MItt Romney (Photo by Gage Skidmore)

Likely Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney focused on education this week, releasing a 35-page plan outlining his education platform and giving a speech on education to the Latino Coalition of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce on Wednesday. Below, we scrutinize some of Romney’s claims.

Statement:

“Among developed countries, the United States comes in 14th of 34 in reading, 17th of 34 in science, and an abysmal 25th out of 34 in math.”

The Facts: Needs more context

Romney was referring to the results of the 2009 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), which was given to 15-year-olds around the globe. The United States’ performance is often cited by politicians, including President Barack Obama, as an indicator that the country’s education system is doing poorly. But the results may not be so black and white, according to a summary of the results by the National Center for Education Statistics. In reading, for instance, although the United States was ranked 14th among Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries, only six countries had scores that were significantly higher than that of the U.S. The remaining seven countries ranked ahead of us had scores that, statistically speaking, were indistinguishable from America’s. In science, though, 12 OECD countries had scores that were measurably higher, and in math that number was 17. Out of the 64 countries that took part in the assessment, nine had significantly higher average scores in reading, 18 in science and 23 in math.

Statement:

“After three months, students [in Washington, D.C.’s Opportunity Scholarship Program] could already read at levels 19 months ahead of their public-school peers.”

The Facts: It takes years, not months

The Opportunity Scholarship Program (OSP), started in 2004, allows students in Washington, D.C. to apply for scholarships to cover private-school tuition. The Obama administration has repeatedly tried to cut funding for the program—something Romney opposes. Romney’s claim here is off by a factor of 12; it actually took three years for students to make the gains he was speaking about. A 2009 study by the U.S. Department of Education showed that one group of students—those enrolled in the program for three years—had the equivalent of 14 to 19 months of extra learning in reading compared to their public-school peers. For students enrolled for shorter periods of time, the gains ranged from three to five months of extra learning. And as for math performance, there was no significant difference among program participants and their public-school peers. A 2010 study concluded that there was no “evidence that the OSP affected student achievement. On average, after at least four years students who were offered (or used) scholarships had reading and math test scores that were statistically similar to those who were not offered scholarships.” The same study did find, however, that students who received the scholarships were more likely than non-recipients to graduate from high school.

Statement:

“The two major teachers unions take in $600 million each year. That’s more revenue than both of the political parties combined. In 2008, the National Education Association spent more money on campaigns than any other organization in the country. And 90 percent of those funds went to Democrats.”

The Facts: Numbers may be off a bit

It’s difficult to quantify how much the National Education Association (NEA) and American Federation of Teachers (AFT) take in annually—each has many state and local affiliates that file their own 990 forms. In 2010, the NEA reported over $352 million in revenue on its tax filings. The AFT brought in $162.7 million. Historically, both organizations have had a large political presence and have favored Democratic candidates. According to OpenSecrets.org, which labels the political action committees (PACs) of both unions as “heavy hitters,” the NEA did top the list of national donors in 2007-2008, spending $56,228,408. The bulk of this money—$53.5 million—was spent at the state level, and about $36.7 million of it went to specific ballot initiatives rather than particular candidates. In 2008, the NEA’s PAC gave 91 percent of its money to Democrats. When it comes to total NEA donations, however—including to other PACs, as well as to candidates from both parties—Romney was slightly off: 86 percent of the NEA’s money went to Democrats.

Bronx Design and Construction Academy ninth-graders Elton Hollingsworth (left) and Noel Cruz, both 14, stand atop the green roof with Nathaniel Wight (far right), a teacher who leads the school's science club. (Photo by Nick Pandolfo)

At the beginning of the 2011-12 school year, Elton Hollingsworth and Noel Cruz, both ninth-graders at the Bronx Design and Construction Academy, joined the science club. Little did they know that a short nine months later, they’d board a plane bound for Denver as two of the youngest people to present at a leading industrial conference.

Last week, the boys explained findings from an experiment they’ve been conducting on the school’s green roof—the first of its kind in a New York City public school—at the World Renewable Energy Forum. Neither had been on an airplane before.

“We were the only high-schoolers there,” Cruz said.

“It takes a professional level of work to get through our peer review process,” says Seth Masia, director of communications for the American Solar Energy Society (ASES), which held its National Solar Conference together with the World Renewable Energy Forum this year. “We’re most impressed that the science club was able to do it.”

The events brought together thousands of engineers, architects, professors and scientists to share the latest work in solar and other renewable energies. U. S. Secretary of Energy Steven Chu and Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper were among the featured speakers.

And then there were Hollingsworth and Cruz. They explained the results of their science club’s project, which was an attempt to figure out whether adding a canopy of solar panels above a roof covered in plants would further boost the already known benefits of a green roof, such as lowering the roof’s temperature and purifying run-off water. In short, they found that it did, keeping the roof up to three degrees cooler than a green roof alone would.

