OXIESEC PANEL

Name	Size	Modified	Perms
📁 ..	-	03/17/2019 06:24:57 AM	rwxrwxr-x
📄 03036edfece701eaa1537fea4014dd44.spc	52.22 KB	02/11/2020 10:50:52 AM	rwxrwxrwx
📄 04d0c6cc2bf146b1318b78f84416b912.spc	123.26 KB	03/12/2020 06:21:28 AM	rw-r--r--
📄 0582678c8cfff117f770f9368b70c2b5.spc	19.97 KB	02/11/2020 10:50:53 AM	rwxrwxrwx
📄 06d19ca88661ebf5f2459dd4315a2bb1.spc	169 bytes	02/11/2020 10:50:53 AM	rwxrwxrwx
📄 09c20f5ef1098fa6a0dcbf757db22c44.spc	212.6 KB	03/07/2020 03:53:26 AM	rw-r--r--
📄 0bb533998a40e1ca3cefc59d6e542fc8.spc	34.69 KB	02/11/2020 10:50:53 AM	rwxrwxrwx
📄 0ed254d4d9db6e3afe193b00bc6471bb.spc	31.22 KB	03/11/2020 01:28:56 PM	rw-r--r--
📄 1469d584e9747d132077c9df3cda6c97.spc	121.54 KB	03/12/2020 06:21:28 AM	rw-r--r--
📄 1608544648e39ada42071bed51f3b175.spc	192.61 KB	02/11/2020 10:50:54 AM	rwxrwxrwx
📄 1857fc578c17e6145bcf223d333aa48d.spc	79.19 KB	02/11/2020 10:50:54 AM	rwxrwxrwx
📄 192555ba2ac5f902a3e3f1c0e4aae46c.spc	176 bytes	02/11/2020 10:50:54 AM	rwxrwxrwx
📄 196f73e8cf4330017ab92ef17541ebea.spc	34.06 KB	02/11/2020 10:50:54 AM	rwxrwxrwx
📄 19d7e90c3867383bc4790ba57a9f0a5c.spc	39.17 KB	02/11/2020 10:50:54 AM	rwxrwxrwx
📄 19f3a21c36072f501f634db8e658bc9f.spc	17.31 KB	02/11/2020 10:50:54 AM	rwxrwxrwx
📄 1a2ad7ec8e9ae3e242926fdbb1c728ec.spc	34.11 KB	02/11/2020 10:50:55 AM	rwxrwxrwx
📄 1afdf65a8c3ff9f8db7a8f10b580c286.spc	41.69 KB	02/11/2020 10:50:55 AM	rwxrwxrwx
📄 1bb80174ec75e092e3e7dbd063def8b9.spc	29.45 KB	03/06/2020 06:31:05 AM	rw-r--r--
📄 1de9a562a6be22df63820a9463bcd78e.spc	168 bytes	02/11/2020 10:50:55 AM	rwxrwxrwx
📄 1e85d1a99d268e01b229ade5baf241c4.spc	40.19 KB	02/11/2020 10:50:55 AM	rwxrwxrwx
📄 23796aacf2848a8f58cd3ef3f69e38fc.spc	419.69 KB	02/11/2020 10:50:56 AM	rwxrwxrwx
📄 2408c179b723e6418904b92398f6b137.spc	83.21 KB	02/11/2020 10:50:57 AM	rwxrwxrwx
📄 242d3dabf79d13154fcc384ff8b2d25e.spc	138.23 KB	03/12/2020 06:21:24 AM	rw-r--r--
📄 24739622a680323db111e64a3e3c3305.spc	13.08 KB	03/11/2020 01:28:57 PM	rw-r--r--
📄 26ad3f3473af193dfc893e18704c9003.spc	5.83 KB	02/11/2020 10:50:58 AM	rwxrwxrwx
📄 2799184659106c88b5072a3e3f763a4d.spc	12.3 KB	02/11/2020 10:50:58 AM	rwxrwxrwx
📄 2abcd685295b4a261ad2e866188e5e11.spc	123.52 KB	03/12/2020 06:21:29 AM	rw-r--r--
📄 2d3ca8b6dffd0b708a87b587b3ae50cc.spc	48.87 KB	08/11/2020 06:13:30 AM	rw-r--r--
📄 30d0eeac4a6b2d98cdef50ef2edffa28.spc	38.41 KB	07/21/2020 08:32:16 AM	rwxrwxrwx
📄 30d5af6cd4c10ea02520bcaba31f3d1c.spc	474.22 KB	02/20/2020 06:35:59 AM	rw-r--r--
📄 3291222baa2e5dd4e0c4863cead17f0a.spc	366.46 KB	02/11/2020 10:51:02 AM	rwxrwxrwx
📄 346a1bcfe350fe2a1953cd7fbdc86186.spc	33.68 KB	02/11/2020 10:51:03 AM	rwxrwxrwx
📄 3691c57bc9ef4dc350ce3298a8291556.spc	34.69 KB	02/11/2020 10:51:02 AM	rwxrwxrwx
📄 38d3dc98ecc1c3d1c27452a54603959b.spc	30.38 KB	02/11/2020 10:51:02 AM	rwxrwxrwx
📄 3f7816c2aa3e261331a0214ae283daba.spc	36.88 KB	02/11/2020 10:51:03 AM	rwxrwxrwx
📄 3fabe39fe5de4def5db0b070e9d0c12e.spc	89.1 KB	02/11/2020 10:51:03 AM	rwxrwxrwx
📄 402e99fadf0b4cfb19572847e3765644.spc	31.17 KB	02/20/2020 06:35:54 AM	rw-r--r--
📄 403c286cb5177de3aee8ae96d600e668.spc	22.17 KB	02/11/2020 10:51:03 AM	rwxrwxrwx
📄 473e9ea85fa887bf730a58a3138e8427.spc	51.38 KB	02/11/2020 10:51:03 AM	rwxrwxrwx
📄 47481ffe1d8aa644664a3e0c5e57b911.spc	33.55 KB	02/11/2020 10:51:04 AM	rwxrwxrwx
📄 4b9b019425e46aa5699b25b164731ea6.spc	191 bytes	02/11/2020 10:51:04 AM	rwxrwxrwx
📄 4e8baeaef3679f9460ffdecddbb1f6a7.spc	38.47 KB	02/11/2020 10:51:04 AM	rwxrwxrwx
📄 4eb2ea2e7b4ee9f516345a8e766106ea.spc	41.31 KB	02/11/2020 10:51:04 AM	rwxrwxrwx
📄 4eb3be40ca0ee332f013def0ede20b51.spc	57.32 KB	02/11/2020 10:51:04 AM	rwxrwxrwx
📄 4eea197c2a9df7be5770ed85a45166af.spc	32.13 KB	02/11/2020 10:51:04 AM	rwxrwxrwx
📄 50df6b48e1a1b469b4fa9e86fc0c5018.spc	33.52 KB	02/11/2020 10:51:05 AM	rwxrwxrwx
📄 51447ae67b6d856982df0ea0496cf24b.spc	27.75 KB	02/11/2020 10:51:05 AM	rwxrwxrwx
📄 52598486d45e22d0c8e6d2cb26125d0e.spc	185 bytes	02/11/2020 10:51:05 AM	rwxrwxrwx
📄 52db6769e7a09162da92fb931530d490.spc	251 bytes	02/11/2020 10:51:05 AM	rwxrwxrwx
📄 557bca13c9bf58c561d365f34528cf99.spc	660.96 KB	02/11/2020 10:51:10 AM	rwxrwxrwx
📄 569a7c623553d15856943f80ff0d9ef0.spc	38.82 KB	02/11/2020 10:51:05 AM	rwxrwxrwx
📄 588359e68ff59d4ef53aaf3edb6a44cf.spc	5.91 KB	03/29/2020 11:25:33 AM	rw-r--r--
📄 593ed9fb92861195f982096e36a276a5.spc	78.73 KB	02/11/2020 10:51:08 AM	rwxrwxrwx
📄 59b7e8b10798f98d6ede55dc16d36abd.spc	286.35 KB	02/11/2020 10:51:10 AM	rwxrwxrwx
📄 5b48fed85f692b870a2e1c54eb110eea.spc	92.95 KB	02/27/2020 05:27:34 PM	rw-r--r--
📄 5b894986f9f55d997ed60e84c8fb60c7.spc	32.87 KB	02/11/2020 10:51:10 AM	rwxrwxrwx
📄 5c46aa1f7a9fbddb1de61f99e41c4c73.spc	27.51 KB	02/11/2020 10:51:10 AM	rwxrwxrwx
📄 5c541078070a50b4ef826d433fcade97.spc	203 bytes	02/27/2020 05:27:37 PM	rw-r--r--
📄 5c744a4198beb7326dcf101f961486b4.spc	56.9 KB	08/20/2020 06:22:11 AM	rw-r--r--
📄 5ef8b2cef4776b3e3f9f79092ce932ca.spc	123.2 KB	03/12/2020 06:21:29 AM	rw-r--r--
📄 60bc545cda9dafe75484b88be1dd4ae9.spc	62.66 KB	03/12/2020 06:21:27 AM	rw-r--r--
📄 60cdba7804abf8b71744dac57a1fd036.spc	37.57 KB	02/11/2020 10:51:12 AM	rwxrwxrwx
📄 6270f865db79068a5dedb78ba877e7a0.spc	32.31 KB	04/10/2020 11:49:32 AM	rw-r--r--
📄 64e0619d4a6fcecb77cd4fa41dd6658c.spc	43.69 KB	02/20/2020 07:08:27 AM	rw-r--r--
📄 66267a4d6dba7887fc7d4a1aa2da9b75.spc	124.15 KB	03/12/2020 06:21:28 AM	rw-r--r--
📄 6b370910388637897c5bc54c01bf6458.spc	39.47 KB	02/11/2020 10:51:12 AM	rwxrwxrwx
📄 6cedd2c7609f97e8201f50ac95407eb3.spc	373.91 KB	02/14/2020 05:05:41 AM	rw-r--r--
📄 6f3a7e432f89d87825c8f322156d359e.spc	105 KB	02/11/2020 10:51:14 AM	rwxrwxrwx
📄 6fb29d2636fbee8586653a44de845c14.spc	36.78 KB	02/11/2020 10:51:15 AM	rwxrwxrwx
📄 73bb6c1505db5ddb104f30c60b108890.spc	41.35 KB	02/11/2020 10:51:15 AM	rwxrwxrwx
📄 75223b5917c4f5312a6c6a8aecd9f9e6.spc	50.85 KB	02/11/2020 10:51:15 AM	rwxrwxrwx
📄 77ff73ee1cbbb4a6cb4bb52bbfd0543c.spc	94.22 KB	02/11/2020 10:51:15 AM	rwxrwxrwx
📄 7947ab9dba76b764cad321483ebe03c4.spc	26.63 KB	02/11/2020 10:51:16 AM	rwxrwxrwx
📄 7c2f1bde8d6c3ddb510b8089c44af91e.spc	43.81 KB	02/11/2020 10:51:16 AM	rwxrwxrwx
📄 7d1ab5c52f2c3ab33c409e73bedecc5e.spc	3.86 KB	02/11/2020 10:51:16 AM	rwxrwxrwx
📄 7f39e24ab9c263578364ff0fcde11837.spc	168.82 KB	02/11/2020 10:51:17 AM	rwxrwxrwx
📄 7fb89d7009fbbd9a5c1c2dcac2e055af.spc	2.12 MB	02/11/2020 10:51:32 AM	rwxrwxrwx
📄 80d5eace46cca553f0c7e7a631ed6703.spc	122.15 KB	03/12/2020 06:21:29 AM	rw-r--r--
📄 8464ad04f90f3f666985ad6a300191a2.spc	183.31 KB	02/11/2020 10:51:21 AM	rwxrwxrwx
📄 87bb9147a3420bb80136500148ef65dd.spc	373.91 KB	02/14/2020 05:06:32 AM	rw-r--r--
📄 89342927fe6500da4a2cd74e4c24cd84.spc	63.45 KB	02/11/2020 10:51:24 AM	rwxrwxrwx
📄 8bbfe139e67e5f738b9ffcb18a7c5b86.spc	92.25 KB	02/11/2020 10:51:26 AM	rwxrwxrwx
📄 8ddc5ee335658bf8ec6b8844cf85c93f.spc	38.21 KB	02/11/2020 10:51:26 AM	rwxrwxrwx
📄 8e912fe5f85715a1da6db5b96e9f1c91.spc	39.3 KB	02/11/2020 10:51:27 AM	rwxrwxrwx
📄 8edc68ba045edb463abe484c4485b3c1.spc	299 KB	02/11/2020 10:51:29 AM	rwxrwxrwx
📄 906b5d59de170e528244744b925a8af5.spc	32.01 KB	03/12/2020 06:21:25 AM	rw-r--r--
