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Okay. Thanks for joining me for part two of our discussion on education.
Okay, so we've been talking about how schools create inequal opportunities for students. So, let's talk about some of the ways that happens. So, one is testing, which we just talked about the state test, right? But here's some of the other ways we use those tests: for tracking. You may be familiar with tracking. Sometimes it's really subtle. So, think about the reading group you were in an elementary school: the
turtles and the eagles and all that right? You weren't supposed to realize that the eagles were the fastest readers, right? But tracking happens beyond just that. So you may remember that there was a whole thing in middle school where if you took pre-algebra in middle school, then you moved through your math faster in high school, which meant that you could take higher level math in high school, if you wanted to. And if you didn't make that decision in middle school, if you weren't ready for that middle school, then you were kind of forever behind. That's an example of tracking. Some schools literally track students into college prep courses versus like VoTech courses.
And they use not just those state tests, but also IQ tests, achievement tests, etc. There's been a lot of discussion about bias in tests. You know, presenting these middle-class norms in tests, and then what I'm testing is not your knowledge, but your background.
So, these tests can be used for tracking, which is just another way that schools contribute to the stratification process. And that really starts in elementary school and correlates directly with the child's background, ethnic group, language skills, parents, and other socio-economic variables. And the negative effects can be profound.
Okay, school funding is another source of inequality as well. So, in the United States, school funding comes from local property taxes. So, a school in a neighborhood where home values are lower gets less money than a school in an area where home prices are higher. We could change that. We could choose to make it so that schools get equal funding, but we don't. And that's another way that we perpetuate inequality. A matter of fact, a serious issue in schools really revolves around quality of schooling, which is also tied funding funding. So, typically at a district,
the salaries for teachers is the same across the district. It's not by school. But if the entire district is a poorer district is going to pay less than another district that has a lot of money, right? But even in a school where it's in a district where everyone is paid the same, lots of teachers avoid schools where there's high level higher levels of inequality because they feel like that's going to be way too much work.
So, very often schools with less funding and lots of inequality with students coming in just coming in, there's going to be issues with quality of schooling. They tend to get the less experienced teachers. They tend to get a lots of teacher turnover. They tend to have more substitutes. They tend to have more teachers teaching outside of their subject area. So, like maybe my degree is in history, but I'm on an emergency certificate teaching math. That's probably not good. Teachers tend to take more sick days in those schools.
Okay, so big deal. I get a bad teacher one year, well we know from the data that even one year of a bad teacher can actually have really far-reaching consequences in terms of my educational loss. So, quality of school is absolutely an important issue for students and for inequality.
And all of this contributes to the achievement gap. And we'll talk more about that in a minute, but I want to look at the data first. This is from 2010, and it's not gotten much better. So, when we look you can see that the graduation rates of all students, when we break that out by race, we can see that Black students and Hispanic students, Latinx students. Ugh.
This has American Indian, and that is incorrect. Should be Indigenous students. For example, all tend to have lower on-time graduation rates than White students,
all students, or Asian Pacific Islander students. So, we know we have a gap by race.
We also have a poverty gap. When we look at students between the ages of 3 and 6 and we look School Readiness skills. You want to know that phrase: School Readiness Skills, which is just basically like skills we'd like you to have that make you ready to start school. Like you recognize your letters, count to 20, write your name, and read some words. Notice very few students go in knowing how to read. So, purple is above the poverty threshold and gold is below it. You can see that there is a marked difference between the School Readiness indicators by class, and that absolutely matters. You're basically starting out behind before you even start the first day of school.
And this is looking at that the same skills broken down by race. And the darker blue is White not Hispanic. The lighter blue is Hispanic. The green is Black and the Orange is Asian or Pacific Islander. And you see some interesting stuff there. It's obviously not all about race. It's really more about class. So you can see that most
of these indicators... Black students, they're arriving ready. And they are actually out performing their White counterparts. Hispanic students, we got some lag there. It has more to do with class, but there is a race factor that we don't fully know all of the reasons for why that's the case.
