[CSPS] un/safe schools - fyi

[Jonathan Coopersmith]

How local policies and bad data equal false results.


Joshua Benton:
'Dangerous' not always unsafe

Dallas Morning News


06:00 AM CDT on Monday, August 14, 2006

Of all the layers of silliness in the No Child 
Left Behind law, it's hard to come up with any 
more poorly thought out than the "persistently dangerous schools" clause.

That's the part of the law that is supposed to 
identify which schools are too scary and unsafe 
for kids to attend. If your school makes the 
list, it has to give you the chance to transfer to a safer school.

This year, five Texas schools were labeled 
persistently dangerous. Four are in the Valley, 
and I'll admit I don't know much about them. But 
the fifth one is a shocker: Cypress Ridge High School in Houston.

Cypress Ridge isn't some gritty urban school with 
gangbangers roaming the halls. It's a middle-class school in the suburbs.

It's in Cypress-Fairbanks ISD, the biggest 
suburban district in the state. The area has a 
lot of new growth; Cypress Ridge was built only 
four years ago and already has 3,500 students. 
Its test scores are usually better than the state 
average. If you want to imagine a Dallas-area 
high school for context, Cypress Ridge's 
demographics are comparable to Newman Smith High in Carrollton.

So how did Cypress Ridge get labeled 
"persistently dangerous"? Was there a serial 
killer on the loose in AP Chemistry?

Nope. Just a few kids snagging pills from Dad's medicine cabinet.

See, a Texas school gets the dangerous tag for 
having too many "expellable incidents" over a 
three-year span. The problem is that "expellable 
incidents" can mean a lot of things.

A quintuple homicide in math class is an 
expellable incident. A gang rape on the football 
field is an expellable incident.

But so is a kid caught with a single joint. Or 
one caught with a single Xanax pill he doesn't have a prescription for.

When you have a system that counts Columbine the 
same way it counts a stray Ritalin pill, you're going to get strange outcomes.

That's what happened at Cypress Ridge. A few 
years ago, the district decided that it was going 
to be aggressive about asking kids to report each 
other when they have prescription medication they 
shouldn't. And the district, along with local 
prosecutors, decided to pursue felony charges in each case.

(Having meds without a prescription is normally a 
misdemeanor. But state law allows it to be raised 
to a felony if the possession occurs on a school campus.)

So, over three years at Cypress Ridge, 26 
students were charged with felonies because they 
had prescription drugs that belonged to someone 
else – most often Mom, Dad or a sibling. In 17 of 
those cases, the kids had only one or two pills, 
and none of them were accused of dealing.

Those were enough "expellable incidents" to earn 
Cypress Ridge the label "persistently dangerous."

Now, I'm not saying popping Adderall like 
Tic-Tacs is smart. And I'm not sold on the wisdom 
of giving felony records to a bunch of kids.

But does Cypress Ridge really sound like a 
"persistently dangerous" school? One so scary 
that kids have to be given a transfer path to safety?

The basic problem is that every school reports 
these sorts of incidents differently.

For instance, an audit by the U.S. Department of 
Education found that in 2003, at Zumwalt Middle 
School in southern Dallas, two students from 
other schools came on campus and shot at a Zumwalt teacher during lunch.

We're talking bullets, not spit balls.

But according to auditors, the incident never got 
reported to TEA as an "expellable incident." 
Zumwalt got to stay off the danger list.

Want an idea of how bad incident reporting is? In 
2003 and 2004, TEA named 11 Texas schools as 
persistently dangerous. All 11 appealed their 
cases. And TEA eventually agreed to take all 11 
off the list because of reporting errors.

There are plenty of schools in Dallas, Houston 
and elsewhere with serious gang problems. Last 
year, Dallas ISD's police reported more than 
5,600 criminal incidents on campuses during an eight-month period.

They weren't all violent, of course. But there's 
no way you can convince me there aren't dozens of 
Dallas schools more "persistently dangerous" than Cypress Ridge.

District officials in Cypress-Fairbanks are 
appealing their inclusion on the list. If history 
is any guide, there's a good chance they'll be successful.

But there's a bigger issue here.

In this age of accountability – when we're so 
eager to slap ratings and labels on schools – 
everything rides on the quality of the data. If 
systems are fed bad information, they'll produce dumb results.

Schools get judged on how well they teach their 
kids. But that assumes that teachers aren't 
helping students cheat on state tests. That's how 
some Wilmer-Hutchins schools earned "exemplary" 
ratings while being among the worst schools in the country.

Schools get judged on how many of their teens 
they can keep from dropping out. But that assumes 
all schools are reporting honestly and accurately. They're not.

Officially, only 8 percent of Dallas students 
drop out over the course of high school. Tell me 
how that makes sense in a district that enrolls 
14,000 freshmen and 7,000 seniors.

There are a lot of ways to describe this sort of 
number-shaping. Sometimes, it's honest people 
making mistakes. Sometimes, it's a broken system. 
Sometimes, it's simple fraud.

But the point is that you can't trust the labels 
if you can't trust the numbers that back them.

As the saying goes: Garbage in, garbage out. And 
there's an alarming amount of garbage.


http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/education/columnists/jbenton/stories/DN-edcol_14met.ART.State.Edition1.2b9e243.html



Jonathan Coopersmith
Associate Professor
Dept. of History
MS 4236
Texas A&M University
College Station, Texas  77843-4236
979.845.8584
979.862.4314 fax

Secretary
History & Philosophy of Science Section (L)
American Association for the Advancement of Science
www.aaas.org 
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://philebus.tamu.edu/pipermail/csps/attachments/20060814/70d20762/attachment.htm