Hearings begin on Monday in a push to persuade the Los Angeles City Council to amend the LA’s daytime curfew law and so end truancy fines for students. Research shows the fines to be spectacularly ineffective in reducing school absences—and they cut against poor and minority students.

Today a large number of parents and advocates are expected to pack the Council’s 10 am Public Safety Committee meeting to show support for the amendment. (Not that there’s any danger of the proposed motion passing out of committee, as the committee’s chair Tony Cardenas, is a vocal supporter of the amendment, along with Bernard Parks, the So Cal ACLU, the Children’s Defense Fund, and the Youth Justice Coalition, among others.

An impressive new report details strategies to improve school attendance in LA’s school, and shows what combination of programs and structures have been notably successful in schools in other districts at —and high priced truancy tickets ain’t one of those efficacious strategies.

Susan Ferris from the Center for Public Integrity has an excellent article on the topic.

Here’s a clip for Ferris’s story:

Fifteen-year-old Juan Carlos Amezcua was just five minutes late for school, and already at the corner by Theodore Roosevelt High School in Los Angeles when a police cruiser’s siren went off last Nov. 16.

The consequences of what happened next — handcuffing, allegations of rough treatment and a $250 daytime curfew ticket — are still resonating here. In January, Amezcua and his cousin, who was also stopped by police en route to school, saw their tickets dismissed in juvenile court. Still upset at their encounter with police, though, the pair and their parents filed a complaint on Feb. 3 with the school district and police concerning officers’ behavior.

Meanwhile, the presiding judge of Los Angeles’ juvenile court and Los Angeles city leaders are also moving to curtail law-enforcement involvement in policing student attendance.

The dispute is indicative of a broader, complex and, at times, racially charged debate over how best to deal with tardy or truant students in jurisdictions across the country. Since the 1990s, cities large and small have adopted daytime curfews with monetary fines to force kids to get to school. Now the City of Angels is at ground zero as the impact of such ordinances in reconsidered.

Next Monday, the Los Angeles City Council’s Public Safety Committee starts a review of proposed amendments to that city’s nine-year-old daytime curfew law. Among the proposals: setting limits on enforcement by police, who routinely search youths and sometimes handcuff them. The proposed amendments would also effectively end $250 fines in favor of negotiated agreements that tardy students submit to counseling…

Officers detaining students for truancy in 2010, Brad Graverson/Torrance Daily Breeze

LAUSD PAID $40 GRAND TO SETTLE WITH MIRAMONTE TEACHER MARK BERNDT, BUT PUT BLOTCH ON RECORD OF INNOCENT MIRAMONTE TEACHERS. REALLY.

KPCC’S Tami Abdollah with Shirley Jahad broke the $40 K settlement story and the opening paragraph pretty much says it all:

The Los Angeles Unified School District agreed last June to pay about $40,000 to settle its dismissal case against former Miramonte Elementary teacher Mark Berndt, who has since been charged with 23 counts of lewd conduct, including spoon-feeding his semen to children.

It turns out that it doesn’t matter if Berndt is convicted of all 23 counts, he still gets his pension, health care benefits for the rest of his life, and presumably the 40 grand—according to his unbreakable union contract.

Read and/or listen to the whole thing.

Then in Friday’s LA Times, Howard Blume, Angel Jennings and Richard Winton, follow up on the Berndt settlement story, and take it farther by delving into the unbelievably careless way the non-semen spooning Miramonte teachers were treated.

Here’s one clip from their story, but there’s lots more:

“When teachers were told that they were being transferred, dozens of teachers were in tears,” union President Warren Fletcher said. “They are part of the fabric of this community.”

The union accepted the transfers, Fletcher said, on the understanding that the move was temporary and that no innocent teacher’s employment record would be marred. L.A. Unified, he said, broke both promises, by categorizing the teachers’ relocation as an administrative transfer. Such paperwork frequently results from a disciplinary action…..

WHO ARE LAPD’S RESERVE POLICE? AND ARE THE EFFECTIVE? SO-CAL CONNECTED TAKES A LOOK

Here’s So Cal Connected’s summary of the segment, which airs tonight, Friday:

They look the same, dress the same, get the same training and wear the same badge, but they’re not full-time cops, and they’re not even paid. Meet the members of the Los Angeles Police Department’s Reserve Corps, the regular citizens who back up the city’s 10,000 cops and whose numbers are on the rise.

AS CRIME RATES DROP, PRIVATE PRISONS ARE NO LONGER CASH COWS—UNLESS WE CAN LOCK UP MORE PEOPLE (WHICH—P.S.— IS NOT A GOOD SOLUTION)

Okay, did anyone really think that private prisons would not end up presenting weird and creepy conflicts of interest if crime went down and we started having more sensible sentencing laws?

Llewellyn Hinks-Jones for the Atlantic Monthly has the story.

Here’s a clip:

Over the last 30 years, Texas built over 90 prisons, quintupling the number of detention centers in the state and earning the title of highest state incarceration rate in the process.

As much as Texas ended up an outlier, it was by no means alone. All across the U.S. during the 1970s, ’80s and early ’90s, depressed villages and hamlets in need of an industry, from the Mississippi Delta to the Appalachian Coal Belt, signed up to build oversized detention facilities on the outskirts of town, surrounded by barbed wire and klieg lights, in the hopes of bolstering the local economy with taxes, jobs and associated retail.

But ever since the nation’s crime rate began leveling off in the late 1990s, with the total state prison population decreasing for the first time in 40 years, there haven’t been enough inmates to populate these new-found penitentiaries….

THE PROP 8 CHALLENGE: IS IT TOO EARLY?

