Source: https://lawprofessors.typepad.com/education_law/2015/03/index.html
Timestamp: 2019-04-22 20:31:07+00:00

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In recent years, a growing body of evidence has confirmed what personal experience and intuition have long suggested: the quality of a child’s teacher has a profound and lasting impact on the child’s academic achievement. According to one expert, replacing just the least effective five percent of America’s teaching force with average teachers could catapult our nation’s K-12 education system from its current place among the worst performing in the developed world to among the top. Yet for complex reasons related to school culture, administrative inertia, and the time and cost associated with dismissing a teacher for poor performance, schools across the country continue to subject students to chronically ineffective teachers in considerable numbers.
New York City Schools to Close on Muslim Holidays: Accommodation or Establishment?
On March 3, New York City schools announced that they will begin recognizing two major Muslim holidays beginning in the upcoming 2015-2016 school year. The two holidays to be recognized are Eid al-Fitr, celebrated at the end of Ramadan, and Eid al-Adha, a feast of sacrifice celebrated in late September this year. While New York City is the largest district in the United States to include these holidays on its academic calendar, it is not the first. Massachusetts, Michigan, and New Jersey all have districts that have taken similar steps. New York, however, has a proportionally larger number of Muslim students affected. New York City school district has just over 1.1 million students and "[a] 2008 study by Columbia University found that 10 percent of [the district's] student body is composed of Muslims." Some school have a significantly greater percentage of Muslim students. The Brooklyn public school that was referenced in the superintendent's announcement reported that 36 percent of its students missed school on the last Eid al-Adha.
This is in contrast to Montgomery County, Maryland, which rather than recognize Muslim holidays, stripped all formal acknowledgement of religious holidays from its school calendar. The facts there were far different, but I suggested the district probably got it correct under the Establishment Clause. Which side of the line New York falls on is a closer call. The question is whether the school is accommodating the free exercise of religion (because to do otherwise is an administrative burden) or whether it is accommodating religion for the purpose of promoting it/pleasing its adherents. Given the size of the Muslim population in the schools, the City can more easily make the former argument and render the policy constitution, although the mayor and superintendent's announcement of the new policy included potentially problematic statements suggesting the latter. Their statements, however, may be political grandstanding, as opposed to indications of school level motivations.
On Tuesday, the Indiana Supreme Court held that the state constitution's education clause does not require school districts to provide school bus services. Indiana's Franklin Township Community School Corp. ended its bus service in 2011 after losing about $18 million of its budget when a cap on property taxes went into effect and local voters rejected a referendum to increase property taxes. Faced with the decision to provide buses or cut staff and classroom resources, the Franklin County Superintendent chose to end transportation. The Township then decided to provide student transportation for an annual fee through a private contractor. In November 2011, parents filed a class-action lawsuit against the Township challenging the constitutionality of the mandatory transportation fee. In 2014, the Indiana Court of Appeals struck down the Township's mandatory fee as unconstitutional. The Indiana Supreme Court decided whether the state constitution's education clause supported any requirement for free bus services. The state supreme court found no such requirement to provide free school transportation in Indiana's education clause which mandates a “general and uniform system of Common Schools, wherein tuition shall be without charge, and equally open to all.” While the Court acknowledged that its ruling "will inevitably require some families to make alternative accommodations,  it will not close the schoolhouse doors." After the class action lawsuit was filed, Franklin Township restored bus transportation in 2012, but the case remains important for other districts facing budget shortfalls. Read Hoagland v. Franklin Township Comm. Corp., No. 49S02-1410-PL-643 (Ind. March 24, 2015) here.
President Obama's administration has taken a great interest in protecting Americans from predatory practices, as evinced by his planned remarks on predatory lenders today in Alabama. The Education Department (and the Justice Dept.) have been watching a few higher education institutions where there have been accounting irregularities with federal funds. In keeping with those efforts, the Ed has placed 67 nonprofit and for-profit institutions on heightened cash-monitoring status, which means among other things that they are restricted from drawing Title IV funds until students receive disbursements from their institutions. The Ed will not reveal which colleges and universities are on its watch list, however, despite requests from Inside Higher Ed and other media to publish the list. Inside Higher Ed reports today that the administration is considering releasing that list. The Ed had not done so before because of the risk, quoting an unnamed Ed official to Higher Ed, that "any public release of the confidential financial standing of these institutions will likely cause the institutions substantial competitive injury.” When it is made public that an institution is on the list, as Computer Learning Centers (CLC) was before its closure, it can be subject to shareholder suits.
