Majority of Texas Middle and High School Students Suspended At Least Once

In the debate this week, it appears the single major word that Texas Governor Rick Perry used most often was "border."  Many uses of that term came as he talked about how dangerous things are along the Texas-Mexico border.

However, it appears that the border line isn't the only dangerous place in Texas.  A six-year study of one million students in Texas--all the 7th grade public school students in Texas in 2000, 2001, and 2002--discovered that between 7th-12th grade, nearly 60% were expelled or suspended from school at least once.  Because only a small fraction of these cases (3%) were legislatively-mandated (violations such as illegal drugs or bringing a weapon to school), it indicates that the vast majority of these suspensions or expulsions were done at the discretion of the school.

The study, which was conducted by the Council of State Governments (CSG) Justice Center in partnership with the Public Policy Research Institute at Texas A&M University,  considered many variables, including age and income level, but found that only two sub-populations in the student body had higher-than-average suspension/expulsion rates:  African Americans and student with certain learning disabilities.  The data reported that 75% of African American had some form of discipline, compared to 65% of Hispanics and 47% of white students.  For students with educational disabilities, 75% of all disabled students, and 90% of students with an emotional disability, were expelled or suspended at least once, compared to 55% of students without any recorded disability.

The report also addresses the consequences that being suspended or expelled has on student success.  Of the 60% of students who had been so disciplined, 31% were held back for at least one year (which many previous studies link to poor academic achievement and higher drop out rates) and 10% officially dropped out (the study also notes that the system underreports how many students have actually dropped out but haven't completed the official paperwork confirming that decision).  Among the 40% who made it through school without suspensions or expulsions, 5% repeated at least one grade and 2% officially dropped out before graduation.  Even worse was the correlation between suspensions and expulsions to being involved in actual crimes; of those who had been so disciplined, almost a quarter eventually became involved in the juvenile justice system, compared to only 2% among the non-disciplined population.

The problem with reports like this is that they are only dealing with numerical correlations, not cause and effect.  So how people interpret the results probably depends on whether your world view is more Hobbesian (who described the life of man as "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”) or Rousseau-ian (who argued that poor human institutions warp people's natural tendencies towards both self-sufficiency and compassion).  That is, some people think that the high number of drop-outs and juvenile offenders among those who have been disciplined is just common sense; their innate bad behavior and/or anti-social principles showed up in school, and was properly disciplined, before they engaged in actual crimes or stopped bothering with school.   Thus, the students' bad character was the cause of both the suspension/expulsion and the dropping out/juvenile crime.  Others, however, wonder to what extent such harsh discipline actually caused the high drop out and juvenile justice figures.  This side would argue that when struggling students are banned from school (for a short term or permanently), that encourages them to spend their time with "bad influences" and/or have more time and opportunity to get into trouble.  In addition, students who have been suspended or expelled probably have more negative feelings about school--either around their ability to succeed there, or whether it is a hostile and unfair, rather than a nurturing and encouraging, place to be, which effects their decisions about whether or not to continue their education and to pursue fields outside the illegal alternative available to them.  The study, however, does not contain the kind of information that helps to support or refute either interpretation.

And I don't know about you, but my immediate reaction to these findings were "They suspend or expel 60%?  Surely they can't have THAT many "bad" students in Texas!  If so, the Wild, Wild West ethos must still rule in the Lone Star state."   But am I just uninformed?  How far from the "norm" is a 60% suspension/expulsion rate?  It turns out that is a hard question to answer, because the study had a more comprehensive database and addressed the question in a way that hadn't been done before.  So I was never able to find a national average for suspensions and expulsions (although, I will  admit, this was not an exhaustive effort....given that this blog is done with the time and money I have to spare after everything else I do).  But I did find at least some information in my home state of North Carolina.