Why does this matter? Because School Unreadiness is the most critical effect of child poverty. It absolutely impacts future outcomes. This data to me is just like... what??? Basically what happens when you're a preschool-age child impacts all of these outcomes in your life, years and years and years later! Things are happening when you are making no choices. You have no control. Okay? 53% of preschool-age children did not attend preschool at the time this data was gathered. Does that matter? It could. Now back when the dinosaurs roamed the Earth, most people didn't go to preschool. I didn't even go to kindergarten. It must not have been required. I went to school at 5.
But I could read and write. I don't know why. I don't remember learning any of that. But apparently I could. So, somebody must have been working with me. I don't know. I don't remember any of that. But in today's world, there usually isn't somebody to work with somebody at home, right? Most people are the working. Both parents are working, for one thing. And most folks need to be in high-quality preschool. We know from the data, quality Early Education helps that children up for success. So, where you put your kids in preschool really matters. People... it's super expensive. So, people want to get it as cheap as possible and they try to find a cheap one. Don't do that. When you have kids, try to try to get them in the highest quality preschool that you possibly can. And, yes, it's gonna cost a lot of money. But 53% children did not attend preschool. And that is no bueno.
Students who do not read proficiently by third grade--third grade!--are four times more likely to just drop out of high school. That's crazy to me! What's going on at third grade has all this impact on what happens to you later in life. Whish is just mind-blowing. Without high-quality Early Education, a vulnerable child is 25% more likely to dropout of school, and 40% more likely to be a teen parent, and 50% more likely to be in in special ed. They're 60% more likely to never attend college and 70% more likely to be arrested for a violent crime. What's happening at preschool age sets you up for these outcomes. This is just the wildest thing to me. Why we don't have federally funded high-quality Early Education for all? I do not understand because the data shows that would make such a tremendous difference for all of us.
And we see these gaps.
When we look at income, which runs along the bottom here, and we looked at writing, reading, and math. We can see that the more money that the child's parents make the higher those scores tend to be. So, this is completely unfair and ridiculous, and yet that is how it works.
We look at household income gaps by race and education. The dark
blue is white and the light blue is Black. Even with comparable education, folks who are White are making more money than folks who are Black even when they have the same credentials. So, again, we're not living in a meritocracy. And you're like, "Why does this matter and why do have this in here?" Because they're having kids and they're sending them to school and they're already experiencing these gaps.
This stuff matters.
Okay, so all of this stuff contributes to the achievement gap. What is the achievement gap? Okay, don't write this down because you're not going to see this again later. This is just for you to understand. It is technically the observed persistent disparity of educational measures between the performance of groups, especially groups defined by socioeconomic status, race, and gender. That's the fancy definition. Here's what to know: it's the gap between the performance of the dominant group kids and the performance of non-dominant group kids. That's basically what the achievement gap is.
Don't write this down either. This is just for you to know. We can see the achievement gap on tons of measures. State tests, GPAs, failure rates, dropout rates... all these different places that we can see it.
Okay, so what's causing the achievement? Well, it's a bunch of stuff. That's the thing: it's not easy to solve because it's a bunch of stuff. Some of it is school-based. Teacher experience and attendance. We talked about that a little while ago. If I'm in a lower-income school, I'm going to have less experienced teachers. They're going to miss more days.
Could be the stress, could be a host of things, right? I'm going to have less technology available to me. Rigor of curriculum. This is a big buzzword in education. We love to talk about rigor. What's fascinating is that we almost never define what rigor is. So, folks end up defining it for themselves and the ways that some people end up defining it is not good in terms of student outcomes. Okay, so rigor really means how hard something is, right? So, what you want is you want to make something hard because you got to think about it. So, critical thinking exercises, problem-solving. That's the kind of rigor that you want, right? Reading things with more vocabulary, longer pieces. That's rigor, But you have lots of teachers... I worked with a teacher who bragged about how hard her class was. And she talked about this assignment. I'm not joking. I'm not making this up. She has this assignment... and we shared students, so I had a lot of students
back this up. She did this...
I don't even understand why. She had this assignment where you had to take your notes from class, and highlight different kinds of information in different colors. And certain things had to have boxes and underlines, and... You basically had to have a whole key to decipher what any of that meant. And
you had to go through your notes and do that. And she was just so pleased with herself. She was like, "my class is so hard. It's so rigorous." Okay, well, we can make things hard for the sake of them being hard, but that's not rigor. That's not really what that means. Okay, so we got folks teaching, who are trying to provide rigor, but what they're providing is just busy work. And that's not the same thing as the kind of rigor that should helps with closing the achievement gap. Teacher preparation.
