ACLU vs Florida, Or Brown vs Board of Education--the Sequel?

The Jeb legacy of herding poor kids into segregated charter chain gangs and segregated fundamentalist voucher madrasas seems to be having some consequences beyond the total social control that these racist policies intended. When leaving school becomes the only recourse for preserving one's dignity and some sense of personal freedom, then you might say schools don't matter anymore. The hemorrhaging of black high school students in Florida and elsewhere has resulted in a long overdue lawsuit. From the NYTimes:

WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. (AP) — The American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit on Thursday accusing state officials in Florida of failing to ensure that students in Palm Beach County receive a high quality education, as evidenced by their poor graduation rates.

The state court suit, filed in West Palm Beach, names Gov. Charlie Crist, the Board of Education and several political leaders and asserts that they are violating a requirement in the Florida Constitution to provide a “uniform, efficient, safe, secure and high quality” education.

“Palm Beach County is clearly not upholding its responsibility to provide a quality education to all of its students when so many of them are not graduating,” Chris Hansen, senior staff lawyer with the A.C.L.U., said Thursday in a statement.

Mr. Hansen added that the issues in Palm Beach County reflected a national problem.

A spokesman for Mr. Crist, a Republican, did not have immediate comment. . . .

Push-Outs on the Rise Under Bloomberg-Klein

From the New York Times:

By JENNIFER MEDINA

Almost six years after a lawsuit forced the city to pledge to keep better track of students who leave public schools without graduating, the number leaving high schools has continued to climb, according to a report to be released Thursday by the public advocate’s office.

The report raises questions about why more than 20 percent of students from the class of 2007 were discharged — the term for students who leave the school system without graduating — but 17.5 percent from the class of 2000 were. Much of the increase has come from students who are discharged in the ninth grade, which has gone up to 7.5 percent for the class of 2007, but was 3.8 percent in 2000.

Though students can be classified as discharged for a number of benign reasons, including a transfer to a private school or a move out of the city, the Education Department has been sued several times for pushing out students who are struggling and are unlikely to graduate, a practice that can help raise the school’s test-score averages and graduation rates.. . . .

New Jersey's Corzine Offers Free Ads to Corporations

In a state that is so broke that it can't hire immigrants to pick up the massive garbage collected along its highways or fix the potholes that could swallow an SUV (a small one), Jon Corzine (D) is looking for ways to do something for nothing. As is often the case in the political world, he has hit upon the opposite result, doing nothing for something--and the something is a new PR campaign for the state's largest corporations.

Corzine announced yesterday that his corporate chums, whose companies have been involved in the attempted hijacking of the State's high school curriculum, are giving, hold on now, $150,000 to fight the dropout problem in New Jersey. From the NYTimes:

The New Jersey campaign, which is expected to cost about $150,000, will be financed entirely by donations and grants from a cross-section of foundations, businesses and civic groups. Verizon gave $35,000; other supporters include P.S.E.&G., Horizon Blue Cross Blue Shield, State Farm Insurance, Prudential and the New Jersey Chamber of Commerce.

Never mind that Verizon alone, for instance, has a national advertising budget of $950,000,000. Even with all that, however, they could not buy what Corzine has handed them for free--the image of a company determined to save the poor urban child from a life of crime and poverty. And never mind, by the way, that these same companies, under the Chamber's banner and the phony research supplied by Achieve, Inc., were at the forefront of an attempt to ditch New Jersey's alternate assessment for high school students who failed the high school exit exam. Which, by the way, is the primary reason that New Jersey's dropout rate is one of the lowest in the nation.

Treating Students as Human Beings as a Way to Combat Dropping Out?

From ABC News:

By NEAL KARLINSKY
April 1, 2008—

Clover Park High School in Lakewood, Wash., is proof that things can change. While graduation rates are dropping across the U.S., Lakewood's rate shot up from 39 percent just a few years ago to more than 70 percent today, a trend line which principal John Seaton calls "very positive." So, how did they do it?

After a grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the school restructured itself, dividing students into small groups and pairing them with the same teachers for all four years, essentially turning teachers into surrogate family members.

"You've got a relationship that is so tight with those kids that they're willing to share their life with you," Seaton explained. "So you can become part of the solution for their problems."

Teachers at Clover Park aren't alone. A handful of schools across the country have discovered that a key ingredient to helping kids be successful in school is helping them deal with the problems they have in the outside world.

At Berrien High School in south Georgia, they created the position of "graduation coach" a sort of super-counselor to get involved with kids and look for risk factors, like pregnancy, poverty and truancy.