David Cole, an expert in Constitutional law, has written an essay for the New York Review of Books about whether or not the Prop 8 challenge, that will now go to the Supreme Court (presuming that SCOTUS takes case), was premature.

There was much discussion of this issue when Ted Olson and David Boies first talked about taking on this case. Olson and Boies argued that this was exactly the right time.

In any case, Cole’s essay on the issue is worth reading. Here’s a clip:

…..gay rights organizations have stayed away from the federal court system. They have instead sought to obtain legal rights for same-sex couples state by state, going first through the legislatures and only thereafter through the courts; and even then, only in the state courts, relying on arguments based on state law that could not be reviewed by the Supreme Court. The strategy has proved quite successful. Since 2004, six states (Massachusetts, Connecticut, Iowa, Vermont, New Hampshire, and New York) and the District of Columbia have recognized same-sex marriages. On February 8, Washington’s state legislature passed a bill that will make it the seventh such state once the governor signs it. Twelve more recognize some sort of partnership status that gives same-sex couples all or most of the benefits and obligations associated with marriage..

Yet many other states have moved in the opposite direction. By June 2011, 29 states had banned gay marriage by constitutional amendment, and another twelve by state statute. (Some states, like California, have both recognized same-sex civil unions and banned same-sex marriage.) In short, we are far from reaching any national consensus on the issue….

Photo by the AP

This week there was yet another instance of a teachers union using disinformation and fear tactics to try to intimidate parents who want to have an effect on their kids’ school.

See, it’s this sort of thing, by the way, that causes liberals, who are generally very pro union (and who are always pro teacher), to start feeling mighty grumpy toward California’s teachers unions—both the statewide union, CTA (California Teachers Association), and its branches, and such local unions as UTLA (United Teachers of Los Angeles)—all of which appear to have become so power-drunk by their decades-long vice grip on CA’s education policy that they actively want to assassinate any other person or group that has the nerve to want also to sit at the decision-making table (and sip a teensy bit of the wine of power too).

(By the way, I mean the word “assassinate” mostly in the metaphorical sense. Operative word: mostly.)

The most recent instance of attack-trained union behavior is occurring in Lynwood, where a group of local elementary school parents have organized as a “parents union” under the banner of the Parents Revolution, which is the group that was instrumental in getting passed the Parent Trigger law.

The Parent Trigger Law is the statute that gives parents the right to “trigger” reforms in schools that are chronically failing to meet minimum state improvement standards (chronic meaning for 4 years or more). In other words, these are the California schools that, year after year, for whatever reasons, give the kids in their care a substandard education. According to the law, when a school screws up to that degree, if at least half of the school’s parents sign a petition, the local school district must adopt one of a handful of reforms: 1. shut down school and let the students enroll in a higher-performing campus nearby; 2. convert the school to an independent charter, 3. fire half the teaching staff and replace the administration; 4. extend school hours and revise the curriculum under a federally recommended turnaround plan; or 5. adopt an “alternative governance” model, which is an option that has a lot of leeway.

In other words, the parent trigger law for the first time gives parents real power to advocate for change in behalf of their sons and daughters—power that previously was held only by the district and the unions, which for the past several decades have seemed more interested in maintaining their respective power bases—-than thinking about what might actually benefit…..you know….kids.

Wow! Bummer! Parents having a place at the bargaining table too! We certainly don’t want THAT!

As it turns out, other states DO want it, and the Trigger law has been spreading, as this Sept. 2011 MSNBC story outlines.

The fact that the dreaded parent-leaning statute might be catching on outside California caused the antipathy toward the Trigger Law to reach such a fever pitch that, this past summer, the American Federation of Teachers put out a power point presentation of how to undermine the law in California and in any other state where it might crop up. The document—which is a must read—openly talks about how the union’s goals are helped by the “Absence of…parents from the table.” (The Orange County Register has more on that shameless move.)

Since the Parent Revolution had its genesis during the rise of the LA charter school powerhouse, Green Dot, the unions have painted such parent groups as clueless dupes of charter school advocates, who cannot make their own decisions and are generally easily influenced idiots who certainly don’t know what their kids need.

The Lynwood union branch of CTA has reportedly used many of FTA’s tactics when they put out flyers and, more recently a newsletter to to try to squash any moves by frustrated Lynwood parents who are tired of sending their children to a school that doesn’t adequately educate them.

The LA Weekly has done a great job of reporting on this issue—both the Lynwood battle that has heated up this week, and an earlier battle over a Compton school, that blew up a year ago.

Here’s a clip from the Weekly’s Simone Wilson’s story on the press conference held Wednesday by Lynwood parents, who are pushing back against union pressure:

Education reformers in California have called Lynwood “ground zero for parent empowerment throughout the entire state.” For whatever reason, parents in the southeast L.A. County town have banded together with an extra sense of urgency, demanding a basic level of respect and competence from their kids’ teachers and administrators that should certainly, by now, be the standard statewide.

But even demands as basic as theirs have now, it seems, been twisted by the local teachers union into some kind of attack on public education as a whole.

Sigh. Fixing this state’s crap school system would sure be a lot easier if we could quit politicking and start discussing the needs of our children like civil human beings.

Uh, yeah. What she said.

IN OTHER NEWS…..ANOTHER CASE OF PROSECUTOR WITHHOLDING EVIDENCE IN TEXAS PUTS MAN IN PRISON FOR 31 YEARS

The Dallas Observer has the story of Rickey Dale Wyatt who was freed on Wednesday after serving 31 years on a rape that Innocence Project head, Barry Scheck says Wyatt did not commit. (The LA Times also reports.)

It seems that although the actual rape victim described a man much larger and taller than Wyatt, and also clean shaven, unlike the then-bearded Wyatt, prosecutors withheld the evidence that likely would have cleared the man.