Okay, so we know we have a teacher preparation problem. We know we have lots of folks coming out of teacher preparation programs, and then they're not even staying that first-year, let alone the first five years. So something we're doing in those programs isn't helping set teachers up for success, and that's a problem. And then we have lots of places that have teacher shortages. Okay. I didn't go to school to be a teacher. I didn't really know what to do with myself to be honest with you. I had really no idea. Somebody I respected said I should be a lawyer, and so I told everybody like, "I'm going to be a lawyer," and so my whole focus was like law school forever.
And I got into six law schools. I applied to 6 and got into 6. But then I worked for a lawyer, like the summer before I was supposed to go to law school, and discovered that it's really boring, and probably not what I should be doing with myself. And I got really stressed out about how much debt that I would have to go into to become a lawyer. And so I ended up not going to law school. So, then I really didn't know what to do with myself. So, I kind of fell backward into teaching. We relocated. My husband was in the military, and so we relocated to a place that had a teacher shortage. And I had a degree in English. I had 51 college credit hours in English, and they needed an English teacher. So, I taught all day, and I went to school at night to take my education courses. And looking back, that is so scary. That could have went really, really poorly for
my students. Thankfully, it didn't, but it could have. And I was certainly not the only teacher that I ever worked who did, they call it an alternative certification. Now, in my case, it worked out fine. It doesn't always work out so fine. So, that's kind of an issue. But ar the same time what you do do? Because we do have the teacher shortage. And you have folks who didn't
think they wanted to teach, and then decide they want to teach. Like, that's a thing.
Funny thing is about that law school story is, you know, I didn't go cuz I was worried about how much money I'd have to spend, and I actually ended up getting in more debt get my Ph.D. [laughs] I did that willingly because this was the right thing. But what you going to do? Anyway, school safety issues can be part of the achievement gap. If I don't feel safe at school, and that doesn't just mean school violence. If I'm experiencing all kinds of microaggressions of school, if I don't feel like my teachers value me, or care about me, or like me, that's gonna make me feel really unsafe as well.
Class sizes. I mention when I worked at the Title I school: I had like 35 to 45 kids in a class. When they put me at the rich kids school, I had 20 kids in the class. Who do you think got more of my attention?
Some of the sources of the achievement gap are home-based. Hunger. Nutrition. If I'm not getting adequate food, if I'm not getting my base-level needs met, how much can I really focus on trying to do learn things? I'm not going to be performing at my peak level. Parent participation. Tell me... Oh gosh, if I had a dime for every time somebody said, "some parents just don't care about their kids' education." Okay, that's absolutely, patently false. I've never met a parent who didn't care about their kids' education. But not all parents have the same amount of time and availability to participate at school. That's the difference. It's not about how much they care. It's about other things. So, you know, if I'm working two jobs to keep everybody fed and housed, I'm not going to be available to participate very much.
Television watching.
If I'm working two jobs, and my kids are with a babysitter or when the kids are old enough to kind of watch the younger ones, they are going to watch way more TV than if I have a parent there saying, "Turn off the TV." Parent availability goes right alongside parent participation. If I'm working two jobs, I'm not there to read to my kids, and we know that being read to actually increases your literary skills. Folks who are read to tend to read more on their own, once they learn to read on their own. Student mobility: that moving around thing. Very often in homes where there isn't a lot of money, students move a lot. My dad, I think I mentioned this in a previous lecture, dropped out of school to take care of his family. Super bright.
He was a brick mason.
Before that he did some other things that caused us to move around, but you also.. you have to move... you can't just brick everything in your own community, right? You have go places to brick things. And that can that can be a source of the achievement gap because you can miss things and not develop relationships with their peers and teachers, etc. Lead poisoning. Houses that have paint in them before a certain date... I want to say sometime in the seventies, could have lead and lead can really cause lots of issues with cognitive ability. Reading habits. Kids who read more tend to do better in school. That's just how it works. Even your birth weights--again things that happened before you were even born--things that you have no choice over can impact your educational achievement.
