Category Archives: Education (K-12)

It would seem to be a common sense idea that putting disruptive students in classrooms would negatively impact the learning experience of the other students. But common sense rarely prevails against ideology, especially one as powerful and pervasive as the social justice movement to stamp out racial disparities in the rate of suspensions and other punishments in Virginia schools.

Based on common sense, I have argued that new justice-driven disciplinary policies, which define disruptive students as “victims” and keep them in class, creates a new group of victims — their classmates. Now comes rigorous academic research that quantifies the impact.

In a study published in the American Economic Review, “The Long-Run Effects of Disruptive Peers,” Scott E. Carrell, Mark Hoekstra, and Elira Kura exploited a longitudinal database of Alachua County, Fla., schools to track what happened to students exposed to disruptive students. The main conclusions:

• Exposure to a single disruptive peer through five years of elementary school has lasting effects. By age 24 to 28, classmates’ earnings are 3 percent lower than they would be otherwise.
• One year’s exposure to a disruptive student in a class of 25 reduces the discounted value of classmates’ earnings by $80,000.
• Increased exposure to disruptive peers by children from lower relative-income families compared to higher-income households explains about 5 percent of the rich-poor earnings gap in adulthood.

“While there are negative affects across the income distribution, the largest effects are on those individuals who earn less than $40,000 annually,” states the study. “The larger impact is to move individuals from the middle of the income distribution to the lower part of the income distribution.”

Bacon’s bottom line: The authors do not comment upon the social-justice disciplinary paradigm being foisted on Virginia schools and schools nationally. Nor do they advance recommendations on how to deal with disruptive students. But the study makes it crystal clear that students pay a price — diminished education, lower test scores, and reduced income — when classmates create distractions and cut into teaching time.

In many instances, the disruptive students are victims — typically of domestic violence. There is an ample academic literature showing the children exposed to domestic violence are more likely to display aggressive behavior,  bullying, depression, animal cruelty, academic performance, and violence in adulthood. So, it’s not as if these kids don’t warrant some special consideration. But school disciplinary policies must acknowledge that keeping disruptive students in mainstream classes comes at a significant cost to their peers. Indeed, the failure to remove disruptive students from classrooms is a significant engine of social and economic inequality.

There may be a cost to providing special educational arrangements for disruptive students, but there is a significant cost for not providing those arrangements.

In purportedly good news for the Richmond Public School system, chronic absenteeism is on the decline. Reports the Richmond Times-Dispatch:

Fourteen percent of city school students have missed at least 10 percent of the school year, as of the beginning of the month. Last year, 16 percent of students were chronically absent. That means about 600 fewer students are chronically absent this year compared with last.

“Even one chronically absent student is one too many,” said Superintendent Jason Kamras. “But we’re heading in the right direction.”

Absenteeism is one of the measures adopted by the Virginia Department of Education to evaluate schools for purposes of accreditation. In VDOE data released earlier this fall, more than one in four schools received poor ratings for their attendance.

The reason I say that this is “purportedly” good news for Richmond city schools is that I am not persuaded that rounding up absentee kids and putting them back in school does anything to (a) increase their learning, or (b) help the learning of their classmates. Compelling a kid to park his (or her) carcass in a school building is no guarantee that they won’t skip class and just hang out, or, if they do enter the classroom, that they won’t disrupt the proceedings out of boredom or resentment for having been forced to be there.

While it makes educational bureaucrats delighted to see reduced absenteeism, someone might want to ask teachers how happy they are to have chronic school-skippers back in the classroom.

There are ways to track the effects of bringing truants back into school. Schools maintain records on disciplinary infractions. One might predict an increase in disciplinary infractions and disciplinary actions as a result of schools’ “success” in reducing absenteeism. Of course, in the real world we live in, Richmond Public Schools have adopted a therapeutic approach to dealing with disruptive students. Under tremendous pressure to reduce the number of disciplinary actions, teachers and principles may not report infractions that they would have in the past. So, there is no guarantee that increased misbehavior, if it occurs, will show up in the statistics.

Here’s what will show up in the statistics. Teachers will burn out more quickly, and many will quit schools where disciplinary issues are the worst. This will be reflected in a higher rate of churn. While schools don’t publish teacher turnover as a metric, they do publish numbers on district-wide teacher shortfalls. As discipline deteriorates, we might expect shortfalls to intensify.

Another potential effect will be deteriorating classroom conditions. Students who want to learn are deprived of instructional time as teachers devote more attention to troublemakers. If students learn less, they will score worse in standardized tests.

I may be totally wrong. Reducing absenteeism may lead to felicitous educational outcomes for everyone. But there will be no way to tell if I’m right or wrong because schools aren’t performing the requisite analysis to find out. Until such analysis is made available, Richmond schools are acting in blind faith that they’re doing more good than harm.

The Virginia Early Childhood Foundation has published a new biennial School Readiness Report Card exploring the relationship between childhood risk factors and educational outcomes across Virginia. The Foundation’s big argument, cast cautiously as “one plausible interpretation” of the data, is that recent declines in SOL results can be attributed to a rise in the number of children born into poverty in previous years.

