California's Children

Chronic absenteeism: 7M+ poor school kids don't show up

May 23, 2012:  As many as 15% of K-12 students are chronically absent each year, estimate researchers at John Hopkins University (JHU) for a study commissioned by the Get Schooled Foundation, a non-profit that promotes initiatives to get youth more involved in their education.  

Chronic absenteeism is missing 10% or one month of the school year. (Standard is up to 5 absences.) Authors of the study, Robert Balfanz, at left, research scientist, and Vaughan Byrnes, from JHU's Center for Organization of Schools, put forth the argument that because data collection on chronic absentism is mandated by only a few states, the problem is not addressed -- an omission that undermines any reform efforts in public education. 

Richard Perez-Pena, reporting for the New York Times:

“There are so many efforts at school reform, but what people overlook is that none of them work if the kids don’t show up,” said Marie Groark, executive director of Get Schooled. Balfanz and Byrnes found that only six states — Georgia, Florida, Maryland, Nebraska, Oregon and Rhode Island — measure chronic absenteeism, as do some local systems, including New York City and Oakland, Calif. Based on data from those states, they estimated that in a given school year, nationwide, more than 10% percent and possibly as many as 15% of students miss at least one day in 10.

From the study [emphases ours]:

 If we apply these metrics to the roughly 50 million of enrolled grade school students, we estimate that 5-7.5 million students are not attending school on a regular basis. Half of these students are chronically absent in multiple years. The available evidence also tells that 25% of chronically absent students are severely chronically absent, which means missing more than 2 months of school each year.

Chronic absenteeism is most prevalent in low-income students. The youngest and oldest tend to have the highest rates...with students attending most regularly 3rd through 5th grade... it begins to rise in middle school and continues climbing through 12th grade, with seniors often having the highest rates of all. The data also suggests that it is concentrated in relatively few schools... with 15% of schools in Florida, for example, accounting for at least half of all chronically absent students. 

Written for California's Children by Elizabeth J Carlyle.

May Revise, Part 7: Early ed & child care sliced into fatal nuances

May 15, 2012: The California State Assembly's report on the highlights of Governor Brown's May budget deals a series of blows to children, child-care providers and centers for early education -- and that fact is about all that is clear to the average (or even above average) reader. 

We called Nina Buthee, at left,  executive director of the California Child Development Administrator's Ass'n (CCDAA), for an explanation.

We'll begin with this detail, from the "highlights":

[The proposed budget revisions will] reduce reimbursement rate ceilings for licensed voucher-based providers from the 85th percentile to the 40th percentile of the private pay market, based on the 2005 Regional market Rate (RMR) survey data. License-exempt providers will be reimbursed based upon 71 percent of the lowered licensed ceilings.  This proposal generates $184.2 million in savings.

"This is the really, really bad, dramatic reduction," Buthee says. "First, the reimbursement rate for the voucher programs went from 85% of the RMR to 40% for the licensed programs, and then, for the license-exempt programs" -- this would be payments to, for example, a grandmother, who cares for the child while the mother works or goes to school --are eviscerated. At first you read the number --71%, and you think, okay that's not so bad. And then, you look at the wording closely, 'lowered licensed ceilings,' and you realize, holy mackerel! they mean 71% of the 40%! I don't think that's even minimum wage."

We asked about this change:

[The revision] redirects $95.1 million in savings from the proposed elimination of Transitional Kindergarten to the State Preschool Program.  Specifically, the May Revise proposes to:

Restore the 10 percent reduction to the Standard Reimbursement Rate (SRR) only for the part-day preschool program ($34 million Proposition 98 General Fund).

Expand access to part-day preschool for 15,500 children from low-income families ($57.5 million Proposition 98 General Fund).  However, this proposal continues to disassociate that the State Preschool Program is linked with the General Child Care Program, which allows families to fully maximize the utility of this service by providing full-day/full-year services. 

"What the Assembly [in the "Highlights" document, link above] is saying," Buthee explains, "is that the Governor is doing an artificial separate between part-day state4 prescchool and full-day state pre-school." [NB: "state preschool" are programs that receive state money; i.e., independent centers under direct state contracts, such as, for example, many of the Kidango centers in the SF Bay Area.] "There was initially a division between part-day and full-day. In 2008, the California State Preschool Program Act, known as the Jones Bill, was passed to combine the two programs into one contract and let the centers decide what combination of half- and full-day programs best served their communities. 

"What the Governor did yesterday was to separate them again, artificially -- legally, there is no separation -- and keep the half-day on one budget line, under Prop 98, and full-day on another budget line. The May revise as put more money into part-day and has not cut any provider reimbursements -- and has cut reimbursements for the full-day. The separation is complicated further by another, unrelated division between the two programs -- which, not incidentally, serve exactly the same population of low-income families -- and that is a division between half-day program, that fall under Title 5 requirements of the education code (which is how it came to be classified as eligible for Proposition 98 funding), and the Title 22 vouches for full-day. This is a very complicated, entangled situation.