15% of the population actually lives below poverty line. 23% of that 15% is children. That is more than 16 million children live below the poverty line.
Other causes of the achievement gap: Poverty, income inequality, a lower socioeconomic status, all of that contributes to reduced access to educational opportunities. You're going to have less familial support because they're just not there because they are trying to earn a living. Nutrition Healthcare. All these factors contribute to educational achievement. Minority status. If you're not part of the dominant group, you're going to experience racism, prejudice, stereotyping, ethnic bias, institutionalized predisposition, such as schools' tendency to lower academic expectations for minorities or low-income students enrolled in the most challenging courses. And that's going to negatively impact your educational achievement. Lower-quality schools. Where you're going to experience ineffective teaching, overcrowding, dilapidated school facilities, inferior educational resources, and programs.
You're going to see a disproportionate representation of non-dominant group students and lower-income students in those lower-achieving schools, lower level academic classes, and classes taught by the least experienced or effective teachers. Parent and family factors, like low educational attainment, unemployment, family instability, all of that contributes to reduce academic motivation, disrupted education, lower educational aspirations etc.
The very structure of American schools and teacher prep programs contributes to lower academic performance in a host of different ways. Let me circle back to low social capital. So, I think your book talks about social capital. So, social capital is like... it doesn't have
to do with income exactly, although very often it's tied to that. But it has to do with, do I have the the social knowledge that I need to access things that I need? So, schools run on middle-class norms, right? Okay. My dad grew really really poor. Dirt floors. No indoor plumbing. My mom grew up upper-middle class.
And I know that's a real love story, right? Girl marries Boy from across the tracks, and all that stuff, and they were really super in love. But, anyway, okay, so we live out, like... no
stop signs. No red lights. Things like that. Okay. so the local school that I would've had to go to was not very good, and it was kind of a dangerous school. We had friends, who their kid was a year ahead of me. Anyway, I was a teeny tiny little kid. like, you know, they had to pull the waistband out and you know, safety pin so it would stay on. Just a teeny tiny little kid. Our friend's kid was a larger kid and he's getting beat up at school, and they're stealing his watch, and all of this crazy stuff. Anyway, they were concerned about sending me there. Well,
my dad didn't know what to do. But my mom, with all that social capital she had, she went 45 minutes into town. And she went to the private Catholic school. We were not Catholic, and she convinced them to give me a scholarship. And I don't know how she got the gas money to drive me to school 45 minutes one-way everyday, but somehow she did. And that's where I started school. So, I started school at pretty fancy Catholic School, even though there's no way in the world we could have afforded that. And that was 100% my mom's social capital. IHaving print materials in the house contributes to higher levels of literacy. There's a direct correlation between those things. And lower-income households tend to not have many print materials. Why? Because that stuff is really expensive, and people are trying to feed and house and clothe folks. Okay,
so we didn't have any money, but my mom always made sure there were print materials in the house. She got them at the library, which was in town, 45 mins away. Again, don't know where she got the gas money to do that. I don't know how she sorted this out, but she did. And there were always books at home, and magazines and this and that, and my mom swears that I learned how to read from flipping through that stuff and that one day I just started sounding them out. And I guess she read to me all the time growing up, and before I started school. So, these are just two examples of how my mother used her social capital that came
from growing up upper middle class to create opportunities for me that I would not have had because of the low income in our household .And my dad likely wouldn't have known how to navigate any of that because his class background. Hopefully that makes sense. So social capital can sometimes create or help contribute to inequality in the achievement gap because folks don't know how to navigate the educational system because it can be in fact very confusing.
All right. So this is just showing the gap begin. Among 9 year olds, there's a 23-point gap in math between White students and Black students and a 26-point gap in reading and that just gets wider with that accumulated advantage thing that we talked about with the Gladwell stuff in a previous lecture, that comes into play here as well.
So, this is among 17-year-olds. Looking at White, Black, and Hispanic students, and you can see that gap gets even thicker.
At the current moment, the achievement gap measures four years. So, at the end of high school ,African American and Latino student have skills in literacy and numeracy that are 4 years behind that of their fellow White students. These are averages. This is not to say that every single student this is every situation, but this is the average.
