Very helpful report by the U.S. Department of Education that focuses on post-Covid disparities in educational access, opportunities to take advanced classes, and varius outcomes, particularly with respect to disciplinary actions against students. For once, this is not an analysis of test scores, but rather gets at the quality of experience during the pandemic. 

Not surprisingly, differentials align to race, as well as to  gender, disability, and English learners. This article doesn't link to the actual data, so here goes:  "2020-21 CRDC Reports and Snapshots."

Hence, the importance of research for the advancement of civil rights in our country, an unfinished agenda.

-Angela Valenzuela

First Civil Rights Data Since COVID Reveals Racial Divide in Advanced Classes

Other equity indicators — such as suspensions and corporal punishment — more difficult to compare because of 2020-21’s widespread school closures.

The latest federal civil rights data confirmed Black and Hispanic students’ inequitable access to STEM courses. The Los Angeles Unified School District has tried to make up the gap by offering college classes in partnership with the National Education Equity Lab. (Mel Melcon/Los Angeles Times/Getty Images)

By Linda Jacobson | 

November 15, 2023

About 2.9 million high school students took at least one Advanced Placement course in the 2020-21 school year, according to the latest federal data measuring access to educational opportunity. But Black and Latino students were significantly underrepresented in those college-level math and science courses. 

And schools in which at least 75% of students are Black and Latino offer fewer math, science and computer science courses than those with a low-minority population.

Those are among the racial disparities noted Wednesday in the Civil Rights Data Collection — the first released since 2017-18. Considering the data was collected when the vast majority of districts offered only virtual or hybrid learning, officials cautioned against making direct comparisons to previous years. But they also noted that among the many topics covered in the survey, including suspension rates, sexual harassment and school staffing data, course-taking trends might be less affected by the pandemic. 

“Sadly, the inequities that have long persisted in our education system are on full display,” said Education Secretary Miguel Cardona, noting the department’s efforts to expand access to STEM learning through partnerships with NASA, nonprofits and the private sector. “We spent years fighting COVID; now we must fight complacency.”

COVID disrupted all aspects of the U.S. education system, and that includes federal efforts to measure how schools are protecting students’ civil rights. Officials canceled the 2019-20 survey and moved it to the following year, without knowing how COVID would continue to upend normal school operations. Many U.S. schools did not return to in-person learning full time until the 2021-22 school year. Prior to that, steep declines in areas such as out-of-school suspension or the use of corporal punishment are likely because many students were learning at home — not because schools stopped disciplining students. 

That doesn’t mean the data isn’t useful for examining gaps based on race and disability. Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights Catherine Lhamon called the release “crucial civil rights data specific to students’ pandemic experience.” Others agreed that the data will help the nation better understand how the pandemic exacerbated inequities for vulnerable students. 

“It won’t be an apples-to-apples comparison,” said David Hinojosa, director of the Educational Opportunities Project at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. “At the same time, the whole intent behind the collection of this data is for schools, communities and civil rights enforcement agencies to identify and correct any civil rights disparities.”

‘Discipline looked very different’

As the primary source of information on school discipline, the survey shows that despite school closures, students missed more than 2 million days of school due to out-of-school suspensions during the 2020-21 school year.

Black boys were suspended at higher rates than boys of other races — a longstanding disparity. Black boys represented 8% of the total K-12 population but 18% of those that received one or more out-of-school suspensions. Black girls represented 7% of student enrollment, but accounted for 9% of students with one or more out-of-school suspensions. White girls made up 22% of the student population, but represented 13% of out-of-school suspensions. 

This data was especially impacted by remote learning, noted Nancy Duchesneau, a senior P-12 research associate at EdTrust, an advocacy organization that focuses on educational equity. 

“Exclusionary discipline looked very different during virtual learning,” she said. “Students were locked out of accounts, or removed from virtual learning environments, without official suspensions or expulsions. These instances of unofficial exclusionary discipline will not be reflected in the data.”

Despite 2020-21 being an unusual school year, districts still referred 61,900 students to law enforcement, which officials described as alarming, and 19,400 students received corporal punishment. Earlier this year, the department issued guidance urging schools to replace physical punishment with other methods.