"Brown's manuevering here gives the appearance that he is keeping preschool slots and not cutting preschool education, when actually, he is. But he is trying to save face with the education community, showing that he is protecting early education."

 

Sex traffickers target LA County foster kids: Probation Dept. fights back

May 9, 2012: Over one-third of the juvenile prostitutes who were in police custody at some point during 2010 -- the most recent year for which data is available -- had "ties" to the Los Angeles Dept. of Children and Family Services. The tie? They've been in foster care.

This month, with the help of a $1 million grant received in January from the US Dept. of Health & Human Services, the LA County Probation Department (LACPD) is initiating "My Life, My Choice," a national program, developed in Massachusetts to identify and support girls in foster care who are most vulnerable to being victims of sexual exploitation and human trafficking. 

Susan Abram, reporting for the Los Angeles Daily News on child sex trafficking in LA County, writes that each trafficked girl can earn up to $140,000 a year for a southland pimp; there is believed to be at least 17 main boulevards where young prostitutes are rotated.

In Los Angeles County, two administrators at the LACPD with social welfare educations, Michelle Guymon, at left, and Hania Cardenas, have "gone above and beyond their regular duties...to shine a light on [juvenile sex trafficking] and advocate for rehabilitation and healing...," in the words of LA County Supervisor Don Knabe [Long Beach-South Bay], who addressed the issue in January 2012, and supported the LACPD's efforts to establish a special unit dedicated to sexually exploited minors, for which Guymon is now the project manager.

In the LACPD program, more than 500 staff and community foster care providers have been trained to raise awareness and identify and support sexually exploited girls. Personal protection is also offered for  girls who are willing to testify against the pimps (even though this protection may mean housed in detention or sent to a juvenile camp).

From LA Daily News:

The data [from Guymon and Cardenas's research].... showed that of the 174 girls brought in for prostitution, 92% were African American, while 84% were from the Long Beach, South Los Angeles, Hawthorne, Inglewood, Compton and Torrance areas....

Most of the girls are also between 13 and 17, but many enter prostitution at age 12, Cardenas said. And the form of exploitation continues to grow.

"Online exploitation has increased," Cardenas said. "I think that the pimps are getting younger. Some of them are in gangs. And many of them will promise girls to be in videos. There's all kinds of recruitment tactics."

Cardenas and Guymon also presented data to the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors. The board in April voted unanimously to support the Californians Against Sexual Exploitation Act (CASE), a state ballot initiative to strengthen penalties against human traffickers, add fines to fund victim services, and require that all sex offenders disclose Internet accounts. (It will also remove barriers to prosecute child sex traffickers, mandate training for law enforcement, and protect victims in court proceedings).

If passed by voters in November, CASE would be the toughest human trafficking law in the country, said Knabe [Long Beach-South Bay] who supported the measure. 

Initial reporting on sex trafficking in Los Angeles County among "young girls who may have a history in the foster care system or absent parents" was done by Janet D. Kelly on The Urban Perspective.

Written for California's Children by Elizabeth J Carlyle.

Civil Rights Project finds kids w/disabilities have "far higher" suspension rate

UPDATE, April 11, 2012: Nearly 1 in 5 African-American students (18%) were suspended at least once in 2009-10, compared to 1 in 17 white students (6%) and 1 in 33 Asian American students (3%), details a report by the The Civil Rights Project (CRP) at University of California, Los Angeles released yesterday and reported on by Joanna Lin of California Watch.

The CRP report analyzed the data on out of school suspensions from the Civil Rights Data Collection released by the US Department of Education in March (see below for background stories).

Schools often use out of school suspensions in preference to in school suspensions (for e.g., detentions) where the student has to be supervised, instead removing the disruptive student completely from the learning environment. However, according to the CRP report, a 6 year study in Texas has found that the frequent use of out-of-school suspensions has no academic benefits, is strongly associated with low achievement, a heightened risk for dropping out and a greater likelihood of juvenile justice involvement.

Additionally, the report found that students with disabilities had far higher rates of suspension: 

Black males with disabilities experienced the highest suspension rates of any demographic group. Among the state's largest school districts, the rate was as high as 59 % at the San Bernardino City Unified School District. The rate among the district's non-disabled black males was 29%.

"One would think kids with disabilities would not be suspended at these much higher rates, but in fact, they are,"Daniel Losen, J.D., M.Ed., above, co-author of the report, said, noting that federal law calls for behavioral support and services for special education students in need. "It suggests that school districts across the state … are really falling down in their responsibility to meet the needs of kids with disabilities – especially if those are kids of color."