While North Carolina generally collects suspension and expulsion data in a different way--it is much more focused on the number of missed days, rather than the percentage of students--I did find one report from the state Department of Education that stated that in 2006, approximately 10% of North Carolina students had short-term suspensions.  That statistic was for the entire school system, but let's just assume that percentage applies to middle and high schoolers, since that is what the Texas study covered.  But that is just short term discipline, and doesn't include long-term suspensions or expulsions.  I believe the Texas study said that 70% of its disciplinary actions were short-term, so if we apply the same statistics to North Carolina and round out the numbers (generously), then that would mean that about 15% of North Carolina students had been suspended or expelled in 2006.  

If that figure was accurate, then that would indicate that about four times the number of secondary students in Texas had been suspended or expelled, compared to those in North Carolina (in terms of percentages, not in actual numbers, since Texas is a much larger state).  Is Texas so wild that four times as many student misbehave?  Or is something else going on?

There was one other interesting data analysis that was included in the report.  The researchers actually divided the schools into three different categories, based on such demographics as family income level, percentage of immigrants or migrants, size of school, etc., and predicted whether disciplinary actions would be at a low, average, or high level.  But when they looked at the three categories, they found that about half reported the "expected" number, but a little less than a quarter had higher than expected percentages, while a bit more than a quarter had lower than expected numbers of disciplinary actions.  This was true regardless of expected level of school, size of school, type of school, or year of analysis.  And the good news was that those that had fewer percentages of students suspended or expelled certainly did no worse than those with average or even high numbers of disciplined students.

So the bottom line is, looking at the entire Texas secondary school system, is that suspending or expelling students is associated with dropping out or getting involved with the juvenile justice system.  But individual schools have a lot of discretion about whether or not they suspend or expel students.  Those who have a more lenient disciplinary system don't do any worse than the schools with higher percentages of disciplined students.  But there is obviously a lot of leeway between schools about who--and how many--are being suspended or expelled.

And either Texas is a LOT tougher on students than North Carolina, or they have a LOT more bad seeds--like four times as many.   Whether you think that is good or bad...well, like I said in paragraph 5 above, that probably depends more on your underlying assumptions about people than any statistics I can report.

Do Charter Schools Burn Out Teachers?

Do charter school burn out teachers?  That is the question raised by a recent study by educational researcher at the University of California at Berkeley.  

In the study, the authors were looking at the statistical factors related to teachers leaving their schools.  Teacher longevity at schools is correlated with positive educational outcomes, both among standardized test results as well as family satisfaction, student relationship building, and other "softer" measures of educational quality.

So the study, which was focused only on teachers in the Los Angeles school system, which can differ in many ways from most of the school systems in this country,  is written in educational-ese and contains lots of data and statistics and such.  I glazed over the statistics analysis and chi squares methodology and such that is part of such academic research, and I have a Masters in Education.  But I think this graphic, taken from the report, can express one of the most important conclusions:

Annual Teacher Turnover by School Size in LAUSD 2002 - 2007

Click here to see the map in its original size.

The bottom line of this graphic is that I count 30 schools that have a teacher turnover rate of over 40%, and of that number, all but two are charter schools, which means that 93% of such high turnover schools are charters (and I don't know the exact statistics, but I think charter schools are only about 10% of all the schools in LA).  So clearly, teachers are much more likely to leave charter schools than traditional public schools.

The question that the study doesn't address, however, is why.  Charter teachers tend to be young; is that why more of them leave? (although more leave charter schools than is average for schools in general). Charter schools tend to be newer, which is also associated with higher turnover, but not at the rates seen in this study among the charter schools.  Are the young teachers who work at charter schools more naive and/or idealistic than other young teachers, and thus leave when their fantasies encounter real educational situations?  Do the (sometimes) for-profit charter schools pay their teachers and/or offer fewer benefits or other incentives that make their staff leave for traditional schools?  All of these explanations have been offered, but none have been proven.

So I don't know how to explain this data.  But I do have a belief (which is backed up by some data) that students are better served by teachers with more experience and/or commitment to the school in which they teach.  Therefore, I think the high teacher turnover rates should be at least a yellow caution light for those who seek to expand rapidly the charter school program (such as the Republican legislators, who this year lifted the 100-school cap on charter schools in North Carolina).  