[The report] found that students and teachers report feeling safer as harsh discipline practices have eased. That’s another good-news finding, since some observers feared that cutting arrests and suspensions would worsen school climate and security.
However, the report also notes that Chicago still has a lot of work to do to further reduce suspensions of young black men, who are still the most likely to be kicked out of school for discipline reasons. One-third of black males received an out-of-school suspension last year, compared to 13 percent of Latino boys and 6 percent of white and Asian boys.
Some schools are replacing out-of-school suspensions with in-school suspensions: Out-of-school suspensions for black male students declined by about 3 percent, while in-school suspensions rose by 7 percent. Most other groups also saw slight increases.
Most suspensions in high schools are handed down for “defiance,” with only a third the result of fights or other threats to safety. The report notes that with so few suspensions for physical altercations, schools probably have more room to cut suspensions without compromising safety—but teachers need training on how to deal with students they perceive as being disrespectful.
The overall arrest rate for high school and middle-grades students was 2 percent, but the rate for black males was double that, according to Chicago Police Department data analyzed by the Consortium. Schools called police for just 43 percent of serious incidents that require police notification under the district’s discipline code.
One troubling fact is that the Consortium still could not get access to complete discipline data from charter schools. This missing data, of course, is also crucial to yesterday's post about comparing urban charters' academic achievement to that of traditional public schools.
Following up on recent stories about racial isolation in San Francisco's public schools, Priceonomics.com put its statistical prowess to work on the issue and produced some interesting analysis and inferences. While at the district level white students are grossly underrepresented in the the public schools, there is a significant amount of uneveness across individual schools and grade levels. They found significant white enrollment in elementary school, but significant drop-offs there after. At the elementary school level, they found "
the spread of the distribution is astounding. Half of San Francisco’s elementary schools have a student population that is 13% white or less. A few elementary schools are over 50% white, while a quarter of elementary schools are under 3.3%.
Those options usually don’t go away as a student ages. If at any point the process doesn’t shake out the way an affluent parent wants, they can just drop out, and shell out for a private education for their child. And, the data suggests, that’s exactly what they do.
Are Charter Schools Finally Outperforming Traditional Public Schools?
Probably not, but the news stories surround the most recent charter school study by the Center for Research on Educational Outcomes (CREDO) would have the public believe so. CREDO's studies have been a center point in the debate over the efficacy of charter schools since 2009. Charter school advocates used the 2009 study to demonstrate that some charters (17% to be precise) were outperforming traditional public schools. Those advocates ignored the 37% that were under-performing in comparison to traditional public schools. Charter school skeptics hammered that point and backed it up with subsequent studies.
CREDO's second report in 2013 was more equivocal than the first and moved in a direction to the liking of charter schools. Rather than focusing on raw performance, it sought to identify educational improvement, finding that charter schools in general were showing more growth than traditional public schools. Some argued that larger growth was potentially easier because charters were starting from a lower baseline. The changed frame of analysis also elicited criticism from both sides regarding the methodology of the study.
CREDO is now out with its 2015 report, and it equivocation is all but gone. The study finds that "urban charter schools in the aggregate provide significantly higher levels of annual growth in both math and reading compared to their TPS peers. Specifically, students enrolled in urban charter schools experience 0.055 standard deviations (s.d.’s) greater growth in math and 0.039 s.d.’s greater growth in reading per year than their matched peers in TPS. These results translate to urban charter students receiving the equivalent of roughly 40 days of additional learning per year in math and 28 additional days of learning per year in reading."
This finding was met with applause by education reformers, charter school advocates, and the business community. It was met with keen interest by the media. It has been met largely with silence from those formerly critiquing charters (or they have been unable to capture headlines). Does this study and the silent reaction to it mean that charter schools have finally matured and are demonstrating superiority over traditional public schools? Is the debate, in effect, nearing resolution? Not so fast, says Bruce Baker. We still must compare apples to apples, and it is not clear that CREDO has done that.