📄 925665a1ef421d5783a6690aaf7df881.spc	8.67 KB	02/11/2020 10:51:30 AM	rwxrwxrwx
📄 92c4233c5ea49b0f47ba9af6486e17f6.spc	30.9 KB	02/14/2020 10:55:56 AM	rw-r--r--
📄 93e4fd43857be9fead41ffa09315517f.spc	34.1 KB	02/11/2020 10:51:32 AM	rwxrwxrwx
📄 94b8ccc457e138e62b74ac96766909fe.spc	43.13 KB	02/11/2020 10:51:32 AM	rwxrwxrwx
📄 96c4f97f5353d399aeef3f49fcc0bd5a.spc	57.89 KB	02/11/2020 10:51:32 AM	rwxrwxrwx
📄 99e1eb580536f979670980ef56caa779.spc	87.52 KB	02/11/2020 10:51:33 AM	rwxrwxrwx
📄 9b4ca5bfc6880bed7985069758de6a4f.spc	38.89 KB	02/11/2020 10:51:33 AM	rwxrwxrwx
📄 Base.php	3.35 KB	02/11/2020 10:51:42 AM	rwxrwxrwx
📄 DB.php	4.6 KB	02/11/2020 10:51:53 AM	rwxrwxrwx
📄 File.php	4.19 KB	02/11/2020 10:52:02 AM	rwxrwxrwx
📄 Memcache.php	4.81 KB	02/11/2020 10:52:02 AM	rwxrwxrwx
📄 Memcached.php	5.27 KB	02/11/2020 10:52:02 AM	rwxrwxrwx
📄 MySQL.php	12.67 KB	02/11/2020 10:52:02 AM	rwxrwxrwx
📄 Redis.php	3.77 KB	02/11/2020 10:52:02 AM	rwxrwxrwx
📄 a3f94d98665e5d26445aa2956b13985d.spc	138.35 KB	03/29/2020 01:13:19 PM	rw-r--r--
📄 a40a776457ebfa5dcaef5c99f859250c.spc	126.09 KB	02/11/2020 10:51:33 AM	rwxrwxrwx
📄 a4a2ea47955d1ebd2b59a41a045b89ba.spc	86.78 KB	07/20/2020 05:27:37 AM	rwxrwxrwx
📄 a68acd2dce64f10ba3d23b96452cbd57.spc	53.71 KB	02/11/2020 10:51:34 AM	rwxrwxrwx
📄 a989cfbb4ebcd4ea5aede2f8d18f6b80.spc	114.06 KB	03/29/2020 01:13:18 PM	rw-r--r--
📄 aaf764fb46ef69a016d4d915512cedd4.spc	677.76 KB	02/11/2020 10:51:41 AM	rwxrwxrwx
📄 abea4df88cf62a5d9a03eb72a825b2f5.spc	23.09 KB	02/11/2020 10:51:36 AM	rwxrwxrwx
📄 abfe9571c106187db93288b1ea97357a.spc	28.61 KB	02/11/2020 10:51:36 AM	rwxrwxrwx
📄 ac468e6e3b78f7a8673a1be751be1226.spc	64.53 KB	02/11/2020 10:51:38 AM	rwxrwxrwx
📄 adb710891b75ea3e9d2379f0460c1d19.spc	65.91 KB	04/11/2020 06:44:20 AM	rw-r--r--
📄 adb7ca764a42bad01a0ccae2df09c2fa.spc	34.34 KB	03/29/2020 01:13:20 PM	rw-r--r--
📄 b1fc76c9199e2130438d81b6297c73fa.spc	124.12 KB	03/12/2020 06:21:29 AM	rw-r--r--
📄 b44b9e448df189cee8d7c7774273267b.spc	61.57 KB	08/22/2020 05:21:09 AM	rw-r--r--
📄 b5b9fb6ba1e724416126f7788d4bd8b7.spc	19.39 KB	02/11/2020 10:51:42 AM	rwxrwxrwx
📄 b95f1bb33446efbc7fa195b29ff261c6.spc	27.65 KB	02/11/2020 10:51:42 AM	rwxrwxrwx
📄 babee465717bca2404982e2751c61c53.spc	176 bytes	02/11/2020 10:51:42 AM	rwxrwxrwx
📄 bd3c5c1472767419fe12061049343483.spc	122.93 KB	03/12/2020 06:21:29 AM	rw-r--r--
📄 beb279d0ed1b28135d1331bbeb778b85.spc	39.34 KB	03/12/2020 06:21:27 AM	rw-r--r--
📄 c033b35e93579cf666101f023d034851.spc	108.48 KB	02/20/2020 06:35:51 AM	rw-r--r--
📄 c168527cd70d44755d5e3dc302cff303.spc	71.23 KB	02/11/2020 10:51:44 AM	rwxrwxrwx
📄 c31156c2178130a5e98ebbb8b2f61319.spc	32.33 KB	03/12/2020 06:21:25 AM	rw-r--r--
📄 c36e33d44db45f66ded3082899946005.spc	38.34 KB	02/11/2020 10:51:45 AM	rwxrwxrwx
📄 c3ae4c4faa1570ab007529b2461aed7c.spc	70.81 KB	02/11/2020 10:51:46 AM	rwxrwxrwx
📄 c49105af5fef08449f157af0549bf58b.spc	22.82 KB	03/12/2020 06:21:26 AM	rw-r--r--
📄 c62b9f08975a3ce69acf5001c1be6fc0.spc	828.2 KB	02/11/2020 10:51:51 AM	rwxrwxrwx
📄 c70815c1694d1b436d240d9290d75605.spc	139.88 KB	02/27/2020 05:27:37 PM	rw-r--r--
📄 c96754afef1f81a69a0494827bfa975c.spc	61.67 KB	02/11/2020 10:52:51 AM	rw-r--r--
📄 c97a7600c7331a10d8231324118b3a67.spc	19.75 KB	02/11/2020 10:51:48 AM	rwxrwxrwx
📄 cc6545fb14fe412555c86b6880afe2fb.spc	192 bytes	07/19/2020 12:01:09 PM	rwxrwxrwx
📄 cdb828b9de2723669f8b1a1352709ee2.spc	387.08 KB	02/27/2020 05:27:35 PM	rw-r--r--
📄 cfba70f3409c5425ded2d8430338d49a.spc	52.97 KB	02/11/2020 10:51:52 AM	rwxrwxrwx
📄 d537e9e237a12ec958fea41eced57151.spc	186 bytes	02/11/2020 10:51:52 AM	rwxrwxrwx
📄 d7881a7f1d63da45f197c9a2e16999e4.spc	16.18 KB	02/11/2020 10:51:52 AM	rwxrwxrwx
📄 d8c5aac1146a5e6b3c91488029d275be.spc	27.99 KB	02/11/2020 10:51:52 AM	rwxrwxrwx
📄 d8eefb559112e58cb4dab21367a186e2.spc	228.32 KB	02/11/2020 10:51:53 AM	rwxrwxrwx
📄 d9db250644ba2877f115f509ace5a7b5.spc	28.08 KB	02/11/2020 10:51:53 AM	rwxrwxrwx
📄 dc319385e4015b85de4c0dee8d535f8f.spc	37.1 KB	02/11/2020 10:51:53 AM	rwxrwxrwx
📄 dc7b0425002a35c26a812e42646cc5af.spc	111 KB	03/12/2020 06:21:28 AM	rw-r--r--
📄 debf9c17532a02a6e6db578a7f3a4646.spc	142.69 KB	02/11/2020 10:51:54 AM	rwxrwxrwx
📄 defbb59ea45d623ea1c51ac8743c90ea.spc	165 bytes	02/11/2020 10:51:54 AM	rwxrwxrwx
📄 df45183a85d0f0324d9f35c8c667f311.spc	124.89 KB	03/12/2020 06:21:28 AM	rw-r--r--
📄 e095b95df0ddae888ac7f451f20129bc.spc	38.71 KB	07/21/2020 08:32:17 AM	rwxrwxrwx
📄 e2003b6fa97074e2942822467b17062e.spc	26.48 KB	02/11/2020 10:51:55 AM	rwxrwxrwx
📄 e2a37cd95187c01162d6f71089afe300.spc	50.54 KB	02/11/2020 10:51:55 AM	rwxrwxrwx
📄 e57f0a350e6688a01a91dda64cfa2101.spc	122.43 KB	02/11/2020 10:51:55 AM	rwxrwxrwx
📄 e5dae6ccace4ca4cc8216461dda29c74.spc	100.76 KB	02/11/2020 10:51:56 AM	rwxrwxrwx
📄 e76dbae7c8f284493808fa5931a959ea.spc	37.61 KB	02/11/2020 10:51:56 AM	rwxrwxrwx
📄 ea703f3e5c39f76615e5a8b975f794a2.spc	19.19 KB	02/11/2020 10:51:56 AM	rwxrwxrwx
📄 ea82db2f68568b4765fcf688d6c93116.spc	64.03 KB	02/11/2020 10:51:56 AM	rwxrwxrwx
📄 ead3210aad70aa054d53594c794ef5cb.spc	36.52 KB	02/11/2020 10:51:56 AM	rwxrwxrwx
📄 f104494ec9505a88f21eecf9104e7bd5.spc	43.49 KB	02/11/2020 10:51:57 AM	rwxrwxrwx
📄 f14af3dc82bb30bf0c3018917fa3a45a.spc	23.14 KB	02/11/2020 10:51:57 AM	rwxrwxrwx
📄 f2e6e96f252853f6483f6c9c725f0ee2.spc	78.09 KB	02/11/2020 10:51:57 AM	rwxrwxrwx
📄 f34923678798ad8b6c06d24190cb88cd.spc	329.67 KB	02/11/2020 10:51:59 AM	rwxrwxrwx
📄 f5306b0dbdad73410aada80dbc3392d4.spc	2.43 KB	02/11/2020 10:51:59 AM	rwxrwxrwx
📄 f74498a86970a084e5ca639447042aa3.spc	85.09 KB	02/11/2020 10:52:00 AM	rwxrwxrwx
📄 f7d657440800849c7fcaeb682984c7e6.spc	30.41 KB	03/24/2020 05:47:43 AM	rw-r--r--
📄 f9cf779dc17343f7a142ab34fefeb6eb.spc	428.03 KB	07/14/2020 10:43:54 AM	rwxrwxrwx
📄 fbc57cfd03bf1e4ef525660536f2fc4c.spc	18.92 KB	02/11/2020 10:52:01 AM	rwxrwxrwx
📄 fbe8c695ab40ed6d8e54c74cfd8720fe.spc	38.5 KB	02/11/2020 10:52:01 AM	rwxrwxrwx
📄 fcf7bfc598a8e90673a28eed5eb8247c.spc	67.72 KB	03/29/2020 11:29:51 AM	rw-r--r--
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Education Next’s senior editor, Paul E. Peterson, recently interviewed Diane Tavenner, cofounder and chief education officer of Summit Schools, and the author of Prepared: What Kids Need for a Fulfilled Life. Bill Gates recently featured the book on his <a href="https://www.gatesnotes.com/About-Bill-Gates/Holiday-Books-2019">list of year-end recommended reading</a>. 

Paul E. Peterson: Why did you decide to take on the enormous challenge of creating a brand-new public charter school in the richest corner of the United States, Silicon Valley?
Diane Tavenner: I was an educator, a teacher, and then a school principal in traditional schools for a number of years, and no matter how hard I worked, I kept running up against brick walls, preventing me from doing what I believed in. . . . The final piece is I was pregnant with my first and only child. And everything changes when you become a parent and you start thinking about education through the lens of your own child.