Related

Kids Keep Getting Hit, Even in Schools Where It’s Banned

The department also collected 2021-22 data and next month, districts can begin to submit responses for the current 2023-24 school year, putting the program back on its regular biennial schedule.

The 2020-21 findings confirm what some researchers captured during the pandemic — the decline in preschool enrollment, for example. In 2017-18, 1.4 million children attended a school district preschool program, but that dropped to 1.2 million, according to the latest data. 

“People did not equitably have access to the internet,” Hinojosa said, “and they weren’t going to have their 4-year-old in front of the screen where they couldn’t learn.” 

The survey, for the first time, included questions about students’ access to the internet and devices. Ninety-three percent of schools offer high-speed internet, and there’s little variation between high-minority and low-minority schools. But there were state-level differences.

Students in Alaska have the least access, where 59% of schools reported a high-speed connection, followed by Florida with 66%. Kentucky, Maryland, North Carolina, Virginia and West Virginia all reported 99% or more. 

While most of the questions focused on in-school availability, the survey also showed that 87% of schools allowed students to take home devices. 

Along with a series of national snapshots, the department also launched a new website with access to state and local data. That will allow for comparisons between states and districts that had different rates of in-person learning and home internet access, said Jennifer Bell-Ellwanger, president and CEO of the nonprofit Data Quality Campaign.

“We need this data even if it’s not as clear or clean as we might want,” she said. But she added, “It’s almost like a new baseline.”

Other top takeaways from the results are:

• Black students made up 15% of the total high school enrollment, but represented 6% of students enrolled in an AP math course. Latino students represented 27% of high school students, but 19% of those in AP math. 

• Boys were more likely than girls to take Algebra I, physics and computer science. But girls had higher enrollment rates than boys in Algebra II, advanced math classes, biology and chemistry. 

• White and Asian high schoolers were overrepresented in college dual enrollment courses, while Black and Hispanic students, English learners and students with disabilities were underrepresented. 

• American Indian or Alaska Native students were 3.4 times more likely than white students to attend a school with a police officer or security guard, but without a school counselor, social worker, nurse or psychologist. 

• There were 20,800 students disciplined for sex-based bullying or harassment in the 2020-21 schools year. White boys made up 24% of the total K-12 student enrollment but accounted for almost half of those disciplined for harassment or bullying on the basis of sex.

U.S.: End Beating of Children in Public Schools

Violation of dress code can be a matter of not tucking in your shirt according to students I've talked to in a high school that practices paddling. Crazy!

-Patricia

Abusive, Discriminatory Punishment Undermines Education

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
CONTACT: hrwpress@hrw.org or media@aclu.org

DALLAS – More than 200,000 US public school students were punished by beatings during the 2006-2007 school year, Human Rights Watch and the American Civil Liberties Union said in a joint report released today. In the 13 states that corporally punished more than 1,000 students per year, African-American girls were twice as likely to be beaten as their white counterparts.

In the 125-page report, "A Violent Education: Corporal Punishment of Children in U.S. Public Schools," the ACLU and Human Rights Watch found that in Texas and Mississippi children ranging in age from 3 to 19 years old are routinely physically punished for minor infractions such as chewing gum, talking back to a teacher, or violating the dress code, as well as for more serious transgressions such as fighting. Corporal punishment, legal in 21 states, typically takes the form of "paddling," during which an administrator or teacher hits a child repeatedly on the buttocks with a long wooden board. The report shows that, as a result of paddling, many children are left injured, degraded, and disengaged from school.

"Every public school needs effective methods of discipline, but beating kids teaches violence and it doesn't stop bad behavior," said Alice Farmer, Aryeh Neier Fellow at Human Rights Watch and the ACLU, and author of the report. "Corporal punishment discourages learning, fails to deter future misbehavior and at times even provokes it."

The report found that in the 13 southern states where corporal punishment is most prevalent, African-American students are punished at 1.4 times the rate that would be expected given their numbers in the student population, and African-American girls are 2.1 times more likely to be paddled than might be expected. There is no evidence that these students commit disciplinary infractions at disproportionate rates.

"Minority students in public schools already face barriers to success," said Farmer. "By exposing these children to disproportionate rates of corporal punishment, schools create a hostile environment in which these students may struggle even more."