Yet Another Study Shows Public Colleges Provide Better Value for Post-Graduation Salaries

So the final in my trinity of recent studies that suggest that top students don't necessarily have to pay top dollar for good educational opportunities, I turn to the "payback" study done by SmartMoney magazine.   Like yesterday's study, this one is based on the salaries earned by the graduates of top colleges, which I personally think is a dubious evaluation of the quality of education.  Nonetheless, it is a major consideration of most families looking at college decisions, so it is worth at least noting what these studies are saying.

So the payback scale devised by this study looks at the average salary of graduates divided by the total fees  (tuition and other charges by the college itself) over four years of earning a degree.  So, for example, if the average student paid $25,000 a year for four years at College X, but earned an average salary at graduation of $150,000 a year, that school would have a payback scale of 150% ($150,000/$100,000 total costs).  But if the average student paid $50,000 a year for four years, but earned an average salary of $175,000, that college would have a payback scale of only 87.5% ($175,000/200,000).

Let's acknowledge upfront that the payback scale favors some universities over others.  For one thing, the schools that offer programs in business or science and technology are going to look better than those that are typical "liberal arts" colleges, whose graduates may be going into such field as social work, the arts, non-profit research, or--gasp!--education, whose salaries are typically lower.   The scores also don't take into account average financial aid--which would benefit the Ivy League schools, whose endowments are rich enough to offer healthy aid packages to many students--or typical years to graduate--which would make many public universities look worse, because more of their students take longer to graduate than the presumed four years.  So looking at these figures with somewhat of a grain of salt, what did SmartMoney magazine find?

Based on the payback scale, the highest performing colleges and universities were the top-tier public universities.  According to SmartMoney magazine, the luckiest students are those living in Georgia:  Georgia Institute of Technology was their #1 "payback" school (with a payback ration of 221), and University of Georgia was #4 (payback of 186).  In general, the South and Midwest ruled the top of the payback scale, with the University of California at Berkeley being the only college on either coast breaking into the top 10 (it was #10 with a payback ratio of 146).   

Alas for North Carolinians, no college in the state made the top 50 of the SmartCollege listing.   Our neighboring states did better; South Carolina has Clemson University, which was #6 with a 160% ratio, and Virginia had both the University of Virginia at #16 (117%) and my alma mater, The College of Williams and Mary, at #18 (111%).

It is not until you get to #19 that you find a private school:  the Ivy League university of Princeton, which as a payback scale of 102.  The last 30 universities on the list are dominated by private schools, with the Ivy Leagues generally scoring higher than most of the other top-tier private colleges.

You can read the article to find out the specific details about the average salaries of the three types of schools--public, private, or Ivies--and the comparative relative costs.  But the bottom line is still the same:  going to a very expensive and exclusive university does not guarantee you a higher salaries, particularly when you compare the relative costs of earning your degree.

Now, my point in the three posts is not to bash the Ivy League schools, or private schools in general. But there can be so much pressure about getting into "the right school" or "the best school," and I hope looking at some of this data can help middle schoolers and high schooler feel less anxious about their postsecondary education.  

And I do have to admit to a personal bias.  When I was in high school, I applied (and got accepted, at least to some) to Ivy League and elite/expensive private schools, but I ended up choosing The College of William and Mary, which was one of my state schools, and thus a fraction of the cost of the others.  I ended up getting an excellent education at a bargain price.  But since I didn't have thousands of dollars of student loans hanging over my head, I was able to choose jobs that I really enjoyed and that I thought were really valuable--jobs in the non-profit world, and then in education (leading finally to homeschooling, where I get to PAY for the privilege of spending untold hours every day teaching children!).  I've never had a high salary job, but I think I've had plenty of high impact jobs.  Plus, I've always enjoyed and believed in what I did--which is something that is hard to put a price tag on.

So all I'm saying is--there is a lot to consider when choosing what college to attend.  Don't feel that a fancy name alone is the yellow road that will bring you to your dreams.