What were some of the “brick walls”?
The biggest one was how narrow the focus is in most schools and how siloed education is in high schools. Most high schools are still focused on teaching kids separate subjects hour by hour in a relatively traditional manner, using a combination of textbooks, lectures, and testing. We know from science and our own experiences that that’s not the best way to prepare kids for today’s world. They need preparation in a much more dynamic set of skills, including hard academic skills, but also the habits and mindsets they need to be successful and engaged people.
Your book reminded me of one by Ted Sizer, Horace’s Compromise. In it he writes, “the American high school student is all too often docile, compliant, and without initiative.” Is that what you’re saying? That the system creates bored students who are compliant and without initiative?
Yes. Actually, the system incentivizes that and really disincentivizes students who want to assert their autonomy, and it doesn’t help students build self-direction. As a mother and an educator, I try to build my child’s and all of our kids’ ability to have agency and self-direct their learning. That is a cornerstone of our school model. Kids aren’t just born with the ability to own their own destiny and journey. That requires skills that, just like reading and math, can be developed, and they have a place in our schools.
You have a remarkable record at Summit Schools, with 98 percent of the students going on to a four-year college, and you believe you have accomplished that by arousing the curiosity and the initiative of the young person. How do you do that?
We start with a project-based curriculum. Students who stay with us through middle and high school engage in about 200 different real-world, authentic learning experiences or projects. They don’t start with a “unit of study,” and we don’t say, “You are going to learn about the causes of World War II, or a specific type of grammar, or the quadratic formula.” Instead, we ask a big question that’s interesting to them.
From reading your book, I know you emphasize cooperation and collaboration and de-emphasize competition. It’s not a matter of who’s going to get into which Ivy League college; it’s a matter of “how do we all get what we want?” How important is that to your strategy?
It’s incredibly important. In most schools, they stack-rank kids by GPA. That means the kids on the top are benefiting from those on the bottom, and the school is benefiting from those on the top being successful. It’s designed to produce winners and losers and for students to be judged on single, narrow measures. At Summit, we try to recognize that every one of our students has hopes, and dreams, and wishes, and strengths, and things to contribute, and areas where they need to grow, and they don’t all want the same things out of life.
Our kids do eight weeks a year of expeditionary learning where they can figure out what their strengths are and try new things, and rule things out. What we’re searching for is the best fit for them.
Believe it or not, not everyone wants to go to Harvard. What’s better is when students find a good fit that matches who they are: for economic reasons, geographic reasons, their future aspirations, all of those things. When you think about what each individual wants and help them drive toward that outcome, versus a single outcome for a select few, you can help everyone succeed.
I can see that you can persuade students of that, but how about their parents? Their definition of success may be much more competitive than the one you’re describing here. How do you explain your mission to the parents?
One of the things we have discovered as we’ve shared the Summit model in 40 states through the Summit Learning Program, and in conversation with parents across the country, is that parents actually have shifted their definition of success. It’s still important to them that their kids have economic stability in their adult lives, but they also want them to be happy, have good lives, do what they want to do, have good relationships.
Most parents think other parents have a much more traditional definition of success that’s about status, power, and wealth, so they are quiet about their beliefs because they think they aren’t shared. The primary reason I wrote the book was to help parents realize they’re not alone. In fact, the parents who want their kids to be happy are a majority in this country.
As parents, we need to be open and vocal about this. We’re hoping to build a movement and let the world know that lots of people believe in this new idea of success and how we should be preparing kids for the future.
This is an edited excerpt from an <a href="https://www.educationnext.org/education-exchange-what-parents-can-do-help-kids-prepare-college/" target="_blank">Education Exchange</a> podcast, which can be <a href="https://www.educationnext.org/education-exchange-what-parents-can-do-help-kids-prepare-college/" target="_blank">heard here</a>.
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";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:14:"Education Next";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:40:"http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/content/";a:1:{s:7:"encoded";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:5827:"<div id="attachment_49691836" style="width: 700px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img class="size-full wp-image-49691836" src="https://www.educationnext.org/files/ednext_XX_1_schoollife_img01.png" alt="Elisa Villanueva Beard" width="690" />Elisa Villanueva Beard</div>
In this issue of the journal, Katharine M. Conn, Virginia S. Lovison, and Cecilia Hyunjung Mo report on how the <a href="https://www.educationnext.org/how-teach-for-america-affects-beliefs-education-classroom-experience-opinions/" target="_blank">Teach For America experience affects teacher-participant</a>s. Education Next editor Martin West discussed the article with the CEO of Teach For America, Elisa Villanueva Beard.
Martin West: How did your own experience as a TFA corps member affect your beliefs about education?
Elisa Villanueva Beard: I was a 1998 corps member, and I taught in Phoenix. My first day of teaching, right out of college, I had 36 first-graders walk into my door. I had 30 desks, I had no books, and I had no curriculum. And I quickly came to realize that my kids had no letter recognition, and they were part of a bilingual system that truly had no coherence throughout my elementary school. And my school just lacked the basics of what you would expect any child to have that is attending any school—a rigorous curriculum, a clear vision, a conducive learning environment.
One of my students, Jasmine, had these chronic headaches. And for a while I thought maybe she just was trying to get out of work, but what I came to realize is that she had horrific tooth pain because she had a mouth full of cavities. And when I started to ask the rest of my kids about dental hygiene practices, I came to realize my kids didn’t have the basics on dental hygiene, or didn’t have access to dental care. And that was the beginning of me becoming exposed to understanding that my kids are coming to school with so many unmet needs that are just basic needs that every child should have.
And this one afternoon in my first semester of teaching, a veteran teacher came into my classroom and, as we were chatting, she asked me why I worked so hard because she wanted to know if I realized that we were teaching the future prisoners of the state of Arizona, which was incredibly shocking, and obviously disturbing, but really just deepened my own courage of conviction, because that was the backdrop, but what I found is that my children, consistently, would rise to the occasion. They were excellent…
And so, I emerged from my experience really just inspired by my students and my families. I was pretty outraged about what was happening and how lots of a child’s access or opportunity is just driven by where she or he happens to be born and where he or she happens to go to school.
And I think I started to just better understand the complexity of the problem, what’s happening outside of school, in communities where children are living in poverty, and what that means inside of classrooms and whole schools and districts, and the beginning of what it might take to do something about this, and really committed to being part of the solution, and determined to get to the day when, truly, every child does have access to a great education.
MW: The authors examine a series of questions about the sources of educational inequity in the United States. They conclude, “TFA participants are more likely to believe that societal issues, not differences in the actions or values of students from low-income backgrounds, exacerbate income-based differences in achievement.” Why do you think that’s the case?
EVB: I would say, very simply, because that is what you see. You know, you see it for yourself. We actually see this playing out with real people in real classrooms, with real children and families. And so, you really get in the middle of it. This proximity brings insight and understanding of the complex nature of the problem.
MW: Another finding is that the TFA experience doesn’t make corps members more cynical or pessimistic about the challenge of improving education. In fact, alums are more likely than non-participants to agree that it’s possible for all children to attain an excellent education, and less likely to agree that there’s only so much teachers can do to help low-income students succeed. That result must be gratifying, as one could easily imagine the differences going the other way.
EVB: It’s incredible to see that our folks are emerging from this with optimism and hope and a deep belief that the problem is solvable, which is the big objective here as folks enter the work. So much of it is really being able to be with your students and see what they’re capable of, and then doubling down and realizing that there has to be a path forward.
…When you see something, you can’t un-look at it. And you stick with it and do whatever you can to ensure that you do your part to contribute to ensuring all kids get what they deserve.
This is an edited excerpt from an episode of the <a href="https://www.educationnext.org/ednext-podcast-elisa-villanueva-beard-impact-teach-for-america/" target="_blank">EdNext </a>Podcast.
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";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:14:"Education Next";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:40:"http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/content/";a:1:{s:7:"encoded";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:6005:"In this issue of the journal, reporter <a href="https://www.educationnext.org/serving-math-whiz-kids-private-enrichment-programs-step-up-meet-need/" target="_blank">Kathryn Baron writes about high-ability math students </a>and some of the private organizations that provide them with challenges beyond what they encounter in school. Education Next editor Martin West spoke with Joshua Zucker, a veteran instructor with Art of Problem Solving, or AoPS, a for-profit company that offers online courses for young math lovers.
Martin West: How does the math instruction offered by Art of Problem Solving compare to what’s typically available in public schools? Do you simply enable students to move more quickly through a sequence of advanced courses, or is it a fundamentally different approach?
<img class="alignright size-full wp-image-49691109" style="float: right;padding-top: 5px;padding-bottom: 5px;padding-left: 5px" src="https://www.educationnext.org/files/ednext_XIX_4_schoollife_img01.png" alt="" width="400" />Joshua Zucker: I think it’s both. A lot of students are bored in math class. They want more, they want it faster, and they want to be pushed to think harder and discover more. So, we do give an opportunity for acceleration, but even more important, our values are different. We place a lot of value on strategic thinking, problem-solving strategies, and mathematical communication. We work on giving young kids problems that require them to express themselves and communicate about their thinking process and how they solve the problem, and we give feedback about both the mathematical content and the communication skills. Communication is often neglected in math classrooms. It’s left to the English teachers. But clear, logical communication can also be taught through mathematics, where we have well-defined signposts on what marks rigorous thinking, and we can evaluate whether students are communicating at that level.
MW: You teach courses online, but the interface you use is decidedly low tech, with no audio or video, just a screen that enables you to post problems and offer instructions and hints. What are the advantages of that low-tech approach?
JZ: In some online classes the goal is to try to replicate what it’s like to have everybody in the same room together. Instead, we ask: how can we take advantage of the fact that we’re not all in the same room? Teaching without audio and video means kids can be a little bit behind or they can be rushing ahead to go further. With the text interface, they can scroll back up and study a point they really need to think about, or they can ask a question and get individual help. And I can ask how students got an answer.
In a math classroom, there’s a tendency for the same kids to raise their hands right away, which can discourage others from trying to figure out the problem themselves. Online, we can have 20 of the 50 kids “shouting out” an answer to the problem, metaphorically speaking, but the other kids don’t know it, because only the instructors see their comments.
MW: In her article, Baron reported that in 2015, the United States won the International Mathematical Olympiad for the first time in 21 years and won again in 2016 and 2018. All 16 students on those three teams had enrolled in AoPS courses—more than a hundred courses in total. What role do national and international competitions play in the education of high-ability math students?
JZ: AoPS came into being in part to help serve the kids who have an interest in competitions. Thirty years ago, those kids had to sit alone in their rooms and prepare by themselves. Now we have hundreds of them taking courses every year and training together with really hard problems. Sometimes I wonder if I’m really helping that much, because the kids provide so many of the great ideas. The service we provide is enabling the kids to interact with each other, bringing them into one “place” where they can share the experience of struggling with these problems. That becomes their community of support.
MW: You’ve had experience as a high-school math teacher. What is an important lesson schools can learn from the success of AoPS and other such organizations?
JZ: Mathematics is fundamentally a human activity, and it’s about creativity just as much as writing a good essay is. There are rules and structure, but there’s also exploration and individuality; people’s work is not going to look exactly the same. There’s a tendency in mathematics to focus on following procedures and getting answers, but to me, that’s the part of mathematics that computers are better at than humans. So let’s focus on the parts humans are good at—the creativity, the communication.
Along with that comes a different way of asking questions—genuine questions. In a classroom or textbook, the questions are often just prompts for following the steps and getting the answer. I want to ask questions like, “How did you approach that? What did you try here?” That kind of query is much more inviting; it says, “I want to know about your thinking.” I’d like to see a lot more questions like these in classrooms throughout the country.
This is an edited excerpt from an Education Next podcast, <a href="https://www.educationnext.org/ednext-podcast-stepping-up-serve-high-achieving-math-students/" target="_blank">which can be heard here</a>.
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During his 1988 campaign, George H. W. Bush said, “I want to be the education president.” Was he?