Although Wyatt’s sentence has been vacated, he has not been declared innocent. He must next appear at the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals where Scheck says he is confident that Wyatt will be cleared.

It is important to note that Dallas District Attorney Craig Watkins has been instrumental in a string of such dramatic releases in Texas because, rather than fighting defense attorneys at every step, Watkins and his office has opened Dallas County Conviction Integrity Unit, which has in many instances opened up files to the Innocence Project and others.

BILL BRATTON AND OTHERS TALK ON NPR ABOUT WHY THE CRIME RATE CONTINUES TO DROP IN THE U.S.

Oh, just listen. It’s a good story, even if Bratton has an ego the size of Wyoming.

IS THIS PRESS REQUEST WRONGLY INVADING STUDENT PRIVACY?

The Chicago Tribune and the University of Chicago disagree vehemently—and with potentially precedent setting consequences—about what information should be protected.

The New York Times’ Tamar Lewin has the story on this interesting case. Here’s how it opens:

It was bad enough for the University of Illinois when The Chicago Tribune’s 2009 series “Clout Goes to College” exposed the existence of a “clout list” that over five years gave hundreds of well-connected students an edge in admissions, and led to the resignations of the university president, the chancellor of the flagship Urbana-Champaign campus and most of the trustees.

But two years later, the university is still mired in litigation before the federal appeals court in Chicago, fighting the release of more documents the newspaper has asked for, including the names and addresses of the parents on the clout list. The university has turned over about 5,200 pages of documents to the newspaper. But in a separate state court proceeding, The Tribune is seeking the grade point averages and ACT scores of the students accepted from the clout list.

Those requests set off a shootout between the state’s freedom of information law and the federal privacy law for educational records.

LA SCHOOL POLICE MODIFYING TRUANCY TICKET POLICY TO OFFER MORE HELP LESS PUNISHMENT

Now that Get Tough student discipline policies are increasingly being shown to do more harm than good, The Los Angeles School Police have announced a change in tactics. Howard Blume reports for the LA Times.

Here’s a clip:

The Los Angeles School Police Department has issued new rules aimed at reducing the number of truancy tickets written to students and focusing efforts instead on helping these students get to and remain in school.

The new policy in the Los Angeles Unified School District, announced Thursday, is the latest change from a campaign to reform traditional school discipline that, advocates of the new policy say, results in ethnic and racial profiling and hardships for students and families. The old rules were part of a get-tough philosophy that included truancy sweeps, $250 tickets and mandatory court appearances that could result in jail time for parents. Such measures, advocates said, can diminish time in school and ultimately increase the dropout rate.

The new approach is an about-face.

And it’s a very, very welcome and important step.

“With this directive, school police officers will be a stronger partner with principals, students, parents and teachers to keep students on track within the educational environment by reducing court appearances,”[ LAUSD Chief of Police Steven] Zipperman said.

Data compiled by advocates indicates that Latino and black students receive a higher proportion of truancy tickets. Earlier, the Los Angeles Police Department modified its truancy policies. Activists also have pushed to reduce the number of student suspensions and expulsions — a goal school district officials have embraced.

Read the rest.

FORMER LAUSD STUDENT EXPLAINS WHY TRAINEE TEACHERS ASSIGNED TO LA’S TROUBLED SCHOOLS AREN’T “HIGHLY QUALIFIED”

This Washington Post essay by Cal State LA student Valerie Strauss, originally ran in Education Week. Strauss writes about how trainee teachers—basically interns—are being jammed into LA’s failing schools and labeled “highly qualified And what the consequences are for LA’s students.

Here’s the opening.

I traveled from Los Angeles to Washington, D.C., for the first time in my life last May. It was exciting to visit the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument. But I wasn’t there to go sightseeing. I was there to ask my elected representatives why students at our country’s most challenged high schools are being taught by unqualified teachers, and why Congress is letting this happen.

They didn’t give me the answers I was hoping for. But I’m not about to let it go.

Read the rest.

FEDERAL JUDGE SAYS NO TO LEGAL BID TO KEEP PROP 8 DONOR NAMES SECRET

The Sac Bee has the story. It speaks for itself.

Here’s a clip:

A federal judge this afternoon [Thursday] denied a challenge to California’s campaign disclosure law by proponents of Proposition 8, who sought to make donors’ identities secret, claiming they were harassed.

The preliminary ruling, by U.S. District Judge Morrison England Jr., comes almost three years after voters approved California’s same-sex marriage ban. In a case that is widely expected to be appealed, the state successfully argued that publicizing the identities of campaign donors is necessary to an informed electorate.

In January 2009, England denied an initial bid by ProtectMarriage.com to keep secret the identities of donors who made contributions in the final days of the campaign.

Joe La Rue, a lawyer for the group, said in oral arguments today that those donors would remain exposed to harassment “so long as these names are perpetually kept on the state’s website.”

Mollie Lee, a San Francisco deputy city attorney, said La Rue presented no evidence of death threats or physical violence. More minor incidents, she said, are “not out of the ordinary in California politics.”

California law requires the disclosure of the identity of anyone who contributes $100 or more to a campaign. ProtectMarriage.com said the $100 limit was too low, and it claimed it qualified for an exception to disclosure laws

Good try, people. But, no. You’re not that special.

The ACLU of So Cal filed a racial profiling lawsuit against Glendale Unified School District, the Glendale Police Department, the Los Angeles Police Department, and LA County Probation on Thursday having to do with a 2010 incident in which 56 Hoover High Hchool students were rounded up and questioned for an hour.

The suit names individual officers from the GPD, the LAPD, probation, plus administrators at Hoover HS for “racial profiling and unlawful search and seizure.”