Study Casts Doubt on the Ability of Highly Competitive Universities to Raise Salaries

On the heels of my post yesterday about a study that showed that high achieving students end up with similar test scores whether they get into the most competitive high schools or not, a study this year by researchers at Princeton University discovered a similar phenomenon in regards to the most exclusive universities.  In this 2011 study, they found that most high achieving high school students who applied to the most elite colleges, but ended up going to a less competitive school (whether because they weren't accepted or chose a different school), earned the same average salaries as their peers that graduated from the exclusive colleges (Ivy League-level schools).

This study is particularly interesting because it was a repeat of a study that the same economists published about 10 years ago.  That study revealed the same thing--applicants to top tier universities who attended less elite colleges generally obtained comparable salaries to the graduates of the most exclusive schools.  In the first study, however, the salaries were self-reported, which left room for some, padding, shall we say.  But in this follow-up research, not only were many more people included, with the time span now reaching to careers of people in their 40s and 50s, but the data on salaries was taken from more objective sources, such as Social Security information.  Still, the results were the same; there was no boost in income for graduates of top colleges compared to other students with comparable test scores and such who didn't attend those types of schools.

So, the bottom line is:  Big name colleges are not required to earn the big bucks.  If you have the grades and test scores, along with personal qualities like self-confidence and persistence that are related to applying to these types of schools, of a viable candidate for admission, ON THE AVERAGE, you will earn as much even if you attend a less prestigious college.  Depending on how much you have to pay for the big name schools, in fact, you may be better off turning them down (if accepted) and pursuing an education at a less costly alternative.

There are some BIG caveats to this conclusion, however.  Graduating from a highly competitive/Ivy League type university DID significantly increase the incomes of minority students (black and Latino), students from low income families, and those whose parents did not attend college.  It appears that the elite colleges do provide those types of students with skills, habits, or networks that do advance their professional chances at gaining a larger salary.

But for white middle or upper income students, the debt they might occur to attend the most exclusive schools is not likely to translate to significantly higher salaries.

Of course, we hope that earning a lot of money is not the sole criteria by which we judge our universities.  Income upon graduation is an even worse stand-in for educational quality than standardized tests are.  However, there can be questions about the educational value of the highly elite schools.  In many of them, the focus is really on graduate education, so that a majority of undergraduate classes are taught by graduate students, who may have only a shallow command of either teaching techniques or the subject area (and sometimes, even of the English language itself!).

This is all to say that students don't need to feel that their lives will be ruined if they don't get into their desired Ivy League schools.  There are a lot more factors involved in finding the right school than simply the prestige of its name.

Study Casts Doubt on the Ability of Highly Competitive High Schools to Raise Test Scores

While more and more applicants try to get into the country's most competitive high schools, a new study suggests that all that effort may not be worth it.  The study, entitled "The Elite Illusion," by economists from MIT and Duke University, compared the students who gained entry to some of the nation's top examination schools (public school that students must apply and take entrance exams in order to attend) to their peers who didn't quite make the cut.  They found that, three or four years, there were virtually no difference in test scores, including state standardized tests, SAT and ACT tests, and AP exams, between the two populations.

This obviously is a narrow study, and applies only to the top tier of students.  Plus, of course, it conflates educational value and achievement with test scores, which readers of this blog know I find a dubious proposition.

However, it should alleviate some of the pressure on students to get into these top schools.  It demonstrates that smart, hard working students can attain equivalent test scores without having to attend the one "magic" school set up for the top achievers.  It also disputes one of the main arguments about these schools--that being around other top students will drive high achievers to superior performance.  This study found that their test performance was no better than the top students left to pursue their education with a traditional school filled with "average" students.

If this is true, it may even behoove students NOT to attend such schools if they are planning on applying to the most competitive colleges.  The thing is, the colleges all have a cap on how many students they will take from any one high school.  For example, if Bill Gates could prove that he had rounded up the 1,000 most brilliant students in the country for an advanced Bill Gates High School, Harvard wouldn't accept all 1,000 of them, no matter how much smarter they might be.  They would only take a small percentage--25 or 50 students maybe?--because they want a diverse, but still high achieving student body.  A student with a 2200 SAT score who is number 1 in an average school that doesn't have a lot of Harvard applicants may stand a better chance than a student with a 2300 SAT score from an elite school that has dozens of other applicants also trying to get in.