No, says the K–12 Teachers Alliance. It ranks “education presidents” based on their use of federal mandates to direct school success—as Bill Clinton did with Goals 2000, George W. Bush did with No Child Left Behind, and Barack Obama did with Race to the Top and conditional waivers to federal law.
Yes, I say. I still believe what I wrote in 1993 after serving 22 months as Bush’s education secretary: “When the dust settles and the history books are written, President George H. W. Bush’s leadership in education will be recognized as among his most significant and lasting contributions.” (See “<a href="https://www.alexander.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?p=what-we-were-doing-when-we-were-interrupted-by-lamar-alexander" target="_blank">What We Were Doing When We Were Interrupted</a>.”)
Instead of relying on federal mandates, Bush in 1989 convened a national summit of governors to establish six national education goals focusing on improved graduation and literacy rates; student achievement; school readiness; and the elimination of drugs and violence in schools. Then, in April 1991, he launched the bipartisan America 2000 strategy in every state to mobilize the country, community by community, toward meeting those goals.
In addition to America 2000, the president’s agenda included a series of truly radical initiatives: 1) a new set of voluntary national standards in core-curriculum subjects, including science, history, English, geography, arts, civics, and foreign languages (math already was done); 2) a voluntary national examination system geared to those new standards; 3) a new generation of thousands of start-from-scratch, break-the-mold, and public charter schools; 4) more autonomy and flexibility for teachers in their classrooms through the waiver of federal rules and regulations; and 5) a $500 million GI Bill for Children to give middle- and low-income families $1,000 scholarships to spend at any lawfully operated school of their choice (which Congress did not approve). With the nation’s governors, he created the bipartisan National Education Goals Panel of governors, members of Congress, and administration officials to monitor progress toward the goals. The private, nonprofit New American Schools Development Corporation raised $50 million to fund design teams to help communities create break-the-mold schools.
Enactment of the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) in 2015 confirms that most governors, teachers, superintendents, parents, school board members, and members of Congress today agree with H. W. Bush’s formula for federal education policy. As Newsweek said in July of that year, No Child Left Behind—the principal vehicle for more federal control of schools—was “the education law everyone wants to fix.” ESSA reversed the trend toward a “national school board” and made clear that the future path to higher standards, better teaching, and real accountability will be through states, communities, and classrooms and not through Washington, D.C. In November 2015 the Wall Street Journal called ESSA “the largest devolution of federal control to the states in a quarter century.” In short, almost everyone involved in educating America’s children had grown tired of Washington telling them how to do it.
ESSA basically put federal education policy back where it was in 1992 when Bush told the Democrat-controlled Congress that he would veto its reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act because it smacked too much of a “national school board”—but ESSA leaves in place and encourages the considerable strides states have made since 1989: creating higher standards, better tests, new accountability systems, and ways to help low-performing schools. The 10 start-from-scratch public charter schools that Minnesota created in 1992 have grown to 7,000 nationwide. States and school districts have made significant progress in new teacher-evaluation systems and school choice. Bush helped start or encouraged most of the effective actions states are taking today to strengthen their schools.
To be sure, federal mandates sometimes have contributed to better schools. They also have created a massive backlash that threatened to undermine the steady state-by-state progress toward national goals. See, for example, Common Core, teacher evaluation, and high-stakes testing. It is tempting and simpler to use federal mandates to try to improve student achievement in 100,000 public schools, but Americans are fed up with Washington mandates. Without local buy-in, there is little lasting benefit. A harder but better strategy is for the federal government to set the agenda and create an environment for success—but avoid mandates. George H. W. Bush understood that. That is why I believe he was a consequential education president.
Lamar Alexander is Tennessee’s senior United States senator.
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";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:14:"Education Next";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:40:"http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/content/";a:1:{s:7:"encoded";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:6468:"In June, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Janus v. AFSCME that public-sector unions could no longer collect “agency fees” from employees who choose not to join the union. Two years ago, the court seemed poised to ban this practice before the unexpected death of Justice Antonin Scalia led to a four-four split in Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association. Marty West, executive editor of Education Next, spoke with Rebecca Friedrichs, the lead plaintiff in that case.
MW: As a veteran teacher, why did you object to California’s policies on agency fees? In what sense do these fees violate individual rights?
<img class="alignright size-full wp-image-49685751" style="float: right;padding-top: 5px;padding-bottom: 5px;padding-left: 5px" src="https://www.educationnext.org/files/ednext_XVIII_4_friedrichs_img01.jpg" alt="" width="400" />RF: Number one, it’s forced representation. My union was voted in when I was a little kid. I don’t know one person in a union who has ever had the opportunity to vote on the question of whether they even wanted the union that represents them. Second, the unions take $1,000, $1,200 a year [in fees], and they’re totally unaccountable; we don’t know where that money’s going in most cases.
MW: By law, teachers have been allowed to opt out of the portion of union dues that go to political activities, so, at least in theory, the agency fee only supported the collective bargaining activities from which all teachers stand to benefit—but you argued to the court that even the union’s collective bargaining activities are political, because they involve interacting with government about policies that control how schools are operated.
RF: Yes. In fact it was Justice Scalia who stated that collective bargaining in the public sector is always political, because it impacts taxpayer dollars. The unions’ legal coalition even conceded that point during our oral arguments. What’s more, the National Education Association’s Representative Assembly sets NEA’s resolutions and writes its new business items each year, and all teachers, including fee payers, are forced to fund their representation and decisions. Yet the NEA stands in solidarity with Planned Parenthood, Southern Poverty Law Center, ACLU, and other highly political, one-sided organizations that often run counter to the values and desires of many boots-on-the-ground teachers. Through agency fees, unions take our money and push their social and political agenda behind our backs. When we ask for accountability, we get bullied, silenced, and labeled “union busters,” “haters,” and “free riders.”
MW: How were you treated by your colleagues as your case moved through the federal court system between 2013 and 2016?
RF: The unions control teachers in what I call a culture of fear, and you’d better not speak out against them or they call you names. They called me radical right-winger; they called me spawn of Satan. Most people at my school didn’t speak with me openly—that was too scary—but a lot of teachers and administrators would pull me into darkened rooms, they’d hug me, they’d tell me they were praying for me, that they’d hoped I’d win.
MW: In a case similar to yours, Mark Janus was successful before the Supreme Court this past June. What do you think the consequences will be for teachers unions? Will they be weakened without the power to exact agency fees?
RF: I think that’s entirely up to the unions. If they continue their current behavior, bullying everybody and ignoring those who choose not to join, they will be weakened, because if people are allowed to leave, they’ll leave. But if the unions step it up and start doing what people want and stop getting so involved in divisive politics, I think they could actually do a lot better.
MW: What do you make of the recent wave of strikes in six states where teachers have walked out to demand better compensation but also better funding for schools?
RF: The teachers I know do not want to leave the classroom for a strike, they want to serve the children, but they’re bullied if they don’t go out and strike. They’re called “scabs,” they’re screamed at, they’re ignored. Unions use teachers and kids to push their agenda. Angry strikes are not how teachers want to stand together.
MW: What are other ways that teachers could unite to have more of a voice?
RF: Teachers can sit together and intelligently discuss what needs to happen to improve student outcomes in our schools. What is it that we really need to do a better job? There were many years when, more than a raise, I really wanted help in the classroom. Students would come to me four grade levels behind in reading, and I was expected to bring them up, and I was one teacher with 34 students. I wanted a teacher’s aide. I always wanted a science lab. I always wanted a music program. We never had any of that. Local teachers can get together and decide what’s best for the students in their community—working with parents, too, because parents have been voiceless. Teachers can stand together and leave the bullying state and national unions—decertify the entire web of union control—and then they can create “local only” associations and have a collective voice. Our dues would be about $200 a year, and we wouldn’t have to fund unaccountable state and national unions and their political agenda.
This is an edited excerpt from an <a href="https://www.educationnext.org/ednext-podcast-rebecca-friedrichs-janus-afscme/" target="_blank">Education Next</a> <a href="https://www.educationnext.org/ednext-podcast-rebecca-friedrichs-janus-afscme/" target="_blank">podcast, which can be heard on www.educationnext.org.</a>
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Charter schools serve a higher percentage of black and Hispanic students than district schools do, and while charter schools boast greater percentages of black and Hispanic principals than district schools, charter-school leaders are far less diverse than the students they serve. <a href="https://www.educationnext.org/strengthening-roots-charter-school-movement-how-mom-and-pops-help-sector-diversify-grow/" target="_blank">Only 16 percent of charter school principals are black or Hispanic.</a> Many of the families who choose charter schools value community, and diverse leadership is a major part of catalyzing the authentic community engagement needed to support the charter-school movement’s future. To learn more, read <a href="https://www.educationnext.org/strengthening-roots-charter-school-movement-how-mom-and-pops-help-sector-diversify-grow/" target="_blank">Derrell Bradford’s article</a>, which will appear in our forthcoming Summer 2018 issue.
—Education Next
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Education Next showcased the results of its <a href="https://www.educationnext.org/2017-ednext-poll-school-reform-public-opinion-school-choice-common-core-higher-ed/" target="_blank">2017 opinion survey</a> at a <a href="https://www.educationnext.org/event-2017-ednext-poll-school-reform-what-does-public-think/" target="_blank">September event at the Hoover Institution</a> in Washington, D.C. Hanna Skandera, who led the transformation of New Mexico’s schools as state secretary of education, participated in a panel discussion on the poll. Serving as moderator was Alyson Klein, federal education policy reporter for Education Week. The following excerpt is edited for clarity and brevity.
Klein: The 2017 EdNext poll found significant erosion in support for charters among the public. How does that finding track with your experience on the ground?
Skandera: It is quite the opposite in New Mexico. The reality—which I don’t see changing anytime soon—is that parents are demanding great schools for their kids. They often don’t distinguish between charter and non-charter. They ask: “Is this a great school?” and “Will it serve my child?” To give you one example: my little sister in the Big Brothers Big Sisters program was on a waitlist of 1,200 kids at a school with 400 students. In New Mexico, parents and families are committed to getting the best education for their kids.
Klein: We’ve seen a decline in support for merit pay for teachers, although a plurality of the public still supports it. . . . I’m wondering, is that a blip? Or is it the tip of the iceberg? And is there anything out there that you can attribute those changes to?
Skandera: It’s important to understand where our teachers land in their performance measures. After all, that performance has everything to do with how our children will succeed. When I first arrived in New Mexico, there was no clear picture on how to differentiate our teachers. When we asked principals to evaluate their educators and to include student achievement in those evaluations, 99.8 percent of our teachers received the same rating. We knew, as tough as it might be, we owed it to our children to close the honesty gap and work on where we needed improvement. Closing that gap took a lot of time and energy, and I think we got stuck on the measurement piece—but it’s what we do with that information that’s far more important. We can’t just “measure and walk.” We need to get to the right conversation to figure out how to improve teacher performance and ultimately provide our students with the best education possible.
However, as we move forward, it’s also important to avoid another pendulum swing, which is typical of policy at the federal and state level. Often we see a reactionary response. We should use the nuggets of why we started measuring in the first place to inform where we want to go next.
Klein: Thanks in part to the Every Student Succeeds Act of 2015 (ESSA), states are going to have a bigger role than ever in shaping K–12 policy. But when we look at the polling data, it seems that the public’s perception is shaped quite a bit by national debates, some of which may have only a tangential connection to education. How can state leaders help parents and communities see the local impact and rationale for a particular policy?
Skandera: It takes a lot of work—but connecting directly with parents, families, teachers, and community leaders is essential. I had the privilege of serving for nearly seven years in New Mexico, and it took me way too long to realize that if I tried to communicate through the traditional chain of command—state chief, superintendents, principals, teachers, and parents—I would utterly fail to reach families and communities. It was the worst game of telephone; we were lucky if we were still on the same topic by the time word got to the parents.
We need to think about how we can reach our communities in meaningful ways. We conducted focus groups throughout the state, and when we spoke to parents in the ways that they think about education issues, we saw that they wanted many of the same things we were trying to get accomplished. Parents fundamentally support knowing how their kids are doing, having choices, and measurement.
