disability to the public on their state site, even though every
state is required to do so every year,» Daniel J. Losen, one of the authors of the report and the director of the Center for Civil Rights Remedies, told *Mother Jones*.

As Demby reflected in his essay on the past and future of public education,
«It’s no accident that local schools are battlegrounds for so many of our
most heated, pitched battles over race and place in America.» There are big
questions embedded in how we decide to educate kids and how we allocate
public resources to schools, he added. «Who gets to go to the best of
them?» he asked.

Fuente:
www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/03/charter-schools-suspend-more-black-students-disabilities-test-scores