Starting in school year 2013-14, each pool of students taking the PALS-K has included a far greater number of students than in previous years who lived in poverty for their entire first five years of life. This will be true of all succeeding cohorts for the next 5-6 years. … Children with prolonged exposure to poverty are more likely to start school already behind, hence a dip in average PALS-K scores and “Pass” rates, while unwelcome, is not unexpected.

(PALS stands for Phonological Awareness Literacy Screening.)

This interpretation contrasts with the argument I have advanced on this blog that the recent decline in SOL scores coincides with spreading classroom disorder caused by the transition in many school districts from traditional disciplinary methods to a therapeutic approach that consumes teachers’ attention and diverts from time devoted to classroom instruction.

The Foundation’s argument is a not-implausible one. Moreover, I applaud the authors for couching their conclusion as merely “one interpretation” of the data. The authors concede, “It is difficult to make confident assertions regarding the effectiveness and progress of Virginia’s recent school readiness efforts.” I also applaud the Foundation for making accessible data in an interactive database that others can use to reach their own conclusions.

However, I read the data differently, and I invite Bacon’s Rebellion readers to weigh in with their own take on the data.

But first, let’s discuss what we agree on. Poor children comprise a growing percentage of the school population. Poverty is highly correlated with lower levels of educational achievement. Therefore, an increasing percentage of poor children in the schools will be reflected by depressed educational achievement as measured by SOL pass rates.  So far, so good.

The authors see the problem as children “living in poverty” for the first five years of their lives. The emphasis on poverty, a measure of income reported to the Internal Revenue Service, as opposed to “living in households headed by mothers with less than 12 years education” implies that a household’s material poverty, or lack of material resources, is the problem. This analysis fails to take into account the vast array of resources that the welfare state provides poor mothers with children.

It is far more productive, I would suggest, to focus on the educational level of the mother. Statewide, the percentage of births to less-than-high-school mothers decreased marginally from 9.7% over the five-year period covered to 9.5%. Among low-income mothers, the percentage increased from 81.5% to 83.3%. 

A mother who has failed to graduate from high school is significantly less likely to provide the home environment conducive to early learning — teaching numbers, colors, and ABCs — as a mother who has graduated from high school, college, or an advanced degree program. Teaching ABCs does not require financial resources. It does not require a laptop or high-speed bandwidth. It requires a willingness of the mother to spend time teaching the child things that even poorly educated, low-income women know.

As the economy continues to expand and the job picture improves, creating employment opportunities for even the most unskilled of workers, we can expect to see a decline in “poverty.” However, we don’t know if a decline in poverty may will be matched by a commensurate decline in the percentage of less-than-high-school mothers having children, which I believe is a much more important variable. If the children living in “poverty” level declines but the children living with less-than-high-school mothers does not, I would predict that we will continue to see deteriorating SOL scores.

Another point: the School Readiness Report Card data show declining 3rd grade SOL failure rates in Years 2 and 3, but then increasing failure rates in years 4 and 5. How does the Foundation’s theory account for that abrupt about-face?

The Report Card does not show failure rates for other grades. If we see the same patterns — declining failure rates three-four years ago then suddenly higher failure rates in upper grades in the past two years — then something other than an increase in children born into poverty five years previously must be responsible. My theory would predict that deteriorating classroom discipline would manifest itself in middle school and high school far more forcefully than in elementary school and, therefore, that the decline in SOL scores would be sharper in the upper grades. I have not checked the data, however, so I do not know that to be the case.

While I may disagree with the Virginia Early Childhood Foundation’s conclusions, I appreciate its willingness to publish the data behind its report and the authors’ caution in drawing hard-and-fast conclusions.

Virginia is notorious for its hostility toward charter schools. In the Old Dominion, charter schools must be approved by local school boards, which see educational alternatives as a threat rather than a potential blessing. Virginia has a grand total of eight charter schools, compared to 88 in New Jersey, a state with comparable school enrollment.

Among the commonly cited reasons for opposing charter schools is that they siphon away money from non-chartered public schools. The questionable assumption here is that existing schools can do a better job with the money than the charter schools can.

In the City of Richmond, which has the worst schools in the entire state (excepting possibly Petersburg), the School Board has permitted two charter schools, including one for kids with cognitive disabilities. According to the Richmond Times-Dispatch, a strong majority of school board members opposes creation of any more.

“In order to deliver on the promise of the American dream, we must aim for a public education system where every school is a good school,” said Kenya Gibson, who represents the city’s 3rd District, when running for School Board last year. “Corporate reforms, including the charter industry, are antithetical to this goal.”

Here’s a question for Gibson and others who oppose charter schools: Which drains more resources from Richmond Public Schools — a couple of charter schools or a school system that is so atrociously bad that every parent who can afford to do so sends their kids to private school or moves to a neighboring county?

The chart above, created by John Butcher of Cranky’s Blog fame, shows how enrollment remains strong in elementary schools, nine of which meet the benchmark for accreditation on the reading tests. Then in middle schools, educational attainment plummets — and, not surprisingly, so does enrollment. Each student who leaves represents the loss of thousands of dollars in state funds. How much money is the school district bleeding because of this exodus?

What if creating a charter middle school helped reverse plummeting enrollment and brought more money into the school district? When you have the worst schools and worst academic attainment in the entire state, isn’t it time to try something new?