Sheila Hendley, the Berrien graduation coach, said, "I have sat with students and literally begged, 'please don't do this, the rest of your life depends on this decision.'"

The results have been dramatic. In just two years, graduation rates at Berrien shot up from 57 percent to 77 percent a 20 percent increase.

Other schools have focused on problems specific to their neighborhoods, such as literacy or English as a second language, as a way to keep at-risk students from falling through the cracks. For students who do, the setbacks are real.

"Earnings of dropouts amount to only three-quarters of what high school graduates earn, and less than half of what college graduates earn," said Vicki Phillips, director of education at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Educators say the solution won't come in the form of more testing.

As one principal put it today, the key is to see students as human beings, not statistics.

Copyright © 2008 ABC News Internet Ventures

Using Dropout Rates to Punish the Poor

A black male student entering 9th grade in an urban high school has a 50-50 chance of getting a diploma four years later. This fact has been submerged for years in Byzantine attendance tracking systems in most states, and with the pressures of NCLB, schools now have a new perverse incentive to push out additional low fliers who threaten a school's AYP status.

I am all for stating the facts as they exist, but now the privatizers want to use the facts to pile up sanctions on the most vulnerable schools, to undercut public support, and to charterize those schools that suffer most under generations of educational debt. Those who are owed the most, then, must continue to pay the debt with their support of cheap charter chain gangs or cheap vouchers paid for with corporate tax breaks. These are the school choices that the econ-anthropists offer in the name of social justice.

A clip from the NY Times:

JACKSON, Miss. — When it comes to high school graduation rates, Mississippi keeps two sets of books.

One team of statisticians working at the state education headquarters here recently calculated the official graduation rate at a respectable 87 percent, which Mississippi reported to Washington. But in another office piled with computer printouts, a second team of number crunchers came up with a different rate: a more sobering 63 percent.

The state schools superintendent, Hank Bounds, says the lower rate is more accurate and uses it in a campaign to combat a dropout crisis.

“We were losing about 13,000 dropouts a year, but publishing reports that said we had graduation rate percentages in the mid-80s,” Mr. Bounds said. “Mathematically, that just doesn’t work out.”

. . . .

Governors also stepped in, worried that schools were not preparing the work force their states need. In December 2005, all 50 agreed to standardize their graduation rate calculations, basing them on tracking individual students through high school.

Fifteen states have begun to use the formula, said Dane Linn, director of the education division at the National Governors Association. And it has produced some stunning revelations.

In North Carolina, the rate plummeted a year ago to 68 percent from 95 percent. The News & Observer in Raleigh likened the experience to the shock of hearing a doctor diagnose a terrible illness.

“But now doctors can start treatments that can lead to a cure,” the paper said in an editorial.

Mississippi is among the states that have become the most serious about confronting their dropout problem, Mr. Linn said.

The state has been building a record system capable of tracking student data from year to year, and in 2005 used it to estimate a graduation rate of 61 percent, 24 points below the official rate.

Mr. Bounds took office that fall and was initially consumed with the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. But he eventually had time to pore over the data.

“It was time to boldly confront the facts,” he said.

Mr. Bounds has used the new figures to persuade the Mississippi Board of Education to require school districts to prepare dropout prevention plans. Last month he told 2,000 community leaders that the state’s dropout crisis was like “a Katrina hitting our schools every year.”

The state will eventually report the lower rate to Washington but has set no schedule, Mr. Bounds said. One problem, he said, is that when Mississippi sends revised rates for its more than 200 high schools, their success levels will appear to plummet and many schools could be exposed to sanctions.

“It’ll look like everybody has dropped, when actually everybody’s doing a better job,” Mr. Bounds said. “But we’re capturing the right score on the scoreboard.”

Unending War Relies On Steady Supply of Dropouts and Pushouts

During World War I, the new racist "scientists" of human intelligence field tested their new human sorting tool that came to known as the IQ test. GIs who did poorly (the poor, the brown, and the black) on the bogus inventory were shipped off to the trenches of France, while the high flyers got Washington desk jobs.

Almost a hundred years later we use other racist tests to accomplish the same end, all the while calling it a civil rights initiative. And now WaPo reports that a third of new recruits are the great grandsons and great granddaughters of the World War I generation of poor, brown, and black citizens who did not finish school. These youngsters today have failed to make it in the testing factories we call schools, and recruiters, armed with these kids' school data (NCLB mandates it), have an unending supply of hot leads.

What would that recruiting poster look like--an army one group of dropouts and pushouts who can still contribute to the America's world class military economy. Sign your body up today!