It would be foolish to do community focus groups using the term “ESSA.” Parents and families don’t know what that is. In fact, as soon as you utter an acronym at a community forum, people say, “Great, I thought this was going to be about my child.” The language we use, the topics we choose, and how we talk about them are critical. For far too long in education, the conversation has been centered on our own selves and our own systems. It’s time to start listening to our parents and teachers and finding ways to respond directly to their needs.
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The teachers and administrators at my daughter’s schools probably do, too. Imagine a parent expecting answers to questions like, “What is your approach to teaching reading and math?” or “Which early-reading program do you use?” and “May I look at the curriculum?”
The following are actual statements made in response by admissions directors, administrators, and even those in charge of academics at the schools I visited during our search:
“We don’t have a reading program per se. . . . It’s hard to explain, but the kids just get it.”
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“Of course your children are going to learn math and reading, but what we care most about is building their curiosity and their love of learning.”
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“We don’t really have a curriculum; we meet each child where he or she is.”
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“We decided we don’t need to teach grammar anymore because of spell check.”
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“You can come in and look at the curriculum, but we don’t let parents make copies or take it home.”
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All of these responses were uttered in private schools. I am an ardent proponent of public and private school choice, by the way; and, as Catholics, my husband and I wanted a Catholic education for our daughter if possible. But there was no Catholic school in our community, so we tried a year of Montessori and two years of Episcopalian schooling before finding a spot this year in a Catholic school about 45 minutes from home. Each school has had its own cultural and academic pluses and minuses, but they have all shared a devotion to warmed-over progressivism, a focus on process and skills over content knowledge, and a tendency to teach to the lowest common denominator. Nimble differentiation? Not so much. The most fascinating phenomenon? The omnipresence of former public-school teachers who say they came to teach in a private school so they didn’t have to “deal with” state standards and tests.
Whenever I have asked for a syllabus, a scope and sequence, or anything at all resembling a codification of what my daughter should know and be able to do by the end of the school year, I have gotten vague statements resembling the worst state standards I ever reviewed or rewrote. It is even less productive to ask about instructional philosophy or how we will all know whether the students have achieved these vague goals. That’s when they start with the talk about conceptual understanding, problem solving, 21st-century learning, and “curiosity.” It astounds me that teachers and administrators, especially in private schools, still think it is acceptable to offer such vague answers to parents, or worse, profess that they don’t want to hamstring teachers’ and students’ “creativity.”
Why do I still have to explain that we can focus on content, skills, and creativity simultaneously, and that doing so makes school a lot more fun for students and easier for teachers? Why can’t they understand that analyzing texts distinguished for the truth of their content and the beauty of their craft—whether literary or informational—is a far better way to acquire and practice language and math skills than following a cacophonous basal or leveled reading program in which the texts are mediocre at best? It might actually mean that the wee ones will learn some history, science, and art, too!
As hard as I have worked to bring rigorous, content-rich standards, reasonable assessments, inspiring curricula, and accountability to public schools, I am dumbfounded to see how little of it has permeated the private schools I visited. I am grateful that my daughter is in a Catholic school that nurtures her faith, her compassion, and her patriotism, but we chose the school despite, not because of, its academic approach. I still wish all parents could take their per-pupil allotments and send their children to the schools of their choice, but if they could, I’m far from convinced that private schools—simply by virtue of being private—would necessarily ensure a challenging, content-rich, fun-filled liberal arts curriculum with transparent accountability for delivering it.
Sheila Byrd Carmichael is an education policy consultant and writer and the founding principal of About Language, LLC.
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From the age of five I had attended my small-town public schools. I was comfortable there, but the only approach to learning I’d ever known was pretty dull: read the textbook, do the homework, take the test. No questions asked. For me, it was a monotonous routine with little personal meaning.
<div id="attachment_49676693" style="width: 430px" class="wp-caption alignright"><img class="size-full wp-image-49676693" style="float: right;padding-top: 5px;padding-bottom: 5px;padding-left: 5px" src="https://www.educationnext.org/files/ednext_XVII_2_schoollife_img01.jpg" alt="Meghna Gaddam" width="420" />Meghna Gaddam</div>
I wanted to know more about this school centered around “design thinking,” so I went to shadow a student for a day. The school was located in a warehouse filled with student work—woodworking projects, paintings, and expressive collages. The use of design thinking was evident in every corner: ideas jotted on sticky notes and posted everywhere, and whiteboards covered with words and sketches. I was excited about the prospect of taking their one-of-a kind Design Lab class—where I would learn and apply the design thinking process—along with more standard courses like language arts and U.S. history.
I wanted to do work I was passionate about, so I decided to venture into the unknown and unorthodox style of learning at Design Tech: I became a “d.tech dragon.” The concept of design thinking felt foreign to me at first. I was now being asked to think practically, looking at the world through the eyes of an innovator. That meant making use of both creativity and analysis, and following sequential steps: empathizing, defining, ideating, prototyping, and testing.
I got to try out the new thinking skills I was developing in my first intersession, a two-week period in which students put aside their usual academics and take classes focusing on extracurricular activities, design thinking, and real-world skill building. I took “Data Visualization,” a class hosted by the Oracle Education Foundation. Every morning I would go to sleek, tall glass buildings to learn about big data and what it takes to make a powerful data visualization. On the first few days we watched TED Talks and heard an in-person lecture by Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic, a data visualizer and author of Storytelling with Data, who taught us about the difference between pretty visualizations and meaningful ones. We also participated in a video chat with the CEO of the Dian Fossey organization. I was surprised to learn that, although their research takes place in the natural world, the scientists often make use of sophisticated technology—for example, to track gorilla types, counts, and habitats. It made me realize that data truly are everywhere.
Then we began our own projects, splitting into groups and brainstorming topics. I suggested that we research Alzheimer’s disease, having seen a family member experience it. My group was intrigued, and we decided to research emotional states of Alzheimer’s patients to help caregivers with their challenging work.
We divided up the tasks of collecting data, visualizing it, and creating a presentation. I worked on the visualization, using a software program called Tableau. I would import files and play around with colors, shapes, and design to create a visualization. The task proved challenging. I would make one visualization and realize that a different type of chart might be easier to read, or that the style I chose was impractical.
After trying many prototypes, we settled on a visualization that wasn’t very intricate or pretty but was simple and easy to understand: an animation and line graph showing changes in emotional states of Alzheimer’s patients over time. Our presentation at the end of the workshop also incorporated storytelling through poems that expressed the feelings of Alzheimer’s patients. One of the poems read, “I am sad and sick and lost. All I know is that I need you.” Looking into the audience of students, instructors, and family members, I felt they were genuinely moved by our presentation.
By the time I finished my first intersession, I had gained both confidence and a passion for technology. Later, my confidence blossomed further when I was chosen to be a TA for the data visualization class and learned how to be an effective leader among my peers. Through my experiences at Design Tech, I have had the chance to harness the power of design thinking not only to help solve problems in the real world but also to grow as an individual.
Meghna Gaddam is a junior at Design Tech High School whose interests include journalism, neuroscience, and advocating for more girls to enter the tech field. She hopes to go into medicine and work on health issues in impoverished communities abroad.
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<div id="attachment_49674094" style="width: 325px" class="wp-caption alignright"><a href="https://www.educationnext.org/files/ednext_XVII_1_schoollife_img01.jpg"><img class="size-full wp-image-49674094" style="float: right;padding-top: 5px;padding-bottom: 5px;padding-left: 5px" src="https://www.educationnext.org/files/ednext_XVII_1_schoollife_img01.jpg" alt="Beth Hawkins and Corey Hill" width="315" /></a>Beth Hawkins and Corey Hill</div>
Corey has Asperger’s syndrome. Pencils challenge him for two reasons: He can’t tolerate the scratching noise they make on the paper. And his brain has a wrinkle called a processing speed lag; oversimplified, that means he thinks too fast for his hands to keep up. By the time the pencil’s in motion, he’s on to another thought.
Once, in 3rd grade, he flung his pencil across the classroom. The school social worker demanded I come get him—and have him evaluated for a behavioral disorder.
Math was the subject that set off the marathon of meetings with school specialists in 7th grade. Corey is very good at math, but it had become a tug of war. I pushed for him to be able to do his work using a keyboard, but his math teacher was holding out, insisting he use worksheets and show his work, in pencil.
The discussions were mind-numbing. We couldn’t get him an iPad, because that would be a shiny object no one else had. A Chromebook wouldn’t inspire envy, but where would it be kept? Should the school label it with his name, or would that imply it was his to keep?
As the questions persisted, my annoyance gave way to a much more fundamental concern. In Minneapolis, where I live, one in five students has a special education plan. Almost one-fourth of the students are learning English for the first time. Teachers struggle to reach every child, both those who enter their classrooms years behind and high achievers who need continual challenges. It’s a tall order.
This particular well-regarded middle school had rooms full of Apple computers that students mostly used to check their online grade trackers. And because math teachers are in perennially short supply, the school offered just one section of higher-level math. Kids had to earn their way into that class, and Corey, needing a different way to show his aptitude, would never manage it.
I asked myself: Why can’t we use the computers to differentiate instruction and also provide enrichment for students who need it? With too few excellent math instructors, why can’t we use technology to help close the teacher talent gap? The pencil wasn’t the problem, nor was Corey. The problem was the persistent belief that school must happen in a particular way: within four walls, with a single teacher presiding in front of the class.
Fast-forward a year to a very different special-ed planning meeting. Corey was finishing 8th grade at an innovative charter school where teachers coach students in creating individual road maps for meeting state academic standards. Technology, and creativity in using it, abound at Venture Academy. Students do math online, and Corey can use quizzes to puzzle through it.
Disagreements over Corey’s math instruction didn’t disappear this past year, but they were meaningful and productive. Instead of stubbornly battling over worksheets, my boy and his teacher interacted about his ability to regulate his anxiety when an equation or concept got hard. He’s learning to persist, discovering how good mastery feels, and—the brass ring for a young person with disabilities—figuring out how to advocate for himself.
Given the autonomy to tap into subjects in a way that ignites their passion, the kids at Corey’s school are soaring. Ninety-two percent qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, yet Venture’s students made bigger fall-to-spring gains than all but one of the city’s schools. And that one school has had its students since kindergarten.
Corey’s teachers spent last summer literally building the high school he’s now attending. There are conventional classrooms, but also breakout rooms where small groups can collaborate, a commons, and a quiet room for the many students who, like Corey, have sensory issues. Soon he’ll have internships two days a week and an occupational therapist to help him learn to manage new environments.
It’s a brave and hopeful thing. There will be joy and struggle and growth. And a few pencils, I imagine.
Based in Minneapolis, Beth Hawkins is an award-winning writer who covers K–12 education. She is the writer-in-residence at Education Post.
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Over the last 20 years, I’ve been involved in more than 100 charter-school start-ups. Until recently, I had one consistent approach to getting a school up and running. It involved a lot of money and at least a year of groundwork: studying effective school models, organizing all the logistics, and preparing a 300- to 400-page charter application.
<div id="attachment_49672735" style="width: 230px" class="wp-caption alignright"><a href="https://www.educationnext.org/files/ednext_XVI_4_schoollife_img01.jpg"><img class="size-full wp-image-49672735" style="float: right;padding-top: 5px;padding-bottom: 5px;padding-left: 5px" src="https://www.educationnext.org/files/ednext_XVI_4_schoollife_img01.jpg" alt="Matt Candler" width="220" /></a>Matt Candler</div>
Although it usually worked, my approach had a big flaw. I rarely tested the new school models before the students showed up on day one. And it could take another two or three years to discover if the school was a winner or a dud.
What if there were a way to refine a school concept before risking all that time and money, not to mention the academic and emotional lives of students?
In 2010, I founded 4.0 Schools in New Orleans as a nonprofit “incubator” of new ideas for doing school. The mission: to bring together a community of creative educators and entrepreneurs and help them develop and launch their ideas. I asked the six people in our first cohort to get started in my usual way, by committing a year to soaking up proven concepts in successful schools.
But one of the participants, Josh Densen, challenged my approach. Josh didn’t want to sink a year into studying existing models. He wanted to ask parents what they were looking for in a school. He started hosting sessions in living rooms around New Orleans, and learned that the two things parents most wanted in a school were socioeconomic and ethnic diversity and a focus on creative thinking. He did a lot of searching on the web but couldn’t find such a school to emulate.