The lawsuit is based on an incident that occurred on September 24, 2010, when, according to the ACLU, school administrators, working with police and school-based probation officers, rounded up 56 Latino students during their lunch period, herded them into classrooms, interrogated them—and in a bizarre touch—”orced them to pose for mock mug shots.”

Attorneys say that the students were targeted although there was no evidence that they were violating any laws or breaking school rules.

Here’s more from the ACLU statement:

“I was shocked and scared when I saw the police, especially because I knew I hadn’t done anything wrong,” said sixteen-year-old Ashley Flores, one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit. “It was the first encounter I’ve had with police. I’ve never been in trouble and have nothing to do with gangs.”

The students, all Latino, were eating lunch when school administrators ordered them into two classrooms, where armed GPD and LAPD officers were waiting for them. Police told the students that they could not leave until they provided information. When some protested that they had done nothing wrong, officers ordered them to “sit down and shut up,” and threatened to go to their homes at 6 a.m. to collect the information if they did not cooperate. The officers told students that their personal information would be kept in a file to identify them if they ever got in trouble. The students were detained between 30 and 90 minutes, causing some to miss their fifth-period classes.

“The police officers, school officials, and probation officers involved in this roundup targeted these students solely because they are Latino,” said David Sapp, a staff attorney at the ACLU of Southern California. “They acted as though being a Latino teenager is all the justification they needed to detain and threaten these students, which is a textbook case of racial profiling.”

One student who was eating lunch with the others, who is not Latino, was not detained in the classrooms.

Additionally, after the incident, Defendant Michael Rock, a captain in GPD who authorized the roundup, acknowledged that the students’ ethnicity was central in determining which students were detained, adding that GPD had planned to conduct a similar operation targeting Armenian students. [Italics mine.]

Nice.

The lawsuit sounds righteous, and there’s no excuse for racially profiling and terrorizing kids, yet it might help to have this bit of context:

According to the school website, Hoover High’s student population is around 42 percent Armenian American, and around one quarter Latino. In recent years, elements within the two ethnic groups have sometimes been violently at odds. The most tragic such event occurred in May of 2000 when 17-year-old Raul Aguirre was beaten with a crowbar then stabbed to death in front of the school just after classes ended for the day. Raul Aguirre, it seemed, was a non-troublemaker kid who had tried to intervene in a fight between the two ethnic factions, and was murdered for his trouble.

In any case, one assumes that there’s more to the story. Again, not that anything excuses the actions of the adults. However, additional information might at least, in part, explain the thinking of the cops and the Hoover High administrators.

AND IN OTHER NEWS:

CDCR SAYS CALIFORNIA’S PRISON HUNGER STRIKE HAS ENDED

The CDCR reported on Thursday that the mass hunger strike in the state’s prisons has ended. This is from their statement:

CDCR officials in Sacramento were contacted by inmates by letter on October 11. It was the first such contact by inmates or their representatives during the inmate-led action.

Officials agreed to meet with inmate representatives to discuss its ongoing review of and revisions to its Security Housing Unit (SHU) policies that began in May 2011. Similar to its discussions with inmates during a July hunger strike, all agreed the changes to policies would take several months to finalize. The department agreed to continue on its same course.

Inmates initiated a second hunger strike on September 26, and after three days, 4,252 inmates in eight state prisons had missed nine consecutive meals – the point at which CDCR considers an inmate to be on a hunger strike….

Last Friday, Ian Lovett reported for the NY Times that, unlike with the first strike in the summer, this time the hunger strikers were dug in and prepared to last as long as it took to get some of their demands met, so the change was unexpected.

Here’s a clip from last week’s story:

….since inmates resumed the strike last week in continued protest against conditions of prolonged isolation, things have gone differently: the corrections department has cracked down, trying to isolate the strike leaders, some of whom say they no longer trust the department and are hoping to push the governor to enact reforms.

“I’m ready to take this all the way,” J. Angel Martinez, one of the strike leaders at Pelican Bay State Prison, said in a message conveyed through a lawyer this week. “We are sick and tired of living like this and willing to die if that’s what it takes.”

This time, though, both sides have shown less inclination to compromise, and no negotiations between the strike leaders and the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation have taken place since the strike resumed.

An internal memo from George J. Giurbino, director of the Division of Adult Institutions for the department, outlined new, more aggressive processes for dealing with mass hunger strikes….

However, on Thursday, Lovett reported on how and why the strikers had agreed to begin eating again. Here’s a clip:

…after negotiations on Thursday between the corrections department and lawyers representing the inmates, strike leaders agreed to resume eating.

Corrections officials reiterated the reforms the department had agreed to at the end of the previous hunger strike in July, which they said would take several months to finalize, and “agreed to stay on its same course,” according to a news release from the department.

The department had already agreed to a review of its policies for placing inmates in security housing units.

But Carol Strickman, a lawyer with Legal Services for Prisoners with Children who negotiated on behalf of the inmates, said that, most importantly, the department had agreed to review the cases of all prisoners already in isolation because of “validated” gang affiliation, rather than because of their behavior while in prison.

“This is the first time the prisoners had heard that kind of review was in the works,” Ms. Strickman said. “That new information, I believe, convinced them to end the hunger strike.”

In the mid 1990’s, Parenting Magazine, which was then briefly trying its hand at more serious stories, asked me to do an article about how African American boys were faring in general in elementary school. All these years after Brown v. the Board of Education, did much racism still linger and, if so, how did it play out in the classroom?

After months of research, the answer I found was that a LOT of racism still lingered (in many cases, it was unintentional) and that much of it was to be found in the area of school discipline.

