The High Cost of a Lousy Education for L.A.’s Lawbreaking Kids – But One Supervisor Points to an Alternative

We spend of lot of taxpayer money on education for local kids who are locked up—either in juvenile hall or in one of the LA County’s various probation camps.

To be specific, the sticker price for 12 months worth of class time in one of the county’s juvenile facilities is approximately $32,000 a year. And mind you, that’s not the cost of keeping a kid locked up (which is more than $150,000 a year). The $32K is merely the price tag for education.

To put that number in perspective, Crossroads in Santa Monica, the arts and science college prep school where entertainment biz types send their kids, charges $25,000 a year tuition. Harvard-Westlake, the west coast version of Andover, costs $29,200.

So, not only are those schools cheaper, at end of a Crossroads or Harvard WL year of matriculation, the kid will have gotten some decent education.

Whereas, at the end of a year in County juvenile lock up, with a few rare exceptions, a is tossed into an educational regimen that is so bad that it has been the basis for recent large lawsuits, and has the US Justice Department breathing down the county’s neck.

So what to do?

Supervisor Mark-Ridley Thomas thinks a solution might be found in a particular charter school embedded in one of Washington D.C’s juvenile facilities. The school, called the Maya Angelou Academy, is one of three charters that are working with incarcerated youth in D.C.’s troubled system, with promising results.

KPCC’s Kitty Felde has a story about the Maya Angelou Academy and about Ridley-Thomas’s hope that the model might be modified for use in LA County.

Maya Angelou purportedly costs $35,000 per student yet, unlike LA County’s probation camp schools run the County’s Office of Education, it seems to actually have a measurably positive educational effect on the kids it serves.

Education Week did a fairly extensive article on the school in November of last year and was surprisingly upbeat in their assessment:

(Note: Ed Week is hidden behind a pay wall so the full article may be found here.)

In a pocket of the education field that many agree has been largely ignored, Maya Angelou Academy so far seems to be succeeding in that mission, by most accounts. “The school is designed to be an integral part of the overall program in a way that helps youths turn their lives around,” said Robert Schwartz, the executive director of the Juvenile Law Center, a Philadelphia-based child-advocacy group. Likewise, Cramer Brooks, a court consultant tasked with evaluating the school found it to be “one of the best programs in a confinement facility” she had ever seen.

Let’s hope that something comes of the idea.

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AND WHILE WE’RE ON THE SUBJECT OF JUSTICE….AND JUVENILE BEHAVIOR…

Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick has a very pointed, and very apt essay on Thursday’s move by Republican senators to block President Obama’s judicial nominee, Goodwin Liu.

It opens like this:

It was a hall of mirrors of hypocrisy at Thursday’s Senate vote on the nomination of Goodwin Liu to be a judge on the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. At least 60 senators had to agree to allow the Senate to give Liu a straight up-or-down vote. Didn’t happen. Liu, a professor of law at the University of California at Berkeley, is the first judicial nominee to be filibustered since 2005.

First, there are the most obvious failures of intellectual consistency: Republicans who once claimed that filibustering judicial nominees is “offensive to our nation’s constitutional design” (Sen. John Cornyn, 2004) and flat-out “unconstitutional” (Sen. Lindsey Graham, 2005) voted against Liu. Even the Republican who said he “will vote to support a vote, up or down, on every nominee—understanding that, were I in the minority party and the issues reversed, I would take exactly the same position because this document, our Constitution, does not equivocate”—even that guy (Sen. Johnny Isakson, 2005) voted against Liu.

You can blame Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid for forcing the Liu issue, or the White House for abandoning it. But nothing changes the fact that the judicial confirmation détente of 2005, when the so-called “Gang of 14” pledged that honorably fulfilling its constitutional responsibilities meant that “nominees should only be filibustered under extraordinary circumstances,” is over. The era in which the self-styled grownups on both sides agree that the judicial vacancy rate represents a national crisis, and that the Senate’s responsibility to advise and consent does not extend to delaying and distorting, is over, too…

Read the rest. Dahlia’s in a mood. And she’s also dead on.

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PRIVATE PRISONS MAY NOT SAVE STATES ANY $$$ (BUT THEY’RE SWELL MONEYMAKERS FOR THE FOLKS WHO OWN THEM)

Do private prisons really cost less, thus saving budget strapped statess like California money by contracting with them?

A new study conducted in Arizona suggest that private prisons not only fail to provide savings for states, they are, in fact, more expensive. Plus they won’t take the really high-priced old and sick patents.

The New York Times reports.

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Photo by Christopher Powers/Education Week