However, the problem with the label "disabled" is that children placed in special education are there for a number of reasons: emotional disturbance, autism or Attention Defecit Disorder (ADD), for example, are diagnoses that fall on a broad spectrum of conditions where children can exhibit "disruptive" or violent behavior. This is complicated by the fact that some districts have been found to have disproportionately high numbers of African-American and Latino students classified as emotionally disturbed in special education.

The report examined the rates of out-of-school suspensions in the state's 10 largest districts by enrollment:  the rates peaked in Stockton City Unified, where 38% of African American males, 28% of American Indian males, and 19% of Latino males were suspended out of school at least once during the school year.

However, none of the largest districts were in top 10 districts with the highest numbers of out of school of suspensions.

Again, California Watch:

The center's findings are consistent with a long history of research on school suspensions, Russ Skiba, a professor and director of the Equity Project at Indiana University, (who was not involved in thens, report) said in the call with reporters.

"Our poor, urban schools see higher (suspension) rates of students of color than white students, but so do our more well resourced, richer, suburban schools," he said. "The results are not simply due to poor kids behaving badly."

Seventeen districts or county offices of education suspended 20% or more of their students in 2009-10. The Manteca Unified School District (also in Stockton) suspended 1 in 3 students – the highest rate in the state.

Although Manteca reported those figures, they may be erroneous, said Rupinder Bhatti, the district's director of child welfare and attendance. After seeing the center's report yesterday, Bhatti believes suspension records were duplicated and misidentified when the district converted to a new database system in 2009-10.

Manteca's true overall suspension rate is closer to the 10 to 15 percent range, Bhatti estimated. The rate among African Americans is closer to 20 percent.

Five out of top 10 school districts with the highest suspension rates are in rural counties, 4 in the Central Valley. Konocti Unified (Lake County) had the second highest numbers in the state, suspending 25% of its student body in 2009-10 (35% of African-American and 26% American-Indian students). Visalia Unified (Tulare County), third on the list, also suspends 25% of all students but with much higher rates for African-American  (47%) and American-Indian students (33%). Also on the list are Kern Union High, Coalinga-Huron Joint (Fresno County), and Corcoran Joint (Kings County) Unified School Districts.

Jefferson Union High (Daly City), a district in a middle-class suburban neighborhood in the top 10 of districts with high suspension rates, in particular highlights the racial disparity. With a total enrollment of 4945 students (49% of Asian, 27% Latino, and 4% African-American), the district handed out 1015 out-of-school suspensions, 3 times the number of in-school suspensions (300); 15% of those were given to African-American students. For students with more than one suspension, the numbers jump even higher: 23% of African-Americans in the general education population and 71% receiving special education services have been suspended more than once. The racial disparity is also reflected in the Academic Performance Index for African Americans (598) compared to Asian students (857).

 

Sick kids can't learn: Rothstein says RTTT $ should require SBCH participation

UPDATE, March 10, 2012: National Public Radio interviews Los Angeles families who take advantage of the district's School-Based Health Centers in this clip: 

 

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March 1,  2012: Richard Rothstein, at left, a former education columnist for the New York Times who is now a research associate at the Economic Policy Institute and senior fellow  at the Warren Institute on Law and Social Policy at the University of California (Berkeley) School of Law, writes in his commentary for the Economic Policy Institute that "keeping children in good health" is a critical part of the formula for success in public education.

Citing that School-Based Health Centers (SBHCs) in "disadvantaged neighborhoods" may be the "only practical way to keep children in good health," Rothstein laments that "adequate promotion of such centers has been distressingly absent from the Obama administration's education policy."--  

(SBHCs offer a safety net for children who lack health insurance, including checkups, physicals, immunizations, mental health treatment, dental care and drug counseling. The clinics also monitor students' chronic diseases, such as asthma, and treat their illnesses so they don't miss school.)

Although, in a February 7, 2012 speech at Harvard Graduate School of Education, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan insisted he is “a huge fan of out-of-school anti-poverty programs,” Rothstein clearly sees a disconnect between the policies and the rhetoric.

An excerpt from Rothstein:

... Such clinics are essential props for student achievement, not only because children who are absent because of illness can’t benefit from good teaching, or because children with untreated dental cavities are distracted by oral discomfort, or because untreated asthma (an epidemic in polluted urban neighborhoods) keeps children awake at night and drowsy in school, or because children can’t read well if they have uncorrected vision difficulties, but because there are few primary care physicians located in low-income neighborhoods. And where primary care is available, parents working low-wage hourly jobs cannot get time off to take children for routine and preventive visits. Often, such visits can happen only if they occur on school campuses and within the school day.