In fact I found so many instances of shriekingly discriminatory behavior being visited on elementary school children and doing damage to kids around the country that it freaked out the editors at Parenting to the point that they began to cut and rewrite large parts of my story so that it wasn’t so “scary.”

For example here’s how they rewrote the opening;

Imagine for a moment that you live in a land where a number of the citizens have purple hair. Now suppose that most non-purple-haired people feel a little uneasy about the grape-haired folk, especially the males. And what if the vague prejudice extended even to little boys in school, who, because of the color of their hair, were apt to hear both these messages regularly: Purple-haired boys aren’t as smart as normal-haired boys….

Large contractual fights resulted, over the above….um… purple prose, and the cuts. Eventually, in a compromise that pleased no one, some of the excised sections were put back in and the editor who authored grape hair part of the increasingly benighted article shared the by-line with me. (I wanted to yank the piece, and take it elsewhere, or failing that, take my name off it altogether.) I vowed huffily never to work with Parenting again. Yet, just this morning, I reread the story, and even with the editors’ relentless dumbing down, a plethora of startling facts came through about this new kind of Jim Crow in public schools—-as civil rights litigator and author, Michelle Alexander, might call it.

For instance, I found back then that, according to the Office of Civil Rights, in the early 1990’s African American males in primary and secondary schools were suspended more than twice as often as white males.

When I looked at big city stats, the numbers got worse. For example, in the Minneapolis school system, enrollment of black and white males is nearly the same, but 43 percent of all students suspended during the 1995-96 school year were black males-as opposed to 14 percent who were white males. Yet most of the suspensions of black boys were not for big things—fighting, profanity, verbal abuse or any kind of dangerous behavior. The majority were suspended for “lack of cooperation” and “disrespect”—infractions that went largely undisciplined in their white counterparts.

I bring this up because it has come to my attention that, although it’s been fifteen or so years since I wrote the story for Parenting, little has changed—even though, as you may have noticed, school discipline is a newly hot topic– namely the damage done by over disciplining kids, meaning school suspensions, expulsions, and the like.

(I even did a story on it the issue at WitnessLA in May of this year.)

The problem of kids being damaged by patterns of over discipline is nationwide. Yet the kids suffering most are African American children. Last month there was a six-year, million kid study released by the Council of State Governments regarding suspensions and expulsions in Texas schools. First of all they found that a ridiculous number of kids had been suspended, and that repeated suspensions predict later involvement in the juvenile justice system.

Then the study noted that African American kids were far more likely to be suspended than their white counterparts.

A study in 2000 by the Southern Poverty Law Center called the Color of Discipline the results were similar.

The point was brought home by an article that ran in LA Progressive over the weekend in which Sikivu Hutchinson ticked off the ways in which school discipline is affected by color in the Los Angeles Unified School District.

Here’s a clip from some of what Hutchinson found:

In the LAUSD the numbers for the 2009-2010 school year speak for themselves.* At Washington Prep High School in South Los Angeles (with a predominantly black faculty) black and Latino students are almost equal in number yet black students account for 62% of those suspended. At Venice High School on the Westside black students represent 9.5% of the population and 25% of those suspended. At Hamilton High they represented over half of the opportunity transfers despite being only 28.5% of the population. In 2008-09 they were 57% of those suspended at Hamilton; in 2009-10 they were 51% of those suspended. At Fairfax High School black students were 18.3% of the population yet represented 43.5% of suspensions. With the exception of Washington Prep, all of these schools had majority Latino populations.

And it goes on from there. Be sure to read it. At times, Hutchinson has a slightly over-the-top prose style, but her point and her facts are solid—and troubling.

ON ANOTHER TOPIC ALTOGETHER, READ THIS GREAT OP ED ON THE ROLL OF “COGNITIVE BIAS” IN WRONGFUL CONVICTIONS

In Tuesday’s LA Times, UCLA’s Jennifer L. Mnookin writes about a case that illustrates how cognitive bias can cause law enforcement and witnesses both to go disastrously down the wrong path. Here’s how she opens:

Last week, the “West Memphis Three” were released from prison, having spent half their lives — 18 years — behind bars for crimes they almost certainly didn’t commit. So what made prosecutors and investigators sure they had the right guys, and why were those beliefs, once established, so hard to reverse?

The crimes for which the three Memphis men were convicted were brutal. Three 8-year-old Cub Scouts were found dead, hogtied and apparently mutilated. The police decided early on that it was likely the boys had been victims of a satanic cult killing, which led them to consider self-described Wiccan teen Damien Echols, a young man with asymmetric black hair, a pale face and oddball taste in clothes and music. They hauled in an acquaintance of his, a minor named Jessie Misskelley, who had an IQ of 72, and interviewed him for hours without his parents or an attorney present. Finally, he confessed, implicating Echols and another friend, Jason Baldwin.

The confession confirmed what police expected to hear — that Echols was involved — which may be why they accepted it at face value. But Misskelley’s account contradicted the evidence in multiple ways. The time he initially gave for the murders was noon, an hour for which the other teens had an ironclad alibi (they were in school); he said that the other suspects raped the boys, but the medical evidence showed no physical trauma consistent with rape and no semen was found in any body cavity; he said the boys were tied up with a brown rope, when they were actually found tied with their own shoestrings.

An overarching problem, which this case illustrates perfectly, is that humans have a tendency to see what they expect to see.

Like many who are sickened by low graduation rates and sub-basement test scores, I have been outraged at the way the teachers’ unions–both LA’s and the statewide union (and those in a lot of other states)—have been unforgivably obstructive when it comes to school reform.