It's just something to consider....

This is particularly interesting for homeschoolers to consider.  Many families decide to have their homeschooled children go to school for their high school years for a whole variety of reasons.  But certainly an important consideration is preparation for college and trying to make the students more competitive by having them in school with other high achieving students.  But this study implies that elite peer relationships don't result in higher test scores.

For example, in our area, most of the homeschoolers I know who are going to school for high school want to get into Raleigh Charter High School, which was the Number 1 school in North Carolina in the Washington Post annual High School Challenge that ranks the best high schools in the country (although it was only 55th best on the national list).  But it is not that much more likely to get into Raleigh Charter, which I think accepts 11% of eligible applicants through a lottery system, than to get into Harvard, which accepts about 7% of applicants.

Anyway, this study is reassuring for those other 89% that don't get into Raleigh Charter that by taking the right classes and doing the hard work, they can earn equally impressive test scores even at a "normal" school.

Should We Refrain from Telling Our Children that They Are Smart?

We are doing our annual testing right now, which reminds me of a debate about the use and consequences of praising your children's intelligence that has been popular lately.  Sparked primarily by articles like  The Secret to Raising Smart Kids (Hint:  Don't Tell Your Kids That They Are), the theory goes that praising children's intelligence encourages them to think that their academic achievements are based on an inherent quality (intelligences) that they either have or don't have.  If they think they don't have it, they won't try; if they think they do have it, they either coast by on their natural talents or try to avoid anything that might demonstrate that they don't have as much intelligence as you think they do.

The alternative advocated by psychological research Carol Dweck, on whose studies most of this advice comes from, is to praise the amount of effort that children put into their work.  Dweck found that students who received effort-related praise continue to put more hard work into their studies and were willing to take on more challenging tasks to prove how much more hard work they could do.

It all sounds good.  But I'm always suspicious of these media-pushed, black and white, simple panaceas for educational issues.  So I did a little checking, and found an excellent article in The Chronicle of Higher Education entitled Carol Dweck's Attitude:  It's Not About How Smart You Art.  As I expected, this discussion shows that the whole situation is much more complicated than the one-page version being shared on parenting websites around the web.

The article shows that in three recent studies done to test that theory, student performance did not reflect the predictions of Dweck's framework. In one case, the researchers believed that the "hard work" mindset could be just as detrimental as the "innate intelligence" is supposed to be in Dweck's theory (that is, those who believe that their scores are due to hard work and who expect to do badly will self-sabotage their work by listening to distracting music so that they can blame their poor performance on the music, rather than on their work).

The Chronicle article also talks about Dweck's earlier work, which was focused on an outside control/deterministic viewpoint versus a self-determining perspective, When I read about this research, it seems to me that this locus of control is really what is most important, rather than the "innate intelligence" versus "hard work" perpective per se. That is, if you aren't convinced that your performance and your life is under your control, you can find "outside" factors to blame your failure on, whether that is blaming your parents' DNA contributions to your lack of intelligence, or bad music or outside life factors for your inability to do the work necessary.

Another thing to consider about this "praise the effort" system is the fact that is is diametrically opposed to the actual assessments students face in schools these days.  With all the high-stake testing that is running education today, it makes NO DIFFERENCE whether the student worked really, really hard preparing for and taking the test, or goofed off all year and treated the test as a joke.  If the hard-working students don't achieve the minimum score, they fail and are held back, and if the lazy goof-offs ace the test, they are promoted.  So I think raising students' hopes about the value of hard work could be counter-productive or misleading when the bottom line is that amount of effort doesn't count at all; only the number of right answers does.

I found a briefing paper by the Association of American Colleges and Universities entitled Greater Expectations to Improve Student Learning that I found useful about the general issue of expectations in education.  For example,  it says that Americans are particularly attached to this whole "innate intelligence" scenario, while other cultures attribute much more to hard work rather than raw ability.  I also thought Daniel T. Willingham's Ask the Cognitive Scientist column on How Praise Can Motivate--Or Stifle to be a great resource in thinking about this topic.