Students with mental and physical disabilities are also punished at disproportionate rates, with potentially serious consequences for their development. In Texas, for instance, 18.4 percent of the total number of students who were physically punished were special education students, even though they make up only 10.7 percent of the student population.

"A Violent Education" is based on four weeks of on-the-ground research in Mississippi and Texas in late 2007 and early 2008, including more than 175 interviews with children, teachers, parents, administrators, superintendents, and school board members.

The report documents several cases in which children were beaten to the point of serious injury. Since educators who beat children have immunity under law from assault proceedings, parents who try to pursue justice for injured children encounter resistance from police, district attorneys, and courts. Parents also face enormous, sometimes insurmountable, obstacles in trying to prevent physical punishment of their children. While some school districts permit parents to sign forms opting out of corporal punishment for their children, the forms are often ignored.

In the report, the ACLU and Human Rights Watch cite experts on best practices in school discipline, who emphasize traditional approaches such as detention, and modern approaches such as positive behavior support systems. Positive behavior support systems, which are school-wide discipline systems that stress a clear structure of rewards and consequences for student behavior, have been effectively implemented in major U.S. school systems. States and school boards that fail to implement best practices allow the status quo, or school beatings, to remain in place.

Human Rights Watch and the ACLU call upon the U.S. government to prohibit corporal punishment in all public schools and urge state governments, school boards, superintendents, and administrators to eliminate physical punishment in their schools.

Selected Witness Accounts:

"He took me into the office and gave me three licks. … He made me hold onto the wall and he paddled me. … It hurt for about two hours, it felt like fire under my butt."
– Matthew S., who was paddled in second grade for throwing food in a school cafeteria in the Mississippi Delta.

"The other kids were watching and laughing. It made me want to fight them… When you get a paddling and you see everyone laugh at you, it make you mad and you want to do something about it."
– Peter S., a middle school student in the Mississippi Delta.

"What made me so angry: he's three years old, he was petrified. He didn't want to go back to school, and he didn't want to start his new school. I was so worried that this was going to constantly be with him, equating going to school with being paddled."
– Rose T., mother of a 3-year-old boy in Texas who was bruised from physical punishment after he refused to stop playing with his shoes in class.

"I went into the principal's office. … He gave me a chair and said hold onto the chair. The paddle had holes in it. Then he just did three swats. … I was hit on my buttocks. … There were holes in the paddle to make it go faster. … It hurt very much. There were definitely red marks and then swelling… almost welt-like markings. It didn't last for more than a couple days. … It left me feeling very humiliated. I think there were several levels of emotion. Physical pain, mental humiliation. … And being a female at that age, it was like there was this older man hitting me on the butt. That's weird… even at that age I knew it was inappropriate."
– Allison G., a recent graduate punished as a teenager in Texas for being late to class multiple times.

"I've heard this said at my school and at other schools: ‘This child should get less whips, it'll leave marks.' Students that are dark-skinned, it takes more to let their skin be bruised. Even with all black students, there is an imbalance: darker-skinned students get worse punishment."
– Account of Abrea T., former teacher in rural Mississippi.

"I see corporal punishment as a form of slavery. Beating on the slaves was how the headman got them to do something… we're focused so much on making kids do what we want. Think about the mental capacity that this kind of treatment leaves our children with. We are telling them we don't respect them. They leave that principal's office and they think, ‘they don't consider me a human being.' That young person loses self-respect."
– Account from Doreen W., school board member in a Mississippi Delta town.

To read the American Civil Liberties Union and Human Rights Watch report, "A Violent Education: Corporal Punishment of Children in U.S. Public Schools," please visit: www.aclu.org/intlhumanrights/gen/36476res20080819.htm

How Teenage Rebellion Has Become a Mental Illness

Interesting read. I love the line: "when ADHD-labeled kids are having a good time and in control, the 'disease' goes away." I think it's also important to note how historically our society has also resorted to incarceration to cure "deviance". -Patricia

By Bruce E. Levine | AlterNet
January 28, 2008.

Big pharma has some new customers. Not complying with authority is now, in many cases, labeled a disease.