Those seeking to demonstrate charter superiority have almost always compared apples to oranges. If the student demographics of charters differ from traditional public schools, raw achievement scores between the two cannot be accurately compared. Responding to this problem, newer studies, including CREDO's, have attempted to account for differing student demographics.
But CREDO's new study may have done both too much and too little in this regard. CREDO's new study narrows the field further than every before, largely in the attempt to triangulate some area of advantage for charters. The new study does not compare charters and traditional public schools on the whole, but only urban charters to urban traditional public schools. That comparison is probably correct, but, of course, those are not the only charter schools in operation. Thus, at best, the study suggests that under certain circumstances, charters outperform traditional public schools.
Charters undersubscribe high need special education kids and oversubscribe mild learning disabled (as a share) but CREDO treats those kids as matched.
This creates a severe bias in favor of charters in Newark and in many other cities with similar sorting patters and high average poverty rates.
This perhaps provides partial explanation for why CREDO tends to find stronger charter effects in poor urban centers than, say in suburbs, where their matching measures - at least for income status - would potentially be more useful.
The point is that the virtual record comparison asserts that these kids are otherwise similar, and thus the gains are somehow attributable to "charter" schooling as a treatment. This assertion is deeply flawed at two levels. First, the as noted above the variables they are choosing for matching are nearly useless. They don't necessarily identify similar kids at all. Nearly all kids fall below the income threshold they are using and thus they might label as "matched" (likely do in fact) a kid in deep poverty/homelessness, etc. in a district school with a kid marginally below the reduced lunch cut point in a charter. They might also label as "matched" a mild specific learning disability kid in a charter (since that's all they have for disability) with a far more severely disabled kid in a district school (where district schools have disproportionate shares of those kids now because charters have siphoned some of the less needy spec ed kids).
The second level problem here is that the CREDO study doesn't then account separately for who these kids attend school with - the peer effect. It conflates that effect with "school" effect, by omission.
Deep stuff. It is probably deeper than the average reporter cares to consider, which might explain some of the silence. But these distinctions are crucial in understanding the new CREDO report and suggest the charter school debate is far settled. The National Education Policy Center has commissioned a review of the CREDO study that will add further clarity to the debate. That review should be available later this spring.
Wisconsin Attorney General Brad Schimel has petitioned the state supreme court to reverse a finding that a new state law unconstitutionally removed powers from the state Superintendent of Public Instruction (SPI) in favor of the Governor. The law, called Act 21, required that the Governor approve the scope and drafts of new administrative rules proposed by the state education superintendent. In February, the Wisconsin Court of Appeals found that Act 21 unconstitutionally took away the SPI’s supervisory rule making power in public education. The case is Coyne v. Walker, No. 2013AP416, 2015 WL 686178 (Wis. Ct. App. Feb. 19, 2015).
This American Life ran a story last night, Three Miles, on a program "that brings together kids from two schools. One school is public and in the country’s poorest congressional district. The other is private and costs $43,000/year. They are three miles apart. The hope is that kids connect, but some of the public school kids just can’t get over the divide." Chana Joffee-Walt tells the story and allows us to listen to what happens when students get to see the other side and it looks a lot better. She not only describes poor students’ immediate reaction to seeing the rich school (one spontaneously bursts into tears) but also follows up on them ten years later and reports on how that experience affected their going—or not going—to college (or going and failing out, as several unfortunately did).
Although not emotionally raw, this story also reminds me of James Ryan's similar lens of analysis in Five Miles Away, A World Apart, which describes segregation over time in Richmond, Virginia.
A steady stream of studies have demonstrated zero tolerance and harsh discipline policies do not achieve their goals. They do not improve student behavior. They do not make schools safer. In some instances, they just make matters worse. Those studies have tended to focus on the aggregate school climate. A new study makes far more specific and shocking findings, so shocking that one might struggle to process them.
Likelihood of student marijuana use was higher in schools in which administrators reported using out-of-school suspension and students reported low policy enforcement. Student marijuana use was less likely where students reported receiving abstinence messages at school and students violating school policy were counseled about the dangers of marijuana use.
