April 16, 2013

L.A. school board president: Problem with L.A. schools is too much discipline

From the Los Angeles Times:
Defiance no reason to suspend students, board president says

By Teresa Watanabe 
April 11, 2013, 2:29 p.m. 
Administrators in the Los Angeles Unified School District would no longer be allowed to suspend students for mouthing off or other acts of “willful defiance” under a groundbreaking school board resolution set to be proposed next week. 
Amid rising national concern that harsh discipline practices disproportionately harm minority students, the resolution by board President Monica Garcia would mark the first state ban on suspensions for willful defiance. 
Instead, schools would be required to use less punitive alternatives to deal with behavioral problems.  Students have been suspended for such acts as wearing hats, tapping their feet on the floor and refusing to read as directed under the willful defiance category, which accounts for nearly 42% of all suspensions in California and about one-third in L.A. Unified. 
Garcia was scheduled to appear at a rally Thursday with hundreds of students and community activists to kick off a citywide campaign to pass the resolution, the School Climate Bill of Rights. ...
Faer said two decades of research has shown that suspending students does not improve behavior but only places students at higher risk for dropping out or running afoul of the law. 

Yeah, but suspension gets them out of the classroom, allowing other students to learn. But who cares about the cooperative students who want to get an education? They're not official victims, so they don't count.
Studies have also shown that harsh discipline policies are used more frequently with African American youth and students with disabilities. In an analysis of federal data released this week, the UCLA Civil Rights Project reported that African Americans accounted for 26% of L.A. Unified’s suspensions in 2009-10 but make up less than 10% of the district’s students. 
However, the district has made progress in reducing suspensions overall. The number of instruction days lost to suspensions decreased to 26,286 in 2011-12, compared to 74,765 in 2006-07. 
Garcia’s resolution would direct all schools to develop two alternatives to suspension that research has shown to be effective: restorative justice practices, which include peer mediation, counseling and face-to-face meetings among involved parties and a program to improve schoolwide behavior through clear expectations and incentives. 

How about afterschool detentions doing humiliating litter pick-up in front of other students under the domineering command of an assistant football coach? It's not as if the human race has zero experience at how to intimidate young punks into line.
The resolution would also require the district to release data on suspensions every quarter and set up a complaint process for students and parents if their schools do not establish the two prescribed alternative programs.

LAUSD schools already have to release suspension data every year for the benefit of plaintiffs' attorneys trawling for disparate impact discrimination lawsuits. (For example, here is the suspension data by race for the expensive new East Valley high school in North Hollywood. This campus cost $130 million to build for 1,593 seats, but its enrollment is only 1,001, or $130,000 per student.) Apparently, though, the civil right lawyers don't find that fast enough for the purposes of getting their hands in LAUSD's deep pockets.

There's always a lot of talk about how We Need Better Teachers. One way to get better people to go into teaching is to not make their working days a living hell in the name of fighting racism.

If you want to see the mindset of the people who work to undermine the schools, watch Mike Leigh's insufferable movie "Happy-Go-Lucky" about a London schoolteacher. From my review in The American Conservative:
Most people in “Happy-Go-Lucky” have pleasant government jobs. Judging from this movie, the British welfare state exists mostly so people with soft college degrees can have some place to hang out together while making plans for which pub or disco to go to after work. ...
One vignette of this momentum-free movie unwittingly exemplifies the female cluelessness that has made Britain’s schools a dystopia of juvenile male thuggishness. When one of her students starts punching other children, does Poppy punish him? No, she signs the bully up for counseling, which consists of three adults—the headmistress, Poppy, and her future boyfriend—sitting around praising the little lout and asking him what’s the real reason he hits people. (Actual answer, but not one conceivable in Mike Leigh's mental universe: it’s fun.) 

27 comments:

  1. I worked for seven years in Los Angeles (they told me it was a promotion) and was only too happy to move back to Texas for the same level job. While in Cali we made sure NOT to live in the LAUSD. I saw what was going on there and made sure my daughters went to Moorpark High School. Actually a good school and 4 time national champs in Academic Decathlon in a 10 year span. What a difference, so close.

    Moorpark High School was about 1/3 Latino, but the AcaDeca team was mostly White and Asian. Go figure.

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  2. Future LAUSD grads/dropouts will watch The Breakfast Club with incomprehension and horror.

    Bender just needed peer mediation, princess.

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  3. Trayvon Martin was killed while being suspended. So I think suspensions are overused.

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  4. I am so glad my mother did not live long enough to see just how low the system could go (which even today we can only estimate from the slope of the decline).

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  5. A higher school suspension rate for defiance is more way that the left claims that civilization has failed AfAms, when it more true to say that it is Afams have failed civilization.

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  6. http://illinoisfamily.org/homosexuality/homosexual-activist-admits-true-purpose-of-battle-is-to-destroy-marriage/

    Jewish lesbian admits the true nature of the agenda.

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  7. Every school trustee should have to sub for a week, incognito. Beyond that, Ms. Garcia should be bitch slapped by every lausd teacher.

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  8. Quote: "Studies have also shown that harsh discipline policies are used more frequently with African American youth and students with disabilities"

    Previously, that bit about students with disabilities might have tugged at my heartstrings. But now I know that those words don't mean, e.g., kids with leg braces, but are code words referring to students whose parents have been coached to get their children misclassified as "disabled" so the parents can collect SSDI and SSI, and also to children who are stupid (and often aggressive), who are given the pseudomedical diagnosis of "learning-disabled" to (a) make their schools eligible for extra Federal funds, and (b) politely excuse the students' poor performance while simultaneously fudging standardized-test statistics (since "disabled" kids' scores don't count, whereas merely-stupid kids' scores would drag down the class average).