When we look at the achievement gap between children of high-income families and low-income families, it's actually 30 to 40% larger amongst kids born in 2001 than 25 years earlier. What does that mean? It means it's getting worse. It's not getting better or worse.
So, for every 1 line of print read by a low-income child, a middle-income reads three. Why does that matter? Because we know from the research that my exposure to print materials and how much I'm reading and being read to impacts how well I read later. And that impacts my educational achievement.
Part of the achievement gap is something we call the Summertime gap, and that's literally just a loss that lower-income children experience from the end of one school year to the start of the next school year. And it really has to do with what do higher-income children do in the summer? They go to fancy camps and on trips, and they're learning and picking up things through those experiences, and lower-income children are not getting to do those things. They actually estimate that summer learning loss accounts for about two-thirds of the ninth grade achievement gap and reading, and probably other gaps as well. That's just what the study was on.
Related to this is the school-to-prison pipeline, which is the term that we used to describe the policies and practices that push students out of classrooms and into the system, especially our most at-risk students.
There are lots of policies that contribute to the school-to-prison pipeline. So, we've been talking about failing public schools and inadequate resources. Well, for a lot of students that pipeline starts with those inadequate resources, those overcrowded classrooms, those inadequate teachers, insufficient funding, etc. That increases disengagement and drop out, and drop out increases the risk court involvement. Some schools actually encourage dropouts in response to pressures from testing accountability, like No Child Left Behind, and it causes them to push out low-performing students in an effort to boost their overall test scores. We actually call them dropouts, but lots of folks, a bunch of experts say we should call them push-outs. Zero-Tolerance policies: we'll talk more about this later. But Zero-Tolerance policies came into effect in response to some highly publicized school shootings. And so in response to that, schools embraced automatically severe punishment based on circumstances. So, like back when the dinosaurs roamed the Earth, if two kids threw bows,
they might get suspended for 3 days. They might not. It kind of depended on the circumstances. In a lot of situations, if you didn't start the fight you wouldn't get in trouble. Or sometimes teachers will just let it go. Now, a fight at school: very often both of them end up having some contact with the criminal justice system. Under these policies, students have expelled for bringing nail clippers and scissors to school. You've likely seen headlines about this. The rates of suspension have increased dramatically in recent years. 1.7 million kids were suspended in 1974; in the year 2000, 3.1 million. And those have been most dramatic for our students of color. And further, even more problematic is:
school the increasingly ignore or bypass due process. Students aren't getting any due process protections at all. And this just pushes students down that pipeline into the criminal justice system. Suspended and expelled students are often unsupervised and don't have any constructive activities. They fall behind in their course work. And that leads to greater likelihood of disengagement and dropout. And all of those factors increase the likelihood of contact with the criminal justice system. When kids are denied procedural protections and courts in schools
that has really negative outcomes. So, in one state, up to 80% of court-involved children don't even have lawyers. Juvenile Detention facilities provide few, if any educational services all. Students of color are far more likely than their White peers to be suspended, expelled, or arrested for the same kinds of conduct. So, in other words, you have two students who do the exact same behavior; one was a student of color, one is not. The student of color is going to probably experience far more harsher penalties. And that's going to push them down this pipeline. Once you start getting pushed down the oipeline, it's very difficult to make that journey in reverse. There are lots of barriers to reentry in traditional schools. So, the vast majority of those students never end up graduating from high school. So, we used to have students go to this place called The Rock, which was the alternative school. So, they got in trouble or got expelled for something and had to go to the alternative school for a period of time, and then when they would come back, their re-entry was
very difficult. Sometimes students didn't even make it through the day before they would get sent back.
I was one of the few teachers that they would be sure to put that kid in my class, and the reason was: my policy was: everyday is a new day. If you acted up the day before and we have some kind of issue. The next day is a fresh day. I'm not going to hold a grudge for what happened yesterday. We're going to start today as as fresh new day. That extended to kids coming back from The Rock.
Whatever it is that sent you there, you're not there now. You're here. Let's do what we're gonna do here.