For a generation now, disruptive young Americans who rebel against authority figures have been increasingly diagnosed with mental illnesses and medicated with psychiatric (psychotropic) drugs.

Disruptive young people who are medicated with Ritalin, Adderall and other amphetamines routinely report that these drugs make them "care less" about their boredom, resentments and other negative emotions, thus making them more compliant and manageable. And so-called atypical antipsychotics such as Risperdal and Zyprexa -- powerful tranquilizing drugs -- are increasingly prescribed to disruptive young Americans, even though in most cases they are not displaying any psychotic symptoms.

Many talk show hosts think I'm kidding when I mention oppositional defiant disorder (ODD). After I assure them that ODD is in fact an official mental illness -- an increasingly popular diagnosis for children and teenagers -- they often guess that ODD is simply a new term for juvenile delinquency. But that is not the case.

Young people diagnosed with ODD, by definition, are doing nothing illegal (illegal behaviors are a symptom of another mental illness called conduct disorder). In 1980, the American Psychiatric Association (APA) created oppositional defiant disorder, defining it as "a pattern of negativistic, hostile and defiant behavior." The official symptoms of ODD include "often actively defies or refuses to comply with adult requests or rules" and "often argues with adults." While ODD-diagnosed young people are obnoxious with adults they don't respect, these kids can be a delight with adults they do respect; yet many of them are medicated with psychotropic drugs.

An even more common reaction to oppressive authorities than overt defiance is some type of passive defiance.

John Holt, the late school critic, described passive-aggressive strategies employed by prisoners in concentration camps and slaves on plantations, as well as some children in classrooms. Holt pointed out that subjects may attempt to appease their rulers while still satisfying some part of their own desire for dignity "by putting on a mask, by acting much more stupid and incompetent than they really are, by denying their rulers the full use of their intelligence and ability, by declaring their minds and spirits free of their enslaved bodies."

Holt observed that by "going stupid" in a classroom, children frustrate authorities through withdrawing the most intelligent and creative parts of their minds from the scene, thus achieving some sense of potency.

Going stupid -- or passive aggression -- is one of many nondisease explanations for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Studies show that virtually all ADHD-diagnosed children will pay attention to activities that they enjoy or that they have chosen. In other words, when ADHD-labeled kids are having a good time and in control, the "disease" goes away.

There are other passive rebellions against authority that have been medicalized by mental health authorities. I have talked to many people who earlier in their lives had been diagnosed with substance abuse, depression and even schizophrenia but believe that their "symptoms" had in fact been a kind of resistance to the demands of an oppressive environment. Some of these people now call themselves psychiatric survivors.

While there are several reasons for behavioral disruptiveness and emotional difficulties, rebellion against an oppressive environment is one common reason that is routinely not even considered by many mental health professionals. Why? It is my experience that many mental health professionals are unaware of how extremely obedient they are to authorities. Acceptance into medical school and graduate school and achieving a Ph.D. or M.D. means jumping through many meaningless hoops, all of which require much behavioral, attentional and emotional compliance to authorities -- even disrespected ones. When compliant M.D.s and Ph.D.s begin seeing noncompliant patients, many of these doctors become anxious, sometimes even ashamed of their own excessive compliance, and this anxiety and shame can be fuel for diseasing normal human reactions.

Two ways of subduing defiance are to criminalize it and to pathologize it, and U.S. history is replete with examples of both. In the same era that John Adams' Sedition Act criminalized criticism of U.S. governmental policy, Dr. Benjamin Rush, the father of American psychiatry (his image adorns the APA seal), pathologized anti-authoritarianism. Rush diagnosed those rebelling against a centralized federal authority as having an "excess of the passion for liberty" that "constituted a form of insanity." He labeled this illness "anarchia."

Throughout American history, both direct and indirect resistance to authority has been diseased. In an 1851 article in the New Orleans Medical and Surgical Journal, Louisiana physician Samuel Cartwright reported his discovery of "drapetomania," the disease that caused slaves to flee captivity. Cartwright also reported his discovery of "dysaesthesia aethiopis," the disease that caused slaves to pay insufficient attention to the master's needs. Early versions of ODD and ADHD?