Then Josh had a crazy idea, inspired by the competition that had erupted between old-school New Orleans restaurants and the new food trucks that were roaming around selling their wares. Why not try a food-truck version of his school? Josh bought some creative-thinking manipulatives and started doing “pop-up” versions of his school at community music festivals. Kids and parents loved it, and some became regulars. Josh then partnered with the Samuel L. Green Charter School. Each week, he and some of the kids from the festivals would visit the school and engage Green students in testing his concept for a class designed to boost creative confidence. In 2013, Josh opened Bricolage Academy — now one of the most diverse schools in New Orleans.
At 4.0, we’ve been trying since then to “de-risk” the process of new-school creation and make it more iterative, responsive, and agile. Four years after Josh’s first pop-up experiment, we’re formalizing this approach through an initiative we call the Tiny Fellowship.
The idea is to give aspiring school and learning-space founders the resources needed to test promising concepts on a tiny scale. Students and their families provide feedback during the pilot, allowing for improvements to the model before a full-scale version is launched. 4.0, which is funded largely through philanthropy, provides design guidance, leadership coaching, and financial support.
One school that’s been incubated this way is Rooted School, founded by Jonathan Johnson, which will open as a New Orleans charter in 2017. Rooted’s unique model provides students with internships in high-growth, high-wage start-ups—gigs that pay $16 an hour.
After doing some pop-up experiments, Jonathan wanted to further test his concept before launching his school. First, he partnered with the Algiers Charter School Association. Then he pitched his idea to dozens of families and recruited 15 students to participate in a one-classroom, one-semester version of Rooted hosted on the Algiers campus. With lots of help from the Algiers staff, the Rooted team (I’m the board chair) learned far more from those students and families than we ever could just talking about our ideas.
A trial run with only 15 students is not a perfect test—but it’s far less expensive and risky than betting a few million bucks on a full-fledged school with no prior testing. Our process is based not on paper but on pavement—the pavement under the feet of school founders and real students and families.
It’s great when people think big, but even better when big thinkers test small, early, and often. If we can validate our ideas on a tinier, more human scale, listening carefully to students and families, we might find a better approach to school reform—doing it with, not to each other.
Getting away from paper and onto pavement may seem like a tiny change, but I think it’s a big deal.
Matt Candler is the founder and CEO of 4.0 Schools. This article was adapted from a chapter by Matt Candler in <a href="http://hepg.org/hep-home/books/educational-entrepreneurship-today" target="_blank">Educational Entrepreneurship Today</a>, edited by Frederick M. Hess and Michael Q. McShane (Cambridge: Harvard Education Press, 2016).
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";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:5:{s:0:"";a:7:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:43:"Law and Disorder in the Classroom – by  ";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:64:"https://www.educationnext.org/law-and-disorder-in-the-classroom/";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:8:"comments";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:73:"https://www.educationnext.org/law-and-disorder-in-the-classroom/#comments";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Wed, 09 Sep 2009 04:00:49 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:8:"category";a:4:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:14:"Courts and Law";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}i:1;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:25:"Governance and Leadership";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}i:2;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:8:"Research";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}i:3;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:11:"School Life";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:56:"http://content.hks.harvard.edu/educationnext/?p=49626485";s:7:"attribs";a:1:{s:0:"";a:1:{s:11:"isPermaLink";s:5:"false";}}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:96:"Emphasis on student rights continues in classrooms even when the Court begins to think otherwise";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:2:" ";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:40:"http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/content/";a:1:{s:7:"encoded";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:27823:"<blockquote>Students will test the limits of acceptable behavior in myriad ways better known to school teachers than to judges; school officials need a degree of flexible authority to respond to disciplinary challenges; and the law has always considered the relationship between teachers and students special. 
— Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer</blockquote>
<a title="Law and Disorder in the Classroom" href="https://www.educationnext.org/files/large-court.jpg" target="_blank"><img style="float: right;margin-left: 10px" src="https://www.educationnext.org/files/small-court.png" alt="small-court" width="356" height="462" /></a>
In Morse v. Frederick, a 2007 First Amendment student free speech case, the Supreme Court held that a school official may restrict student speech at a school-supervised event when that speech is viewed as promoting illegal drug use. Filing a separate opinion, Justice Stephen Breyer echoed concerns expressed by his conservative colleagues that school authority was being undermined by legal challenges. Since the 1960s, courts have become increasingly involved in regulating U.S. schooling in general, but especially in the area of school discipline. Justice Breyer noted in his opinion, “Under these circumstances, the more detailed the Court’s supervision becomes, the more likely its law will engender further disputes among teachers and students.”
School discipline is a critical area for research, as student interaction with school institutional authority is one of the primary mechanisms whereby young people come into contact with and internalize societal norms, values, and rules. It is thus significant that the number of cases reaching state and federal appellate courts has surged back up to levels attained during the early 1970s when civil rights cases had a central place on the national political agenda (see Figure 1). Our research indicates that both educators and students understand the former’s authority to be more limited and the latter’s rights more expansive than has actually been established by case law.
School Discipline in Court 
Until the late 1960s, parents and students rarely challenged the disciplinary actions of school authorities, viewing common schools as providing instruction, instilling virtue, and fostering the ideals of our nation. Then, as conceptions of youth rights began to shift, and as institutions that provided support for the expansion of these rights emerged, students and parents, with the support of public-interest lawyers, began to question and challenge school disciplinary practices in court.
Table 1 summarizes key school-related rulings from the Supreme Court over the last 40 years. From 1969 to 1975, amid increasing legal challenges to the regulation of student expression in school, the Court’s rulings largely confirmed students’ rights to various free expression and due process protections. The most important decision affecting how schools approach student discipline was Goss v. Lopez, decided by the Supreme Court in 1975. During a patriotic assembly at Central High School in Columbus, Ohio, in 1971, expressions of student unrest over the lack of African American curricula turned into a week of demonstrations and disturbances. Dozens of students were suspended for up to 10 days without formal hearings or notification of the specific charges against them. The Supreme Court case hinged on whether the disciplinary actions improperly denied students their rights to a public education. In ruling for the students, the Court granted “rudimentary” due process rights to those suspended from school for fewer than 10 days, as well as “more formal protections” for students facing longer exclusions.
In recent years, courts at all levels have dealt with cases challenging the enforcement of “zero-tolerance” policies that establish severe and nondiscretionary punishments for violations involving weapons, violence, drugs, or alcohol. At the same time, an increasing number of cases have appeared in lower courts that involve students and families suing schools for failing to provide adequate discipline within school facilities. These cases have alleged climates that permit bullying, sexual harassment, or other forms of school violence (including school shootings). Thus, in recent years, schools have been sued for both disciplining students and not disciplining them.
Since 1975, the Supreme Court has generally been less favorable toward students than it was during the early years of the civil rights movement.. This shift in orientation occurred for diverse reasons, including growing public concern about the level of violence and disorder in public schools, the changed political climate following the end of the Vietnam era, and a pattern of increasingly conservative judicial appointments during the Nixon, Reagan, and Bush administrations. The Supreme Court’s 2007 decision in Morse v. Frederick continued the post-1975 pattern of sympathy with schools that are facing challenges to their disciplinary authority, but did not, as some of the media coverage implied, alter the general contours of student rights as previously established. Its June 2009 decision in Safford United School District v. Redding, in which eight justices agreed that a near strip-search of an 8th-grade girl suspected of concealing prescription-strength ibuprofen was unconstitutional, at first glance appears to be an exception—a sign that the courts will continue to watch over the shoulders of school officials to ensure that reasonableness and proportionality prevail. Yet a majority on the court ruled that the administrators who conducted the search could not be held personally liable because of the uncertainty of the law in this area.
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Appellate Case Patterns 
While Supreme Court decisions are important because every school in the nation must adhere in principle to its rulings, these few landmark cases do not encompass the universe of legal challenges regarding school discipline and related policies. To discern the larger contours of the legal climate facing schools, we analyzed all appellate-level federal and state court cases in which school efforts to discipline and control students have been challenged. As a whole, decisions in these cases are often complex and contradictory in providing practical guidance to schools regarding specific disciplinary matters. We included cases involving the use of state agents (such as the police) acting on behalf of school authorities to deal with students in the vicinity of school grounds. We excluded instances of conflicts between schools and teachers (such as teacher dismissal cases) and between schools and nonstudent outsiders (such as drug- and weapon-free-zone cases that did not involve students), as well as student rights cases focused exclusively on free speech issues (that is, those not combined with the school’s use of suspension, expulsion, corporal punishment, and transfer). We also excluded cases in which students allege that school authorities have breached their duty to maintain safety in the school and to protect students from harm.
Of course, we did not include the vast majority of litigation, which was either settled before hearing or never reached state and federal appellate courts. Still, our methods provide a way to gauge the general character and broad trends in legal challenges that contemporary educators face. Appellate-level court cases define case law, generate media coverage, influence public perceptions, and can be tracked over time as an empirical indicator of the broad parameters of court climate toward school discipline. We found that not only has the frequency of legal challenges greatly varied over time, but the content and direction of outcomes has shifted as well. 
The newfound willingness to challenge school authority became evident in the surge of litigation during the late 1960s. In part because of increased institutional support from public-interest legal advocacy groups and the legal services program of the Office of Economic Opportunity, from 1968 to 1975 an average of 39.1 public school K—12 cases per year reached the appellate level. After important legal precedents were set and institutional support waned, the average number of cases declined but then took a sharp upturn from 1993 on, with a peak of 76 cases in 2000 and a total of 65 in 2007. We present here the overall number of cases rather than a relative measure accounting for public school enrollment, given that media coverage and individual understandings reflect the former indicator. Nevertheless, a measure of state and federal court cases calculated per enrolled student would demonstrate similar upward trends, more than doubling from the years 1976—1992 to the 2003—2007 period.
<img style="float: right;margin-left: 10px" src="https://www.educationnext.org/files/laying-down.png" alt="laying-down" width="421" height="641" />The substance of the cases brought before the courts has also varied over time, with protest and free expression cases decreasing markedly through 1992 (see Figure 2a). Recently, courts have witnessed a reemergence of these issues. Cases involving alcohol and drugs rose during the intermediate time periods that coincided with national attention to the “War on Drugs” and then diminished. Those involving weapons and violence have increased to nearly 40 percent of all K—12 public school discipline cases since 1993. In addition, school discipline court cases increasingly have involved student disability. From 2003 to 2007, 18 percent of cases included discussion of student disability status. Since the 1970s, legal entitlements and protections have grown for students classified as disabled because of learning, physical, or behavioral handicaps (including psychological disorders that are associated with the manifestation of student misbehavior). Special education students thus gained additional protections related to school discipline, particularly in cases in which infractions could be attributed to the individual’s disability.
Over time, we found that courts in general have become less favorable to student claims across these areas of litigation (see Figure 2b). However, since the number of court challenges has increased in recent decades, the likelihood of a school facing a legal environment in which a student has recently been successful in a court challenge over school discipline has not significantly diminished.
Socioeconomic Disparities 
Many of the early school discipline cases were brought to ensure that the rights of less-advantaged students were protected. New evidence suggests, however, that litigation is increasingly used strategically and instrumentally by families from relatively privileged origins to promote the interests of their children. Research (by Irenee Beattie, Josipa Roksa, and Richard Arum) that examined appellate court cases from 2000 to 2002 found that, on average, those cases emerged from secondary schools with 29 percent nonwhite students compared to 37 percent nonwhite students in the national population of secondary schools (the latter weighted for enrollment size to be comparable to the court case data); appellate cases also emanated from schools with more educational resources per student (student/teacher ratios of 16.3 compared to 17.5 nationally).
National surveys of teachers and administrators reveal a similar middle-class bias in legal challenges. A reanalysis of a Harris survey of teachers and administrators conducted by Melissa Velez and Richard Arum for Common Good in 2003 examined the proportion of public school educators (a combined sample of teachers and administrators) who reported that either they or someone they knew personally had been sued by a student or parent. Educators in suburban schools with less than 70 percent nonwhite students had a 47 percent probability of having experienced contact with an adversarial legal challenge compared to a 40 percent chance for educators in all other schools. Although much of the development of student rights originally emerged from concern about nonwhite students in urban areas, educators in those settings had only a 41 percent probability of contact with a legal challenge.