Suspending kids actually increased the odds of drug use by 60 percent-- even for kids who weren't suspended, but attended the school were suspension was the policy. "That was surprising to us," said co-author Richard Catalano in a press release. "It means that suspensions are certainly not having a deterrent effect. It’s just the opposite." And according to Catalano and his colleagues, suspensions "related to unintended negative outcomes for the suspended student, such as disengagement from school, delinquency or antisocial behavior, smoking, and alcohol and drug use."
The Arkansas Law Review's symposium issue on education (presumably celebrating the 60th Anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education) is now available on westlaw. The essays and articles offer a historical narrative spanning from segregation to current policies that divert funds and attention away from the education of poor and minority students to incarceration. Each is summarized below.
Peter C. Alexander, Seeking Educational Equality in the North: The Integration of the Hillburn School System​, 68 Ark. L. Rev. 13 (2015).
Peter Alexander, uses the example of his small hometown of Hillburn, NY to discuss the history of segregation and integration in the north. Alexander points out that "[m]uch attention has been paid to segregated schools in the South, but surprisingly little has been written about segregated schools that existed north of the Mason-Dixon Line." However, even racially-diverse, small northern towns like Hillburn, which has a population of only about 1000 people, had segregated schools. "Curiously, the local high school was in the neighboring village of Suffern, New York, and it was integrated; however, children in the Hillburn schools were divided by race until the ninth grade." Nevertheless, Hillburn was not unique in its decision to segregate. Alexander points out that neighboring counties in New York, as well as numerous districts in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and many more norther states had segregated school. "The reasons segregated schools existed outside of the South varied from community to community." For some districts, it made geographic sense to segregate, as was the case in Hillburn. Alexander also discusses how economic demographics came into play as a rationale for segregation. Throughout the article, Alexander uses Hillburn's journey from segregation to integration as an example of the challenges that many northern cities and towns faced when making that transition.
Ellen Marrus, Education in Black America: Is It the New Jim Crow?, 68 Ark. L. Rev. 27 (2015).
The second explanation rings particularly true. As I have noted several times, OCR has begun enforcing anti-discrimination more aggressively over the past year or two. Various policy guidance documents have all but invited individuals to bring complaints that they might have foregone in prior years, thinking that such a complaint was a waste of time.
Not mentioned is the fact that courts have grown so inhospitable to some claims, particularly those requiring evidence of intentional race discrimination. See Alexander v. Sandoval. OCR's continuing authority to enforce its disparate impact regulations leaves it as one of the venues of last resort for communities experiencing educational inequality. This reality, however, is overtaxing the resources of OCR. The time it takes to resolve cases has grown considerable. It is now asking Congress for additional funding to hire 200 additional attorneys and investigators. Of course, what I might term as OCR's successes are termed as overreaches by some in Congress, who are thus skeptical of the efficacy of funding increases.
Drawing on recent restricted data from the U.S. Department of Education, this Article presents an original empirical analysis revealing that a police officer’s regular presence at a school significantly increases the odds that school officials will refer students to law enforcement for various offenses, including these lower-level offenses that should be addressed using more pedagogically-sound methods. ... The empirical analysis reveals that, even after controlling for (1) state statutes that require schools to report certain incidents to law enforcement, (2) general levels of criminal activity and disorder that occur at the school, (3) neighborhood crime, and (4) other demographic variables, a police officer’s regular presence at a school significantly increases the odds that school officials will refer students to law enforcement for various offenses, including seemingly minor offenses. This finding has serious implications as lawmakers and school officials continue to deliberate over whether to use their limited resources to hire more law enforcement officers to patrol school grounds.
[T]his Article urges lawmakers and school officials to use their resources to adopt alternative measures to promote school safety instead of resorting to measures that rely on coercion, punishment, and fear. This is especially important when such measures tend to push students out of school and into the juvenile justice system, which can have such devastating, long-lasting consequences on the lives of students. A growing body of research suggests that programs that promote a strong sense of community and collective responsibility enhance school safety much more effectively than police officers and other strict security measures without degrading the learning environment. And while these alternative measures may not prevent a determined, deranged individual from harming members of the school community, the rarity of these events cannot justify the enormous amount of resources that would be needed to protect students at all times and in all places while they are at school. Indeed, in the wake of highly-publicized acts of school violence, the public often forgets that schools remain among the safest places for children.