In Rush's lifetime, few Americans took anarchia seriously, nor was drapetomania or dysaesthesia aethiopis taken seriously in Cartwright's lifetime. But these were eras before the diseasing of defiance had a powerful financial ally in Big Pharma.

In every generation there will be authoritarians. There will also be the "bohemian bourgeois" who may enjoy anti-authoritarian books, music, and movies but don't act on them. And there will be genuine anti-authoritarians, who are so pained by exploitive hierarchies that they take action. Only occasionally in American history do these genuine anti-authoritarians actually take effective direct action that inspires others to successfully revolt, but every once in a while a Tom Paine comes along. So authoritarians take no chances, and the state-corporate partnership criminalizes anti-authoritarianism, pathologizes it, markets drugs to "cure" it and financially intimidates those who might buck the system.

It would certainly be a dream of Big Pharma and those who favor an authoritarian society if every would-be Tom Paine -- or Crazy Horse, Tecumseh, Emma Goldman or Malcolm X -- were diagnosed as a youngster with mental illness and quieted with a lifelong regimen of chill pills.

The question is: Has this dream become reality?

School gym doubles as juvenile courtroom

School gym doubles as juvenile courtroom

Daniel Perry
June 13, 2007 - 10:35PM
EDINBURG — The bleachers at Edinburg North High School’s gymnasium were crowded Wednesday afternoon as families waited their turn to appear before Justice of the Peace Mary Alice Palacios and her staff.

It was the second consecutive week she had her weekly afternoon court session at the school to deal with Edinburg school district-related cases.

During the recently completed school year, Palacios had court at her North 12th Avenue offices near the Museum of South Texas History, the Hidalgo County Courthouse and the district’s transportation building. Court has been moved from all these places because there was not enough room.

Palacios’ case load for the district begins at about 80 cases at the start of the academic year and rises into the hundreds as the months wear on. Because of this, she is looking to the Edinburg district instead of the county for help in the form of a case manager, two clerks and a larger court space.

She has 16 county and school district-assigned workers in her office and is projected to pay them about $230,000 this year, according to county budget information. Employee budgets for other county justice of the peace offices range from $109,000 to $150,000. The average number of staff in other justice of the peace offices was not immediately available late Wednesday afternoon.

Palacios said the Edinburg district has an obligation to provide additional work space.

“It’s their cases in my courtroom,” she said about the district. “We are handling 500 cases a day.”

Mario Salinas, Edinburg’s assistant superintendent of administration, said finding space is not a problem during the summer, because classes are not in session. He said the challenge is during the school year, when campuses are being used from dawn to dusk for classes and activities and there is just no room available to accommodate large groups for court.

The county is responsible for renting, buying or constructing buildings and providing employees for its nine justices of the peace, county public information officer Cari Lambrecht said. Palacios could seek more space for all of her work if she requests it through the county’s budget process, which is going on now, Lambrecht said.

Court started at Edinburg North about noon Wednesday and was not expected to end until about 8 p.m. People walked through a metal detector at one side of the gymnasium, checked their names on the docket with court staff and took their places in the bleachers to wait for their names to be called. The cases ranged from first-time offenders to repeat offenders, with violations ranging from truancy and fighting to using abusive language and other offenses.

Palacios also takes on school district-related cases from Donna, Edcouch-Elsa, La Villa, Monte Alto, the South Texas Business, Education & Technology Academy in Edinburg, Mid-Valley Charter School in Weslaco and the county’s Juvenile Justice Alternative Education Program.

She said Donna, Edinburg and Edcouch-Elsa provide clerks, while the other schools and districts provide office supplies. And Donna and other districts provide more than ample space at campuses to have court.

Edinburg school district staff are scheduled to meet Monday about her situation, she said.
“We are trying to help,” said Salinas, the assistant superintendent of administration. “I know as of recently we added two staff members to her staff. But we want to help and we recognize that what she does is valuable. She’s part of our team. We don’t pay her salary, but she does a lot for us.”

———

Daniel Perry covers education and general assignments for The Monitor. You can reach him at (956) 683-4454. For this and other stories, visit www.themonitor.com.

http://www.themonitor.com/news/school_3037___article.html/county_district.html