As is typical for me, I think the "either or" approach is wrong. So in our case, I've told my son that he is smart, because he is, and I will continue to tell him that.  I'm kind of an encouraging, "praise-y" personality anyway, and I think it would feel unnatural and inauthentic of me to withhold my assessment of his intelligence because of some research studies.

However, I also tell him that because I know how smart he is, I have high expectations for the quality of his work, and what other parents or teachers accept as "good enough" for other students may not be "good enough" for what I expect from him.  And we discuss the fact that quality is a factor of effort as well as natural talent.  We talk a lot about all sorts of gifted people and how hard they had to work to manifest their gifts, even with their natural abilities. So Michael Jordan had an incredible body for basketball--but that didn't mean that he hasn't practiced for hours almost every day of his adult life. Likewise with Mozart, or Picasso, or Einstein, or Maya Angelou or anyone....it all takes work to refine and apply whatever natural abilities we might have.

Don't get me wrong--I think it is a good thing to read and consider research like this--IF you are looking at the full picture, which usually has a lot more nuances than the "sound bite" version we get in a single page in a magazine or website.  But in the end, we have to do what feels right as parents and teachers.  And usually, that is a more common sense, mixed approach than the typical distinct treatment populations of research studies.

So if you want to tell you children they are smart--go ahead!  Just don't forget to tell them that isn't the whole picture.

Is Studying a Foreign Language Still Important?

Every year, we are advised about all the additional stuff we need to be teaching our middle schoolers and high schoolers.  We are told they need more science and math, more computers and technology, more business and finance work, more arts and music, more writing, more more more.  But how can we fit it all in?  If we are adding in additional years in traditional subjects, or including new subjects like information technology, what do we let fall by the wayside in a school day that only has so many hours?

One area I haven't heard as much about lately is foreign languages.  On one hand, with all the emphasis on the globalization of our modern world, it seems it would be important to communicate to at least some section of the planet that doesn't speak English.  On the other hand, are we just assuming that everyone else will continue to learn English, so there is no need for us to learn one of their languages?

However, at least on the college level, it seems that foreign language instruction has been growing steadily for at least the last decade.  The Modern Language Association has just released the results of its 2009 comprehensive survey of enrollments in languages other than English among 2,514 US undergraduate and graduate institutions.  It shows that foreign language enrollments in 2009 were at an all-time high of 1,682,627 students, having grown by 6.6% between 2006-2009 and by nearly 13% from 2002-2006.  

The most popular language by far (it enrolls more students than all other foreign languages combined) is Spanish, which has long held the #1 position in foreign language studies with 864,986 students.  The second most popular language is French, with 216,419 students, and followed by German with 96,349 enrolled.  These languages, along with what has traditionally been the fourth-ranked language, Italian, continue to grow, but by relatively small percentages (from 2-5%).  

The great leaps in enrollments, however, have come from what the MLA calls "less commonly taught languages" or LCTLs, which grew by 31.2% from 2002-2006, then by an additional 20.8% from 2005-2009.  The biggest percentage gains were registered among the Arabic languages, where enrollments raised by 126.5% from 2002-2006, then by another 46.3% in 2006-2009.  Any guesses about what the most popular LCTL is?  Actually, it is American Sign Language (ASL), which was up by 16.4% to a total of 91,763 students and supplanting Italian as the fourth most popular language.  Japanese, with 73,434 enrollments, was the most popular Asian language and was the 6th most popular language overall, followed by Chinese in 7th place with 60,976 students.  The top ten list was rounded out with Arabic in 8th place (35,083 students), Latin in 9th (32,606), and Russian in 10th (26,883).  The only languages among the top 15 that reported losing students were Ancient Greek (although some of that was explained by some schools that have reclassified their Greek classes) and Hebrew, both Modern and Biblical.

The good news, according to experts, is that language studies seem to be more stable now then they were in the 1980s and 1990s.  So if your children are interested in pursuing a LCTL, there's a good chance they can find a college that will enable them to continue their studies at the postsecondary level.  Overall, US colleges and universities reported offering a total of 217 LCTLs, which is 35 more languages than were available in 2006.