And yeah, so they put a lot of a lot of kids who came back from alternative school in my class, but you know, I'm just one teacher. That's is not necessarily enough and a lot of them ended up not being able to stay, which is really unfortunate. Police in school hallways. So, back when the dinosaus roamed the earth, we did not have police officers on our campuses. When I first started teaching in the early 90s, we didn't have school resource resource officers on campus. Now, you see them almost everywhere, and a lot of under-resourced schools actually having increased reliance on police rather than teachers or administrators to maintain discipline. So between me and my students, and if there's some disciplinary issue, that it's up to me to figure out how to solve it.
Some of my fellow teachers operated... a lot of them... whatever minor infraction was taking place, rather than just dealing with it themselves, they will call the school resource officer with a problem. You're now putting that student in contact with the criminal justice system. The school resource officer now knows their names and are going to be kind of watching what they're doing and looking for them to mess up. It's just really sending this for really not good outcome.
Another big issue is that a lot of districts employee school resource officers to patrol their hallway and those officers have no training in working with teens. Why is that matter? Well, I'll tell you. Working with teenagers: not everybody is cut out to work with teenagers. And there's a really steep learning curve. One of the first things I learned about working with teenagers is:
don't
escalate the scene. It takes two people to escalate a scene. Students comes at you sideways and they're all upset. And then you match that energy; you have now escalated the scene. You cannot take what they do personally, and you cannot respond in kind if they're acting all wild. You need to be even calmer than you would be normally.
Don't back them into a corner. Don't give them some situation where they can't get out of it without losing face because respect is incredibly important to them. Another big important thing to realize: their brains are not fully formed. Your brain is not really fully formed until you're 25, 26 years old. When you're a teenager all hopped up on hormones and your brain is not fully developed, you're doing all kinds of stuff that doesn't make any sense at all. And here's the thing: if you're working with teenagers and you are expecting them to act like adults, that's not going to go well. And if you're taking what they're doing personally, that's not going to go. It probably just everything to do with you. Sometimes they can't even tell you what's going on with them. I can't tell you the number of students I've had look me up on social media and send me a message and apologize and say, "you know, you were actually my favorite teacher. I don't know why I gave you the business all the time. I don't know what my problem was. I'm sure you think I hated you." I didn't
think they hated me. Because it actually
probably isn't about you at all.
Well, if you don't have any training, if you don't understand teenagers, and you've never really worked with them, then you place a police officer on campus and they have no training and maybe that's not the assignment they wanted. What do you think guys become cops? Did they think, what I really want to do is like being at school on a middle school or high school campus all day? No, that's not where they want to be. They want to be where all the action is. So, it's kind of just setting everybody up in a bad situation and it's kind of setting that officer up to fail. It's really kind of unfair. Now, that being said, I have encountered some school resource officers, who are great at their job, and seemed to really like teenagers, and seemed to really get them, but that's just luck of the draw. Because of
the situation, we're just setting folks up. Children are far more likely to be subject to school-based arrests, the majority of which are for nonviolent offenses, like disruptive behavior than they were even a generation ago. And this rise in school-based arrests is the quickest route from the classroom to the jailhouse, and most directly exemplifies the criminalization of school children. I'll tell you a quick story. So it's my first year at the title 1 School, and
I always ate lunch in my classroom, but I I know what happened because I heard from many people, including adults. So, there was a student, not my student, who kind had of like a little bit with the lunch ladies every day. So, he'd go through the lunch line and he would make a big thing about pretending to steal a Gatorade. But he would only do it when he had their eye contact, so it's like a bit. So, like, "See me take the Gatorade?" And he was like really loud and silly, like anybody observing should have put this together that this was a bit. This is him clowning around. Then when he would get to the end of the line, he would put it back. That was just his deal. So, the SRO officer, who is new to to campus sees him do this [take the Gatorade] and somehow
doesn't pick up on what's actually happening and starts yelling at him. And here's another thing with teenagers: If you don't have a relationship with a teenager, you really cannot get up in their face about stuff, and expect them to just do what you say. That kind of doesn't really work out very well, but he did that. He got in the kid's face.