In collaboration with colleagues working on the School Rights Project (Lauren Edelman, Calvin Morrill, and Karolyn Tyson), we conducted a national telephone survey of 600 high school teachers and administrators and site-based surveys of 5,490 students and 368 educators on perceptions and experiences of the law in schools. In our site-based work, which included in-depth interviews and ethnographic fieldwork, we examined 24 high schools with varying legal environments situated across three states (New York, North Carolina, and California), stratified by school type (traditional public, charter, and Catholic) as well as by student socioeconomic composition. We found that 15 percent of public school teachers and 55 percent of public school administrators have been threatened with a legal suit over school-related matters. For administrators with more than 15 years of experience in the position, the figure rose to 73 percent. Administrators’ actual experience with being sued for school-related matters occurs at a lower rate (14 percent), but is still the source of considerable professional anxiety, given that these cases—following Wood v. Strickland (1975)—include vulnerability to personal liability claims. We again found that legal challenges are concentrated in schools with more-privileged students. When we looked solely at administrators working in urban public schools with more than half of students eligible for free lunch, we found—albeit with a sample of only 16 cases—not a single report of administrators being sued for a school-related matter.
That legal mobilization is dependent on economic resources needed to pursue such challenges is in general not surprising. We documented evidence of this association, however, to illustrate that regardless of the institutional and political origins of student rights, today legal mobilization in schools largely reflects patterns of socioeconomic inequalities. In the School Rights Project, we found that white students were nearly twice as likely as nonwhite students to report having pursued a formal legal remedy for a perceived rights violation.
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Legal Understandings and School Practices
Legal mobilization is a relatively rare occurrence, a small tip of a much larger legal-dispute pyramid. School discipline today is profoundly shaped by legal understandings that are only partially and indirectly related to formal regulation and case law. We highlight here the extent to which both students and educators have developed an expansive definition of legal rights of students, the relationship between this sense of legal entitlement and school disciplinary practices, and perceptions of the fairness and legitimacy of various school disciplinary practices.
The institutionalization of student due process protections goes well beyond appellate case law, having been enshrined in extensive state statutes and administrative regulations. The accompanying sidebar (page 65) provides a sense of the extent to which law has come to permeate school practices by highlighting codified disciplinary procedures in New York City. While discipline policies vary across schools, districts, and states—and as the nation’s largest school district the New York City public schools are likely more bureaucratized and formalized in matters of school discipline than smaller districts—the scale, scope, and level of complexity of the legal regulations affecting day-to-day school practices appear quite formidable.
Generally speaking, educators and students have developed a set of legal understandings that assumes a broad and expansive definition of student legal entitlements. Following the Goss decision, students have been granted rudimentary due process protections when facing minor discipline and more formal due process protections when facing more serious forms of discipline (such as long-term expulsion or suspension). The Goss decision delineated procedural safeguards, stating that “the student be given oral or written notice of the charges against him and, if he denies them, an explanation of the evidence the authorities have and an opportunity to present his side of the story.” More formal due process protections may include the right of students to “summon the accuser, permit cross-examination, and allow the student to present his own witnesses. In more difficult cases, he (the disciplinarian) may permit counsel.”
We are interested in individuals’ perceptions of such protections, since students’ and educators’ beliefs about rights likely have real consequences for school authority and disciplinary procedures. In the School Rights Project, we specifically asked students and teachers which due process protections were required when students faced various disciplinary sanctions. We found that while expectations of formal due process protections were broadly diffused for students when facing major disciplinary actions, many of them had also come to expect these legal entitlements when facing minor day-to-day discipline. For example, 62 percent of public school students in our sample believed that, if faced with long-term suspension or expulsion, they were legally entitled to at least one of the following: a formal disciplinary hearing, opportunity to be represented by legal counsel, opportunity to confront and cross-examine witnesses bringing the charges, or opportunity to call witnesses to provide alternative versions of the incident. Approximately one-third of students also believed that they were legally entitled to some form of formal due process protection when they had their grades lowered for disciplinary reasons (33 percent), were suspended from extracurricular activities (36 percent), or faced in-school suspension (35 percent).
We found that students’ sense of legal entitlement was expansive, and that teacher and administrator expectations of required student due process protections were even more so. For example, when asked about lowering student grades for disciplinary reasons, approximately half of public school teachers and administrators responded that this action was prohibited; among the educators who did think such disciplinary actions were permissible, 32 percent reported that students subject to such disciplinary sanctions were entitled to formal due process protections.
In the School Rights Project, we found that increased perceptions of student legal entitlements correlate with decreased reports of the fairness of school discipline. This conclusion mirrors James Coleman’s finding that Catholic school students in the 1980s were significantly more likely to perceive school discipline to be fair than public school students, who possessed far greater formal legal protections. Educators and students have developed a generalized sense of legal entitlements, while school practices have, in many settings, become increasingly authoritarian, with student misbehavior often subject to criminalization and formal legal sanction. These internal contradictions enhance students’ sense of the unfairness of school discipline. Longitudinal research has demonstrated that students who perceive school discipline as unfair are more likely to disobey teachers, disrupt classroom instruction, and in general fail to develop behaviors conducive to educational success and related positive outcomes.
Also, in recent decades schools have moved away from disciplinary practices that rely on the judgment, discretion, and action of professional educators and have turned instead to reliance on school security guards, uniformed police, technical surveillance, security apparatus, and zero-tolerance policies. The latter techniques are ill suited to the pedagogical task of enhancing the moral authority of educators to support the socialization of youth, that is, the internalization of norms, values, and rules.
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Due Process in the Big Apple
At the start of each school year, parents of public school students in New York City receive a 28-page pamphlet titled Citywide Standards of Discipline and Intervention Measures: The Discipline Code and Bill of Student Rights and Responsibilities, K—12. Schools require parents and students to return a signed form acknowledging that they are familiar with the guidelines specified in this document. The brochure lists 112 different infractions and specifies the range of possible disciplinary responses and guidance interventions associated with each type of incident. “The Right to Freedom of Expression and Person” is a topic specified in detail, and the section on “The Right to Due Process” notes 10 specific components of students’ rights:
1. be provided with the Discipline Code and rules and regulations of the school; 
2. know what is appropriate behavior and what behaviors may result in disciplinary actions; 
3. be counseled by members of the professional staff in matters related to their behavior as it affects their education and welfare within the school; 
4. know possible dispositions and outcomes for specific offenses; 
5. receive written notice of the reasons for disciplinary action taken against them in a timely fashion; 
6. due process of law in instances of disciplinary action for alleged violations of school regulations for which they may be suspended or removed from class by their teachers; 
7. know the procedures for appealing the actions and decisions of school officials with respect to their rights and responsibilities as set forth in this document; 
8. be accompanied by a parent/adult in parental relationship and/or representative at conferences and hearings; 
9. the presence of school staff in situations where there may be police involvement; 
10. challenge and explain in writing any material entered in their student records.
The pamphlet notes that “students with disabilities are entitled to additional due process protections described in Chancellor’s Regulation A-443” and “when a student is believed to have committed a crime, the police must be summoned and parents must be contacted (see Chancellor’s Regulation A-412).” Ten other specific Chancellor’s Regulations are referenced in the document (A-420, A-421, A-449, A-450, A-750, A-801, A-820, A-830, A-831, A-832) in addition to the acknowledgment that all procedures must also comply with relevant “State Education Law and Federal Laws.” While school officials “must consult the Disciplinary Code when determining which disciplinary measure to impose,” they also are required to consider “the student’s age, maturity, and previous disciplinary record…the circumstances surrounding the incident leading to the discipline; and the student’s IEP, BIP and 504 Accommodation Plan.”
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Conclusion 
Citizens, legislators, judges, and policymakers have begun to recognize and question legal interventions in situations involving school discipline and authority. We add to this discussion our findings that the legal understandings underlying school discipline policies depart in significant ways from the case law on which they are assumed to be based, according expansive rights and protections to students, even as the courts have tended to side with school authorities. We also document that although public-interest lawyers were initially motivated to expand student legal rights as part of a larger strategy to reduce social inequality, legal challenges to school disciplinary actions are disproportionately the province of white and higher-income students and their families.
The expansion of student legal entitlements has been accompanied by the increasing formalization and institutionalization of school discipline. As educators’ discretionary authority over school discipline has been challenged and undermined, counterproductive authoritarian measures such as zero-tolerance policies have been implemented in its place. But to be educationally effective, school discipline requires that educators have moral authority and students perceive their actions as legitimate and fair. Ironically, the expansion of student legal rights, rather than enhancing youth outcomes, has increased the extent to which schools have relied on authoritarian measures, decreased the moral authority of educators, and diminished the capacity of schools to socialize young people effectively.
As various social and political actors consider legal regulatory reforms, it is important to recognize that the expansion of students’ legal entitlements has also increased the potential for student dissent in U.S. schools, whether of a political, religious, or ideological character. At the same time, individual students and families with sufficient resources are able to contest what they perceive as unfair disciplinary sanctions or rights violations. These gains have come at a pedagogical and societal cost, as the resolution of school disciplinary matters has increasingly moved—as Justice Breyer feared—from the schoolhouse to the courthouse.
Richard Arum is professor of sociology and education at New York University, where Doreet Preiss is a research fellow and doctoral candidate. This essay is adapted from “Still Judging School Discipline,” in Joshua M. Dunn and Martin R. West, eds., From Schoolhouse to Courthouse: The Judiciary’s Role in American Education (Brookings, 2009).
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";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:5:{s:0:"";a:7:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:23:"Domino Effect – by  ";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:46:"https://www.educationnext.org/domino-effect-2/";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:8:"comments";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:55:"https://www.educationnext.org/domino-effect-2/#comments";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Wed, 19 Aug 2009 14:33:23 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:8:"category";a:4:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:8:"Research";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}i:1;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:11:"School Life";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}i:2;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:19:"disruptive students";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}i:3;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:17:"domestic violence";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:50:"http://content.hks.harvard.edu/educationnext/?p=62";s:7:"attribs";a:1:{s:0:"";a:1:{s:11:"isPermaLink";s:5:"false";}}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:39:"Domestic violence harms everyone's kids";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:2:" ";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:40:"http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/content/";a:1:{s:7:"encoded";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:20544:"Each year, between 10 and 20 percent of schoolchildren in the United States are exposed to domestic violence. According to psychologists, such exposure can lead to aggressive behavior, decreased social competence, and diminished academic performance. A majority of parents and school officials believe that children who are troubled, whatever the cause, not only demonstrate poor academic performance and inappropriate behavior in school, but also adversely affect the learning opportunities for other children in the classroom. A nationally representative <a href="http://www.publicagenda.org/reports/teaching-interrupted" target="_blank">survey by Public Agenda</a> found that 85 percent of teachers and 73 percent of parents agreed that the “school experience of most students suffers at the expense of a few chronic offenders.”
Understanding whether troubled children in fact generate spillover effects in school is important for two reasons. First, the existence of substantial spillovers caused by family problems such as domestic violence would provide an additional compelling reason for policymakers to find ways to help troubled families. Second, because many education policies change the composition of school and classroom peer groups, it is important to understand how such changes may affect student achievement. For example, a common concern regarding the ongoing push to “mainstream” emotionally disturbed students in regular classroom settings is that doing so may undermine the performance of other students. Similarly, the tracking of students into classrooms based on ability or academic performance may group disadvantaged children with the most disruptive students. The validity of these concerns hinges on whether and how classroom exposure to troubled peers affects student achievement and behavior.
Credibly measuring negative spillovers caused by troubled children has been difficult. Most data sets do not allow researchers to identify troubled children. Even when such students are identified in the data, it is difficult to determine if a disruptive child causes his classmates to misbehave or if his classmates cause him to be disruptive, what scholars of peer effects call the “reflection problem.” In addition, troubled children are likely to attend the same schools as other disadvantaged children. One must rule out the possibility that the disruptive student and his classmates misbehave due to some common unobserved factor.