Thus I was excited when I saw that Class Warfare: Inside the Fight to Fix America’s Schools by Steven Brill, was featured on the cover of the NY York Times Book Review, knowing that it would bring a lot of buyers to what promised to be an important book on the utterly essential topic of what is standing in the way of fixing the nation’s schools.

But it was with a sinking heart that I finished the review by smart cookie writer Sara Mosle, who was also clearly excited by Brill’s book—until she read it.

Mosle’s disappointment is obvious as she points out Brill’s unwillingness to include pesky facts and inconvenient complexities that don’t support his one-villain thesis.

Here’s how the review opens:

Steven Brill is a graduate of Yale Law School and the founder of Court TV, and in his new book, “Class Warfare,” he brings a sharp legal mind to the world of education reform. Like a dogged prosecutor, he mounts a zealous case against America’s teachers’ unions. From more than 200 interviews, he collects the testimony of idealistic educators, charter school founders, policy gurus, crusading school superintendents and billionaire philanthropists. Through their vivid vignettes, which he pieces together in short chapters with titles like “ ‘Colorado Says Half of You Won’t Graduate’ ” and “A Shriek on Park Avenue,” Brill conveys the epiphanies, setbacks and triumphs of a national reform movement.

Some of his subjects, like Wendy Kopp of Teach for America, are by now household names; others, like Jon Schnur, an adviser to the Clinton and Obama administrations, are more obscure. But in Brill’s telling, they have all come, over some two decades, to distrust or denounce the unions and to promote the same small set of reforms: increasing the number of charter schools and evaluating and improving teacher quality through merit pay and other measures that rely heavily on student test scores.

Throughout, Brill reminds us he’s just an objective reporter. Disinterested, however, is not how he comes across. He recounts an educator’s motto to “teach like your hair’s on fire.” For most of the book, Brill writes like his hair is on fire. His sympathies clearly lie with the unions’ most adamant critics, like Michelle Rhee, the controversial former superintendent of the District of Columbia public schools, and Joel Klein, the combative ex-chancellor of the New York City system.

I say this as someone whom Brill might pick for a jury pool. I taught for three years in New York as a charter member of Teach for America and had my own run-ins with the union. (An article I wrote, which praised Kopp’s then-­fledgling organization and made some of the same criticisms Brill does, angered my union representative.) This fall, my daughter will be attending public school, and I’ll be teaching at a private, reform-­minded urban academy in New Jersey…..

For those who are interested in school reform there is no question that Class Warfare is a must read. However, judging by what Mosle has written—which seems to ring sadly true—reading it may make many of us wish that Brill’s book was a better, less choir-preaching read.

Here is what we know of the story:

A sophomore on the Santa Monica High School wrestling team says that, on May 4, he walked into the school’s wrestling room and saw the team’s brown practice dummy with a noose around its neck. As this same student, who happens to be black, headed for the locker room, he was approached by two of his team members who, he says, enfolded him in a “bear hug.” Then, using a cable and a lock, they chained the black wrestler to a locker. According to his mother, Victoria Gray, her son said that the teammates-turned-tormenters, at that point, shouted “Slave for sale.”

Such actions are alarming enough on their face, but what is most perplexing is the actions of the adults in the hours and days and weeks that followed the noose and the chaining and the racial slurs.

The Santa Monica Daily Press reports a part of the sequence of events:

A few things are known for certain.

After the incident, which occurred on May 4, counseling sessions were held on site for other members of the wrestling team that wanted to talk about the experience.

At those sessions, students were told to go home and tell their parents what happened.

Victoria Gray, the mother of the boy who was chained, was never informed, neither by her son nor by school officials.

She found out over three weeks later when a woman she had never met called her to tell her one version of events.

The two boys who allegedly did the chaining have been disciplined by the school with a three-day suspension. They will also have to help teach a freshman seminar on hazing.

The matter first came before the Board of Education at its meeting June 16, when Gray used public comment time to express her dissatisfaction with how the incident had been handled.

The Santa Monica Evening Outlook reports that Gray said her son, ” told her he didn’t want to make a big deal about the whole thing because he didn’t want to jeopardize the wrestling program.”

Gray said that her son told her that Leslie Wells, the principal of H House at Samohi, told him that the incident could get the whole wrestling program canceled.

Great.

It has also been reported that administrators insisted that students who snapped cell phone photos of any aspect of the noose and chaining incident, must turn in their phones, at which time the administrators deleted the photos.

The California penal code on the matter reads that: “Any person who hangs a noose, knowing it to be a symbol representing a threat to life, on the property of a primary school, junior high school, high school, college campus, public park, or place of employment….. shall be punished by imprisonment in a county jail not to exceed one year, or by a fine not to exceed five thousand dollars ($5,000).

Community organizer Najee Ali of Project Islamic Hope held a press conference in front of the high school on Wednesday afternoon to call for an investigation into the incident as a hate crime,. When I spoke to Ali on the phone afterward, he too said he was particularly angered and dismayed by the behavior of school administrators.

“I’m more shocked by the adults behavior than by the students,” Ali said then noted that the student’s mother has said that she was not informed of the incident, “Which meant the student didn’t get the support he needed.”

Ali is also troubled by the cell-phone-picture-deleting part of the story.

“If that happened, legally, they destroyed evidence. It sounds like they were more interested in protecting the school than in protecting the student who was bullied, or in using this incident as a real teachable moment.” Ali sighed. “And all that needs to be investigated. It also needs to be brought out into the open and talked about.”

There will be a chance to begin that conversation Thursday night, June 30, when there is a school board meeting scheduled at which school board member, Oscar de la Torre, said the noose and chaining incident will be discussed, and there will be a time for public comment.