    Heck, in some schools there are almost no stupid kids, only (highly subsidized) "disabled" ones, and the categories of "African-American" and "disabled" overlap to a large degree.

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  9. ..."rising national concern..." translation: it's a new idea with almost no support, but it's going to be the fashionable POV, so get with it.

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  10. This appears to be one of those policies which will quickly crash & burn, if it is applied as stated. The 3 (count 'em, three) present and former public school teachers in my immediate family assure me that even a good teacher (motivated, educated, a people person, wants to nurture young minds to upshoot, etc.) can easily spend as much time trying to control one or two snotty kids as actually teaching the rest of the 20-25 students in the class. In a just world , of course, the budding sociopath would be either expelled or sent to a classroom where the resources are present to control him (typically some hardass with a crewcut, or the African-American equivilant).
    The silliness of the policy might be amusing, of course, but for the fact that the other students, our American children, will actually lose out. The kids may be so unfortunate as to attend LAUSD schools, but what parent would want their child to get this kind of (non) education?

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  11. I went to LA city schools. I went to Eagle Rock Elementary circa 1955. What a paradise. It seemed so even then.

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  12. Students have been suspended for such acts as wearing hats, tapping their feet on the floor and refusing to read as directed under the willful defiance category, which accounts for nearly 42% of all suspensions in California and about one-third in L.A. Unified.

    I have trouble believing that. I get the feeling the brat actually did something a lot worse, but for some reason, it's getting recorded in the official stat book as a relatively piddly infraction like "willful defiance."

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  13. There are no conservatives in LA, so Kevin Drum cannot blame the inevitable failure of LAUSD on Grover Norquist. But he'll try. But seriously, if we see US politics as essentially drunks being restrained by less-intelligent but more sober bouncers, who get blamed for all the fights, it's great to have a whole state with no bouncers. Look forward to following the continuing demise of the Golden State from a safe distance.

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  14. It's Mike Leigh, not Ken!

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  15. So, that's why nobody except me ever gets Ken Leigh and Ken Loach confused!

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  16. Nameless @ 4/16/13, 5:57 PM
    Every school trustee should have to sub for a week, incognito.

    Excellent suggestion. After seeing how difficult it can be to teach the students who want to learn when one or more students are acting up,we might see a trustee with a different opinion.

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  17. groundbreaking

    I object to the down-defining of the word groundbreaking.

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  18. One picture is worth a thousand words. One look at the porcine Garcia shows the level to which the education industry has sunk. As a line of work education has been a step up for very many mediocre minorities who can make more money than they otherwise would had they had to rely on their merit. The bad drives out the good and has turned public education employment in many places into just swamps inhabited by the stupid, the indifferent, the lazy, the eccentric. Racial politics have caused upheaval in education for the past half-a-century or so, which pretty much destroyed much of it and apparently it's still going on in various forms. It's a money pit; the more that's spent the less it actually does. In the larger systems it's a case of the dumb teaching the stupid.

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  19. What's funny is that there is another push to stop schools from letting the police manage bad behavior. "Let the principal handle it!"

    The NYT had a piece on this topic last week: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/12/education/with-police-in-schools-more-children-in-court.html?pagewanted=all

    So basically the liberals are pushing from both ends, to reduce or eliminate any form of punishment of blacks and browns by school administrators, as such punishment is of course inevitably disparate.

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  20. Another good, classic movie about the reality behind London's dysfunctional and failing stae run comprehensive schools is 'The Class of Miss McMichael' starring Oliver Reed and Glenda Jackson.
    An underrated gem from 1978.

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  21. Speaking of Glenda Jackson, (now aged 75 and the Labour MP for Hampstead - the home of British champagne liberals, no less -), she did wonderful work in the the House of Commons the other day in denouncing Maggie Thatcher after her death. A nifty little speech invoking 'sharp elbows and sharp knees'.
    Almost makes you feel proud to be a Labour vote.

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  22. first the KIPP people say the reason schools are failing is because of too little discipline, now L.A schools are failing because there's too much discipline! what's next?

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  23. Iain Johnston4/17/13, 9:13 AM

    Thank goodness somebody else hated the film "Happy-Go-Lucky"; women I know seem to love it and are nonplussed when I point out that Poppy is an emotional incontinent. The depressed driving instructor is merely a unrealistic foil for her dizziness (and you know he's crazy because he doesn't like multiculturalism!)

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  24. Dear me. "Groundbreaking"? This word used to be reserved for works of artistic genius or great scientific achievements. Now it is used to describe the deliberate worsening of school discipline.

    By the way, "Lee" is not Mike Lee's real surname. Just saying...

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  25. Instead of suspending such students you could send them to another room in the same school - the Pandemonium Room.

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  26. Mike Hunt Rice4/17/13, 1:29 PM

    1) Principals hold it against teachers when they throw students out of class.

    2) When a student misbehaves, current thinking is that this is the fault of the teacher, since the teacher didn't "engage" the student.

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  27. The "emotional incontinence" of his female characters was proof to all that Mr. "Leigh" had more than a passing knowledge of Jewish mothers.

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