And the kid basically told him to F off. Which... that's kind of how they are sometimes. Kid tells him to F off. He puts the Gatorade down, but the cop misses him putting it down. Kid goes outside with his lunch. The officer follows him outside. This is Texas. Kids eat outside a lot. It is very windy in Texas all of the time. Officer goes outside. He tells the kid to get down on his knees. The kid has some other choice words for him. The officer takes his pepper spray and sprays it at the kid. The wind is blowing? You see where this is headed, right? So, we probably had like a hundred kids outside. They all get pepper sprayed. It's total chaos. We go into lockdown. The bell is ringing. I don't know what's happening. I'm downstairs in my class room. The bell's ringing and then I'm in my doorway, as is my habit, and there's all this chaos and there's kids running around. And their eyes are all red. And they come over the thing, and say we're in lockdown. So, I have kids in my room who
I don't even know them. They're all pepper-sprayed. I mean, it was a mess. Just an absolute mess, and silly, and completely avoidable. Unfortunately, the kid with the Gatorade ends up getting arrested and facing charges, and starts down the school-to-prison pipeline. And it's really unfortunate because if they had given the officer some training about how to handle teenagers that could have been a different outcome, or if he had relationships with the students before he jumped in, that could have made a difference. Just lots of different ways that scenario could have went a different way, but it didn't. Disciplinary alternative schools: I just touched on them, but that's a growing thing around the country. They're often run by private for-profit companies, and are immune from educational accountability standards. And so they don't tend to provide meaningful educational services for students there. And so struggling students return to their regular schools unprepared, and are now kind of locked
in inferior educational settings, or funneled through alternative schools into the juvenile system. Whenever we had a student come back from the alternative school, they were always completely behind and really struggling. And that stressed them out. It was just a bad situation.
We know from the data that even when we control for school poverty, schools that have an SRO have five times the rate arrest for disorderly conduct in schools than schools without an SRO. What's disorderly conduct? It's whatever you want it to be because it doesn't have a specific definition. So, when we look at total arrest rate, we can see that the orderly conduct charges are making up the bulk of that, and those wouldn't happen if you didn't have an SRO right there on campus.
We also know that the presence of a SROs on campus actually doesn't have anything to do with the reported crime rates. So, that's a problem. And we also know that school-related arrests have a racial element to them. Remember, we talked about disproportionate representation? Well, Black students represent about 16% of student enrollment, yet they represent 31% of school-related arrests. We call that an over-representation. That isn't good. We don't want to see that. So, we're seeing this huge uptick in arrests. And we're seeing that it's impacting our non-dominant students more than it's impacting anyone else.
We have over-representation in terms of students being expelled or suspended. That has to do with race as well.
You probably saw this on the news. This was a really unfortunate incident and it plays right into exactly where we just talked about. A teacher couldn't get a student to stand up from her desk, and instead of figuring out how to handle it herself, and trying to fall back on the relationship that she should have built with the student, she ended up calling the school resource officer. He ends up physically dragging the girl out of her desk by her hair, and slamming her to the floor. And I think we can agree that that is a disproportionate reaction to a student refusing to stand up at their desk, and something that a teacher really should handle. And lots of folks have said that our teacher preparation programs are obviously not preparing to them have adequate classroom management, and I would agree with that.
A recent study found that adding police to Texas school campus--and Texas schools are replete with SRO officers--led to declines graduation rates and in college enrollment rates. Another study found that having more police in New York City neighborhoods actually hurt the test scores of Black male students as young as 11 years old, and were even worse for older students, up to age 15.
One student in the United States is pushed out of high school every 26 seconds. That's a total of 6000 students a day. And that was in 2011. I think those numbers have actually gone up.
That's a problem because pushouts are eight times more likely to be incarcerated.
Approximatley 75% of state prison inmates did not complete high school. There's a direct correlation between those two things.
50% of African-American male pushout students are in fact behind bars.
African-American male students who have pushed out are incarcerated at six times the rate of White male students have been pushed out.
So, how can we address this? How can we address the achievement gap and all the things that go with it? Effective schools research say that having a climate of high expectations is one of the key things to addressing this. Having effective school leadership. Having SROs handle classroom discipline is not having effective leadership. Accountability processes, monitoring student learning, spending a lot of time on task in the classroom. So, using our classroom time well and having the flexibility to experiment and try new things.
If you would, with your partner or your group, respond to these questions on one piece of paper that everyone will turn in to be credited.