On Monday, I posted on the Alabama Senate passing a bill to allow charter schools in the state. That bill blew through state house and the governor signed it into law yesterday. More details here.
The Atlantic ran a story this week titled "Zeroing out Zero Tolerance." Much of the article mediates the debate between "no-excuses" charter schools that believe a rigid approach to discipline has been the key to their academic success and large urban school districts that have recently abandoned zero tolerance policies. Her story emphasizes the large gains in achievement and graduation that the nation's two largest school districts--New York City and Los Angeles--have achieved since ending zero tolerance for minor misbehavior. The same is true of Denver, which was a front-runner in this change. There is not much new in the story, but it does a better job than most in highlighting the issues and juxtaposing the relevant school systems.
American disability discrimination laws contain few intent requirements. Yet courts frequently demand showings of intent before they will remedy disability discrimination. These intent requirements have come into the law almost by accident: through a statutory analogy that appears apt but is in fact false; by continued repetition of language pulled from an obsolete judicial opinion; and by doctrine developed to avoid a conflict with another law when the conflict does not actually exist. Demanding that section 504 and Americans with Disabilities Act claimants show intentional discrimination imposes a burden found nowhere on the face of those statutes or their interpretive regulations.
This Article spells out the reasons not to impose any intent requirement either for liability or for monetary relief in section 504 and ADA cases concerning reasonable accommodations. It makes the uncontroversial point that no intent requirement applies to ADA employment cases, then explains that the same conclusion ought to apply to cases under the ADA’s state and local government provisions and section 504. It rebuts an analogy to caselaw under Title VI and Title IX of the Civil Rights Act that some courts use to support an intent requirement. It then identifies and corrects the reasoning of cases relying on the inappropriate analogy, those that rest on the obsolete precedent, and those that refuse to apply a full range of remedies for fear of conflict with the federal special education law.
This Article breaks new ground in the scholarly discussion of the disability discrimination laws by placing into context and critiquing the infiltration of intent requirements into cases brought under the provisions that bind state and local government and federal grantees. It relies on a contextual reading of the decisions of the Supreme Court, on the history of the ADA, and on policy considerations that ought to determine liability and remedies for unintentional disability discrimination.
In Fairfield-Suisun Unified School District v. California Department of Education, Nos. 12-6665, 12-16818, 2015 WL 1136449 (9th Cir. Mar. 16, 2015), the court of appeals ruled that school districts lack a right of action to pursue claims that the state department of education violated applicable procedures when deciding parental complaints filed pursuant to the federal special education law’s Complaint Resolution Process established under 34 C.F.R. sec. 300.151 (CRP). In one case, a school districts alleged that the department allowed two reconsiderations of a decision and took into account conduct outside the one-year statute of limitations set out in 34 C.F.R. sec. 300.153(c). In the other, a school district alleged that the department improperly put the burden of proof on the district rather than the complainant. Both districts sought injunctive relief forbidding similar conduct in future complaint resolution proceedings. The court observed that the cause of action established by the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) in 20 U.S.C. sec. 1415(i) provides for appeals from due process hearing decisions, but does not include appeals from CRP decisions. Accordingly, the court rejected the argument that IDEA’s express terms allow school districts to sue, and further rejected any implied right of action by which school districts can sue for the alleged violations of the statute.
The holding is not a surprise. The court previously held that school districts lack the ability to sue the state education department for violations of IDEA procedures connected with due process hearings (specifically, routinely failing to comply with the time limits set out in federal regulations), Lake Washington School District No. 414 v. Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction, 634 F.3d 1065 (9th Cir. 2011). Moreover, courts have generally not permitted school districts to sue for violations of IDEA outside the context of an appeal of a due process hearing decision. I collect the cases in Special Education Law and Litigation Treatise (LRP 3d ed. & supp. 2015) at sec. 21.5. There are a few outliers, but given the trend against recognizing implied statutory causes of action exemplified by Alexander v. Sandoval, 532 U.S. 275 (2001), the likelihood of courts allowing school districts broad rights to sue for violations of IDEA in situations other than due process appeals looks slim. On the other hand, parents may have more extensive rights of action under section 1415, an implied IDEA cause of action, or 42 U.S.C. sec. 1983.

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