February 5, 2012

Post Katrina: Study Correlates New Orleans School Expulsions to Crime
By Zoe Sullivan

Special to the Trice Edney News Wire from the Louisiana Weekly

The report is a scathing indictment of the way that charter schools are dealing with disruptive students, correlating expulsions to the city’s notorious crime rate. While the connection may seem obvious, the report offers no specific data to back it up. This is one of the issues that former Orleans Parish School Board member and education advocate Leslie Jacobs cites with the document. “If you look at the annual dropout rate,” she said, “it’s all public schools students in the city. A school may expel a child, but that doesn’t mean the child is on the streets.”

Research on Reforms is a think tank focused on public education in New Orleans. Co-founder Dr. Barbara Ferguson, who was the first female superintendent of the New Orleans public school system and who holds both a doctorate in education and a juris doctorate, authored the report. She points to studies correlating school drop-out rates with crime. More focused research, however, has not as yet been done to demonstrate this link in New Orleans.

Asked whether it had documentation on the correlation between crime and expulsions, the Greater New Orleans Community Data Center and the New Orleans Police Department (NOPD) both said that they had not conducted such a study. A public information officer for the NOPD said that this kind of study would require a significant investment of time and that it would be illegal for the Department to release the names of juveniles in the criminal justice system for comparison with school records since this information is protected under the law.

“Kids don’t just disappear,” René Greer, spokesperson for the Department of Education (DOE) said, as she affirmed the Department’s commitment to keep youth in school. “So there is a great deal of focus on meeting the needs of students, even the most challenging students.” Greer went on to ask that people inform the about cases where students are being expelled unfairly.

Ferguson’s report lays out the argument that, under the charter system, it has become easier for public schools to expel students. “Prior to Katrina,” she said a student who was expelled from one school, “that student was well-known in the district, and that student was placed in another school.” Something, she sustains, is not happening now. This, she says, is a way of weeding out poor-performing students who bring down School Performance Scores. Ferguson says that her requests for “unidentifiable” student codes from the State Department of Education, which would allow her to evaluate this assertion more accurately, have been denied. Greer, in contrast, told The Louisiana Weekly that no such request had been filed.

Jacobs, a prominent charter-school supporter, disputed Ferguson’s claim. “In 2004-05, the last year before Katrina, 11.3 percent of our 9th- to 12th-graders dropped out that year. In 2009-10 ([the] latest data available), 5.7 percent of our 9th- to 12th-graders dropped out that year. We have cut the rate almost in half.”

Asked about this, Ferguson sustained that there was “no way of knowing” how students were classified by the state (i.e. dropout, unknown, expelled, etc.), and, consequently, whether these figures are accurate because the State would not release the data.

“Either they need to give us the data and the codes to track them, or they need to track them themselves,” Ferguson argued to The Louisiana Weekly. “We have not been able to get the codes of the students to track them. And if they’re not going to track them and report on them every year, then we are going to continue to make the claim that youth in our city are the victims of a school system that doesn’t take care of all of its children.”

Asked about this, Greer said that it would be a violation of privacy regulations to release this kind of data, but that the DOE does run some inquiries for researchers.

The “Continuing Failure” report sustains that hundreds of students fall through the Recovery School Systems administrative cracks each year when schools are closed and no automatic transfer is arranged when a charter school stakes its place. The report states: “…a total of 1,068 high school students for this 2011-2012 year…needed to find another school to attend since their school had been closed…Whether or not they did, no one knows as the Recovery School District does not track student enrollment.”

Responding in writing to this, Recovery School District spokes-person Kizzy Payson explained that the school district will be introducing a new enrollment system in February. “The new system will prioritize all students whose school have been closed or is phasing out,” the statement said, “and will account for every child enrolled in a RSD charter or direct-run public school.”

Jacobs contested the report’s allegation of not tracking students in a written rebuttal. She defended the state saying that it tracks students and is “consistently ranked in the top 10 for its data.”

“Once a student enters public schools, s/he is assigned a student ID number,” Jacobs wrote. “The state tracks that student each year…A student expelled from one school who is not re-enrolled in another school is classified by the state as a dropout.”

While this may be true, traditional public school advocates see a system that incentivizes school performance at the cost of educational equity.

“The system of chartering schools and the market model that we have basically incentifies [sic] schools not to take problem children.” Dr. Raynard Sanders, a former New Orleans public school principal, told The Louisiana Weekly. “So therefore we have a system where many of them have a selective admissions process where the kids that are easiest to educate, we want to take them in the schools, and the kids that have some deficiencies, we want to keep them out.”

Another related point Jacobs contests in Ferguson’s report concerns this process of weeding out “disruptive” students. According to Ferguson, prior to Katrina, even if principals wanted to expel students, strict rules forced them to figure out how to work with them in the classroom. “No matter how difficult the student was to teach, no matter how disruptive the student was, no matter if the parent cooperated with the school or not, the student remained in some New Orleans high school,” the report asserts. This halcyon view, however, differs from the picture offered by the overall pre-Katrina dropout rate Jacobs cited.

Nonetheless, research by the Southern Poverty Law Center identifies other barriers to New Orleans public education. The organization’s 2010 study identifies “brutal and ineffective school security and discipline policies” as well as obstacles for students with disabilities. Questioned about this, Greer reiterated the importance of whistle-blowers and concerned citizens who help the State to fulfill its responsibilities.

Another study by the Institute for Race and Poverty at the University of Minnesota concluded that the post-Katrina reorganization has steered a predominantly minority group of students “into a group of lower performing schools” through direct and indirect policies such as location, disciplinary policies and recruitment efforts.

In spite of the acrimony over the current state of public education in New Orleans, one area where Jacobs and Ferguson agree concerns the need for improvement is the dropout rate among incoming 9th-graders. According to Jacobs, this figure has stayed steady since Katrina, indicating that this transitional moment is when many youth disengage from the school system and risk becoming involved in harmful activities.