PS: As bad as this incident is, the lock-’em-up zero tolerance reaction to the acts of teenagers helps no one. Emotionally violent actions such as these require meaningful consequences, which means more than a few days suspension, but they do not call for legal vengeance.

A few serious consequences for the adults, however, are clearly in order. They are the ones who should have been instantly protective toward Victoria Gray’s son then precipitated some kind of school-wide assembly or action to address the the myriad implications of the incident—and the deep damage actions like it can wreak.

Instead, it seems, the adults mostly ran to hit the “delete” button.

SCOTUS REVIEW IS SOUGHT FOR 2 ONLINE FREE SPEECH CASES, ONE INVOLVING STUDENTS AND “DOUCHEBAGS”

(Yes, you’re right, my inner 9-year-old does think it’s funny each time I type the word “douchebag.”)

Ahem…

The Student Press Law Center reports that the lawyers for two cases that involve online communication by students, and First Amendment rights, hope that the US Supremes will agree to hear their cases. Both address similar issues and have the potential to set precedent. Here are the rundowns on the cases, as reported by SPLC:

CASE 1: The Right to Mock in MySpace

“J.S.” was a student at Blue Mountain Middle School in Pennsylvania in 2007 when she was suspended for 10 days after creating a MySpace profile mocking the school principal, James McGonigle. Her parents sued the school district on her behalf for violating her First Amendment rights and their due process rights to discipline their child as they wished.

Both the district court and a three-judge panel of the Third Circuit found in favor of the school district. However, when the full Third Circuit court reheard the case along with an extremely similar one, Layshock v. Hermitage School District, it found in favor of the students in both cases.

CASE 2: The…er….Douchebag Matter

On April 25, a panel of judges from the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals concluded that Connecticut student Avery Doninger’s First Amendment rights were not violated when she was prevented from running for class office, and later prevented from accepting the office she was elected to by write-in ballot, after calling school administrators “douchebags” on her blog in 2007.

The Second Circuit determined that the district had been “objectively reasonable” in their decision to punish her for her blog post. It granted the district immunity from the lawsuit but did not address whether Doninger’s rights were violated.

Doninger attorney John Schoenhorn wrote in an email that he intends to ask the Supreme Court to hear an appeal in this case as well because the conflict between the Second Circuit and Third Circuit’s decisions could create confusion.

Here’s a more detailed account of the Doninger case.

Let us hope that the Supremes take on or both cases as the arguments will be interesting.

LAUSD AND THE NEW HOMEWORK POLICY

The LA Times Howard Blume writes about the Los Angeles Unified School District’s new homework policy, and how it is not a simple wrong/right matter.

Here’s how it opens:

Vanessa Perez was a homework scofflaw. The Marshall High School senior didn’t finish all of it — largely because she worked 24 hours a week at a Subway sandwich shop.

Alvaro Ramirez, a junior at the Santee Education Complex, doesn’t have his own room and his mother baby-sits young children at night. “They’re always there and they’re always loud,” he said, explaining his challenges with homework.

The nation’s second-largest school system has decided to give students like these a break. A new policy decrees that homework can count for only 10% of a student’s grade.

Critics — mostly teachers — worry that the policy will encourage students to slack off assigned work and even reward those who already disregard assignments. And they say it could penalize hardworking students who receive higher marks for effort.

Some educators also object to a one-size-fits-all mandate they said could hamstring teaching or homogenize it. They say, too, that students who do their homework perform significantly better than those who don’t — a view supported by research.

But Los Angeles Unified is pressing forward.….

IS THE LOCKE TAKEOVER BY GREEN DOT WORKING? A REPORT CARD

It’s been three years since Green Dot Charter Schools fought for and won the right to take over and try to transform LAUSD’s desperately failing Locke High School. So how is the grand experiment doing?

An LA Times editorial says the progress is not exactly dramatic, yet it is slow, steady and in small increments.

That’s what I’ve heard too. In my experience, however, some miracles occur, not in a blinding flash of light, but in slow motion. Yet they are miracles nonetheless. Maybe the changes at Locke could be said to fall in that category.

Let us hope so.

The editorial is a good one. Here’s a clip. But read it all.

How did Green Dot do at stemming the tide of students who disappear from campus into lives usually plagued by high unemployment and low wages? Solidly better, but not the quick and extraordinary transformation everyone had hoped for. Not yet, anyway.

Charter schools are not the ultimate solution to bad public schools; rather, the solution lies in improving public schools so that they have adequate resources, good teachers and a stimulating curriculum. Like many charter operators, Green Dot has had financial help from outside foundations, help that isn’t available to most public schools.

Still, well-run charter schools have played a valuable role in pressuring public schools to improve, and they can be a lifeline to students who are sinking in crummy neighborhood schools or, in many cases, leaving school far too soon. In the case of Locke, the switch appears to be working, albeit more slowly and haltingly than Green Dot expected.

The charter operator deserves praise for its massive and earnest effort at Locke. It was the first charter school in Los Angeles to accept all of the students within its attendance boundaries, just as public schools do, rather than restricting enrollment and accepting students through a lottery. Students who choose their charter schools are motivated to follow the rules and achieve; public schools take all comers. The Locke takeover served as the model for L.A. Unified’s Public School Choice initiative, in which new schools and some failing schools were turned over to outside groups that filed the most promising applications. Some of those were groups of teachers, others were charter schools. All had to follow Green Dot’s example and admit all students within their enrollment boundaries.

BILL WANTS TO ABOLISHED THE DEATH PENALTY IN CALIFORNIA

Don Thompson of the AP has the story. Here’s how it opens:

A state lawmaker on Monday introduced a bill seeking a public vote on whether California should abolish capital punishment and convert death sentences to life in prison, citing a study that said most condemned inmates die of suicide or old age despite billions in taxpayer costs.