We overcome these problems in this study by utilizing a unique data set in which information on students’ academic achievement and behavior is linked to domestic violence cases filed by their parents. This data set allows us to identify troubled children more precisely than we could by using conventional demographic measures. Moreover, we can identify children who are troubled for specific family reasons and not because of their peer group. This allows us to measure peer effects free from the reflection problem, providing a rare opportunity to test the notion that even one “bad apple” impedes the learning of all other students.
Our results confirm, first, that children from troubled families, as measured by family domestic violence, perform considerably worse on standardized reading and mathematics tests and are much more likely to commit disciplinary infractions and be suspended than other students. We find also that an increase in the number of children from troubled families reduces peer student math and reading test scores and increases peer disciplinary infractions and suspensions. The effects on academic achievement are greatest for students from higher income families, while the effects on behavior are more pronounced on students who are less well-off. The results of our analysis provide evidence that, in many cases, a single disruptive student can indeed influence the academic progress made by an entire classroom of students.
Data
In our study, we use a confidential student-level data set provided by the school board of <a href="http://www.co.alachua.fl.us/" target="_blank">Alachua County in Florida</a>. This data set consists of observations of students in the 3 rd through 5th grades from 22 public elementary schools for the academic years 1995–96 through 2002–03. The Alachua County school district is large relative to school districts nationwide, with roughly 30,000 students; in the 1999–00 school year, it was the 192nd largest among the nearly 15,000 districts nationwide. The student population in our sample is approximately 55 percent white, 38 percent black, 3.5 percent Hispanic, 2.5 percent Asian, and 1 percent mixed race. Fifty-three percent of students were eligible for the federal free or reduced-price lunch program.
The test-score data consist of reading and mathematics scores from the <a href="http://www.education.uiowa.edu/itp/itbs/" target="_blank">Iowa Test of Basic Skills</a> and the <a href="http://pearsonassess.com/haiweb/cultures/en-us/productdetail.htm?pid=E132C" target="_blank">Stanford 9</a>, both nationally normed exams. Reported scores indicate the percentile ranking on the national test relative to all test-takers nationwide. Because the reading and math results are so similar, we use a composite score calculated by taking the average of the math and reading scores. The average student in our data scored at the 53rd percentile, or just above the national norm.
Yearly disciplinary records, which include incident type and date, are available for every student in our sample. Incidents are reported in the system if they are serious enough to require intervention by the principal or another administrator. We focus on three behavioral outcomes from these records: the probability the student was involved in a disciplinary incident, the total number of disciplinary incidents per student, and the probability the student was suspended. In a typical year, 18 percent of the students in our data set were involved in a disciplinary incident, the average student was involved in 0.56 incidents, and 9 percent of students were suspended.
We gathered domestic violence data from public records information at the Alachua County courthouse, which included the date filed and the names and addresses of individuals involved in domestic violence cases filed in civil court in Alachua County between January 1, 1993, and March 12, 2003.Cases are initiated when one family member (typically the mother) petitions the court for a temporary injunction for protection against another member of the family (most often the father or boyfriend). Students were linked to cases in which the petitioner’s first and last name and the first three digits of the residential address matched <img style="border: 0pt none;margin-top: 10px;margin-bottom: 10px" src="http://media.hoover.org/images/ednext_20093_58_fig1.gif" alt="Article figure 1: Students exposed to domestic violence do less well on standardized tests and are more likely to misbehave in school than their peers." width="380" height="358" align="right" border="0" />the parent name and student’s residential address in the annual school record. In that way, we were able to identify the set of students who could be matched to a domestic violence case from1993 to 2003. In total, 4.6 percent of the children in our data set were linked to a domestic violence case filed by a parent, split equally between boys and girls. Sixty-one percent of these children were black, while 85 percent were eligible for subsidized school lunches.
Students linked to a domestic violence case performed at lower levels academically and were more likely to have been involved in a disciplinary incident than other students in the district. Boys exposed to domestic violence, for example, performed at the 37th percentile academically, as compared with the 52nd percentile for boys who were not exposed. Forty-three percent of boys exposed to domestic violence were involved in a disciplinary incident, as compared with 25 percent of boys who were not exposed. Girls exposed to domestic violence performed at the 41st percentile academically and 19 percent of them were involved in a disciplinary incident, as compared with the 55th percentile and 11 percent for girls who were not exposed to domestic violence (see Figure 1).
Measuring Peer Effects
Our main analysis examines the impact of troubled children on their peers. We assume there is no feedback loop in which a student’s peers cause the domestic violence in the household. This assumption appears reasonable, as none of the most likely determinants of domestic violence can plausibly be caused by an elementary school child or her peers.
To overcome the bias that results from self-selection into peer groups, our main analysis compares cohorts of students in the same grade at the same school in different years. For example, we compare the 3rd graders in a given school this year with the 3rd graders in the same school last year to see whether the cohort with more students exposed to domestic violence had higher or lower student achievement. Restricting the comparisons to students attending the same school ensures that any effects we observe reflect the impact of troubled students and not the fact that schools with more such students differ in unobserved ways from other schools. We measure peer domestic violence at the cohort level (that is, across all students in a grade at a school) as opposed to the classroom level due to the possible sorting of students into classrooms according to their achievement and behavior. We also adjust for differences among students in a large set of individual characteristics—most importantly whether particular students had been directly exposed to domestic violence—but also race, gender, subsidized lunch status, and median zip code income.
<img src="http://media.hoover.org/images/ednext_20093_58_fig2.gif" alt="Article figure 2: The presence of troubled peers in school lowered achievement and increased behavioral problems among students as a whole. For students from low-income families, these effects were concentrated on behavior rather than on achievement, while the opposite was true for children from higher-income families." align="right" border="0" />Results
Our results indicate that troubled students have a statistically significant negative effect on their peers’ reading and math test scores. Adding one troubled student to a classroom of 20 students results in a decrease in student reading and math test scores of more than two-thirds of a percentile point (2 to 3 percent of a standard deviation). The addition of a troubled peer also significantly increases misbehavior of other students in the classroom, in effect causing them to commit 0.09 more infractions than they otherwise would, a 16 percent increase. These are effects that could accumulate over time if the same students are repeatedly exposed to troubled peers.
These average effects also mask a few interesting differences across student groups. We find that troubled peers have a large and statistically significant negative effect on higher income children’s math and reading achievement, but only a small and statistically insignificant effect on the achievement of low-income children. However, we find the opposite pattern for disciplinary outcomes. The presence of troubled peers significantly increases the misbehavior of low-income children, but does not increase the disciplinary problems of higher-income children (see Figure 2).
Results of examining the differential effects of peers from troubled families by race and gender show relatively large negative and statistically significant test-score effects on white boys and statistically insignificant effects on black boys, black girls, and white girls. Adding one troubled peer to a classroom of 20 students reduces white boys’ reading and math scores by 1.6 percentile points and black boys’ reading and math scores by 0.9 percentile points (the effects on girls are negligible). Troubled peers increase disciplinary problems for all subgroups except for white girls. The effects are largest for black girls. One troubled peer added to a classroom of 20 students increases the probability that a black girl commits a disciplinary infraction by 2.2 percentage points (an increase of 10 percent over what would otherwise be the case).
Finally, we examined whether troubled boys affect their peers differently than do troubled girls. Across all outcome variables, both academic and behavioral, the negative peer effects appear to be driven primarily by the troubled boys, and these effects are largest on other boys in the classroom. The results indicate that adding one troubled boy to a classroom of 20 students decreases boys’ test scores by nearly 2 percentile points (7 percent of a standard deviation) and increases the probability that a boy will commit a disciplinary infraction by 4.4 percentile points (17 percent). Apparently, troubled boys generate the strongest adverse peer effects, and other boys are most sensitive to their influence.
Testing Key Assumptions
Of critical importance to our method is the assumption that students are not systematically placed into or pulled out of a particular grade cohort within a school depending on the domestic violence status of the student or his peers. For example, if parents who really value education were more likely to pull their children out of a cohort with a particularly high proportion of peers from troubled families, such nonrandom selection would cause us to erroneously attribute lower performance to the presence of the troubled peers.
We performed several additional analyses to probe the robustness of our results to this critical assumption. As a first test for nonrandom selection of students into or out of particular schools and cohorts of students, we examined whether peer family violence appears to have an effect on cohort size or student characteristics such as race, gender, and income. In the absence of nonrandom selection, we expect to find no correlation between these characteristics and the peer family violence variables. This is indeed what we find.
Next, we noted that some parents may be more likely than others to put their children in private schools or move to a different school zone because of a particularly bad cohort, but that parents may be less likely to pull one child out of the school due to a particularly bad cohort when that child has a sibling in the same school. When we calculated peer effects only on children with siblings in the school, the results were essentially the same as those for the full sample.
One might also be concerned that some families are, for some reason, unable to remove their children from cohorts with a large number of troubled peers. To check this potential cause of nonrandom selection, we calculated results based only on comparing students to their siblings. We found that the sibling in the cohort with more children from troubled families has lower test scores and more disciplinary problems. These within-family results are roughly two-thirds the size of the estimates for the full sample, but the differences between the two sets of results are not statistically significant.
For a final check, we added controls for a full set of cohort-level variables, including race, gender, participation in the federal subsidized lunch program, and median zip code income. These variables control for any potential changes in cohort characteristics not captured by our full set of individual controls in the main analysis. In addition, this allows us to examine whether the presence of children exposed to domestic violence is merely a proxy for other peer characteristics, such as family income. The results indicate that the negative peer effects are not likely driven by observable factors, such as family income, that are correlated with domestic violence.
Collectively, these tests provide strong evidence that our findings are not the result of families changing schools in response to the number of children from troubled families in their child’s grade at an assigned school.
Discussion
In addition to knowing how children from troubled homes affect their peers through interaction with their cohort at school, one may also wish to know the precise way in which the troubled families cause the peer effects. This is a particularly challenging task given that researchers have consistently found, as we have, that domestic violence is correlated with other negative family characteristics, such as poverty, unemployment, low levels of education, and substance abuse. While we cannot conclusively attribute the effects found to the causal effect of domestic violence per se, we can exploit the timing of the domestic violence filings to provide suggestive evidence of whether the negative spillovers are due to domestic violence or some other factor correlated with it.
Specifically, we examine whether the negative spillovers associated with children from troubled families are smaller after the parent files the case than before the case is filed. Survey research shows that on average, violence had occurred in the family for more than four years prior to the reporting of the incident. However, 87 percent of the respondents indicated that the reporting of the incident “helped stop physical abuse.” Consequently, if domestic violence itself is causing the negative spillovers on the child’s classmates, then we would expect the spillovers to be smaller when the parent of the peer had already filed for the injunction against domestic violence.
To investigate whether exposure to domestic violence is the potential mechanism through which the spillovers occur, we constructed two peer domestic violence variables: reported and as yet unreported violence. By definition, reported domestic violence means that the petition for the injunction was filed before the student test was taken and unreported domestic violence signals that the filing occurred after the test date.
We find substantially larger effects for the proportion of peers with unreported domestic violence (that is, those whose parents had not yet filed for the injunction) than for those with past domestic violence. For example, the test-score effects for troubled boy peers on boys are statistically insignificant for reported violence, while they are large and highly significant for unreported violence. The larger peer effects for unreported domestic violence suggest that the violence in the home may itself be playing a role in driving the effects. However, we remain cautious with this interpretation, as we have no direct information regarding the details of the family environments for students in our sample.
Conclusion
Our findings have important implications for both education and social policy. First, they provide strong evidence of the validity of the “bad apple” peer effects model, which hypothesizes that a single disruptive student can negatively affect the outcomes for all other students in the classroom. Second, our results suggest that policies that change a child’s exposure to classmates from troubled families will have important consequences for his educational outcomes. Finally, our results provide a more complete accounting of the social cost of family conflict. Any policies or interventions that help improve the family environment of the most troubled students may have larger benefits than previously anticipated.
<a href="http://www.econ.ucdavis.edu/faculty/scarrell/" target="_blank">Scott Carrell</a> is assistant professor of economics at the University of California–Davis. <a href="http://www.econ.pitt.edu/people/facpage.php?uid=108">Mark Hoekstra</a> is assistant professor of economics at the University of Pittsburgh.
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