Democratic Sen. Loni Hancock, of Berkeley, said the state can no longer afford the cost of trying capital cases, defending them through a lengthy appeals process and housing inmates in the nation’s most populous death row.

She cited a study prepared by Judge Arthur L. Alarcon of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals and Loyola Law School professor Paula M. Mitchell that calls the capital punishment system “a multibillion-dollar fraud on California taxpayers.”

Their analysis, to be published next month, estimates California has spent more than $4 billion on capital punishment since the death penalty was reinstated in 1978. In that time, California has executed just 13 inmates, which works out to $308 million per execution.

“Capital punishment is an expensive failure and an example of the dysfunction of our prisons,” Hancock said in a statement. “California’s death row is the largest and most costly in the United States. It is not helping to protect our state; it is helping to bankrupt us.”

Yeah. What she said.

NBC San Diego also has a report on the bill.

9TH CIRCUIT SAYS MARICOPA COUNTY STRIP SEARCH VIOLATES 4TH AMENDMENT RIGHTS & THE SUPREMES LET THE RULING STAND

The Christian Science Monitor has the story.

Here are some clips:

The US Supreme Court declined on Monday to examine a federal appeals court ruling that the strip search of a male detainee by a female guard in an Arizona jail was an unreasonable search in violation of the Fourth Amendment.

[SNIP]

At issue was a 2004 search of Charles Byrd, a pretrial detainee, at a minimum security jail in Phoenix.

Mr. Byrd was one of 90 detainees ordered to submit to a unit-wide search for contraband and weapons. Byrd was told to remove his clothing except his boxer shorts, which were described as pink and comprised of very thin, revealing material. The searches took place four to six at a time. Some were conducted by cadets from the detention officer training academy. Present during the searches were an estimated 25 cadets, a number of training supervisors, and 10 to 15 uniformed guards. The procedure was also videotaped.

Byrd said in his lawsuit that he should not be subject to such an intrusive search by a female guard. He also charged that the female guard – later identified as Cadet Kathleen O’Connell – squeezed his genitals and kneaded his buttocks during the search.

CNN further reports that, in January, the 9th Circuit used “tough language” to describe the actions of Maricopa correctional officers.

“The indignity of the non-emergency strip search conducted by an unidentified female cadet was compounded by the fact that there were onlookers, at least one of whom videotaped the humiliating event,” wrote the en banc panel of 11 judges. “For these reasons, we conclude that the cross-gender strip search, as conducted in this case, was unreasonable.”

On Monday the Supreme took a pass on the issue of whether California could offer tuition discounts to in state students, regardless of their immigration status. They let stand the lower court’s ruling (favoring the discounts).

GATES FOUNDATION REPORT SAYS LA SCHOOL PRINCIPALS SHOULD HAVE MORE AUTHORITY IN HIRING TEACHERS. UNION SHRIEKS IN HORROR

Howard Blume at the LA Times has the story:

School principals should be able to hire any teacher of their choosing, and displaced tenured teachers who aren’t rehired elsewhere within the system should be permanently dismissed, according to a controversial new report on the Los Angeles Unified School District. The report will be presented Tuesday to the Board of Education.

The research, paid for largely by funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, offers a roadmap for improving the quality of teaching in the nation’s second-largest school system, with recommendations strongly backed by L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa.

Read the rest.

MORE COGITATING AND OPINING ON THE QUESTION OF WHY CRIME HAS GONE DOWN—NATIONALLY AND IN CALIFORNIA

After last week’s musings by James Q. Wilson (among others), now we have James Alan Fox of the Boston Globe explores the popular claims among certain academics that that legalized abortion may be one of the biggest causes. However, Fox looks more deeply into the numbers of the abortion claim and, in doing so, pretty much demolishes the argument. To wit:

A spirited debate among economists was ignited a decade ago when John Donohue of Yale and Steven Levitt of the University of Chicago concluded that legalized abortion had produced a drop in crime. These prominent scholars argued that following the 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade, thousands of unwanted fetuses were aborted instead of being born into less-than-ideal environments, thereby producing two decades later a reduction in the pool of at-risk, violence-prone individuals.

In a 2001 paper published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, Donohue and Levitt developed a complex set of statistical models to reach this bold claim.

[SNIP]

Despite persuasive logic regarding a reduction in the number of children born to circumstances that would place them at-risk for growing into criminality, the significance of this effect appears to have been grossly overstated. For example, nearly 60% of the decline in murder since 1990 involved perpetrators ages 25 and older—individuals who would have been born prior to the landmark abortion decision. As shown in the figure below, there were substantial reductions during the 1990s in homicides committed by older age groups, especially those in the 25-34 year-old age range.

SO DID THREE-STRIKES LOWER CRIME IN CALIFORNIA? ANOTHER RESEARCHER SAYS NO

At least not to any measurable degree says Robert Parker of UC Riverside, who calls Three Strikes “a failure.”

Dan Walters of the Sacramento Bee has the story:

Citing “logic, data and research,” Parker contends that “all these uniformly show little or no impact of three strikes policy on violent crime rates in California and elsewhere.”

He compared historic crime patterns in California and other states with similar laws to those without such laws and found they “show little difference in … pattern of violent crime.”

Parker cites other studies that attribute crime rate declines to economic and social factors, such as alcohol consumption, rather than policing and sentencing policies and suggests it’s “better to use alcohol policy to control violence than three strikes.”

Were California to change its approach to crime and comply with the federal court order to reduce the prison population, he notes, it could save $2.3 billion a year in prison costs.

“California needs to stop gorging itself at the all-you-can-eat buffet of imprisonment,” says Parker.