If the topic seems a bit esoteric for 14-year-olds, Hollingsworth doesn’t see it that way.

“It’s another subject you can use to hold a conversation,” he says. “Because it’s always good to know at least one thing about every subject. So we have definitely learned enough to have a conversation with somebody about renewable energy.”

Nathaniel Wight, a science teacher who co-founded Bronx Design, runs the science club, which focuses on researching the green roof that was installed in late 2010 with the help of a grant from the City Gardens Club and the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation.

Students in the construction portion of the academy built all the devices and structures used on the green roof, and the students in the science club set up sensors to collect data like air temperature, which they then analyzed to learn about the roof’s environmental effects.

Bronx Design and Construction Academy co-founder and teacher Nathaniel Wight (left) observes the school's garden with ninth-grade science club members Elton Hollingsworth and Noel Cruz (far right), both 14. (Photo by Nick Pandolfo)

“They’re learning about this innovative technology, but we’re also trying to teach them the practical skills to learn how to solve real-world problems,” says Wight, who accompanied the boys on the trip to Colorado.

Hollingsworth and Cruz’s trip was welcome news after a chaotic period at the school. Two years ago, the city decided to phase out a previous construction academy, which has now been replaced by Bronx Design. The automotive program remained, and will be joined by a nursing program next year, Wight says. Two alternative high schools—for older students who are behind on credits—now occupy the top floor of the school building.

Hollingsworth and Cruz said they were flooded with questions after their talk, and a Ph.D. student from Penn State even emailed them about a potential collaboration. While the boys say they are happy with their accomplishments, they have their eyes set on securing a grant to make the school’s entire roof green.

Hollingsworth said he had a conversation with someone from ASES about possibly funding their project.

“They told us, ‘Name a price,’ ” Hollingsworth says. “I said $50,000 to $100,000 is what we’d need to do all of this. He looked up at me like, ‘Wow, that’s a lot of money.’ I had to kind of play it off like, ‘It’s not that much.’ ”

This story also appeared on Gotham Schools May 25, 2012.

A test taken in September of the previous school year was a low point. Then, the student’s achievement level leapt upward in remarkable increments, to a high point in the spring. But by the next fall, the student’s achievement level had sunk again, back toward the point where he had started the previous year.

The principal named the culprit: Summer.

Much of the discussion about the wide discrepancies in educational achievement between poor and affluent students is focused on what schools and teachers should be doing to close it. But researchers are gathering more evidence suggesting that summer—when students are typically out of contact with their schools and teachers—is one of the root causes of the gap.

At the Education Writers Association annual conference last week, a panel of researchers and educators, moderated by Education Week’s assistant managing editor-online, Kathleen Kennedy Manzo, discussed how summer affects student learning, and what to do about it.

“When kids return to school in the fall, on average they’ve slipped by about a month from where they were in the spring,” said Catherine Augustine, a senior policy researcher at the RAND Corporation, a nonprofit research group, and co-author of a report released last year on summer learning programs. But, she added, the averages mask significant differences between poor children’s summer learning loss compared to that of their wealthier peers.

More advantaged children tend to stay at the same achievement level, or even make gains, over the course of the summer, Augustine said: “They’re reading, they’re being read to, they’re going to fancy camps.”

In contrast, poor children fall far behind. “Low-income kids are less likely to be going to those camps,” she said. “They’re more likely to be playing video games, watching TV, and staying indoors, particularly if they live in unsafe neighborhoods.”

She added that the discrepancies between the two groups are perpetuated summer after summer, helping to increase the achievement gap as children grow older. (She also noted, however, that both low-income and high-income children lose ground in math over the summer during the elementary school years.)

The panelists did not necessarily recommend year-round school, however. Many parents dislike the idea, and there is still little research on whether cutting out summer vacation entirely actually helps shrink the achievement gap.

Instead, schools and community groups should work together to create programs that are both fun and educational, said Gary Huggins, CEO of the National Summer Learning Association. Rather than being “remedial and punitive,” he suggested school districts create programs that low-income students actually want to attend.

“It’s not just about more school,” Huggins said. “Programs have to be engaging and innovative.”

Ideally, he suggested, summer school might become a laboratory for experimental strategies—like hands-on activities, field trips, theme-based curricula and Socratic teaching methods—that schools can also incorporate into the regular academic year.

Kathryn LeRoy, who oversees the extended summer learning program for the Duval County Public Schools in Florida, said her district is already doing some of that experimentation. Using federal funds, the Duval district, which encompasses Jacksonville, expanded and renamed its summer school program “The Superintendent’s Academy.” Administrators then conducted walks through local public housing projects to recruit low-income families. The program, which targets struggling students, now includes music, dance, physical education, field trips and partnerships with local camps, not just reading and math classes, LeRoy said.

So far, the schools with students involved in the program have seen remarkable gains, she added, going from Ds and Fs on their state report card to As and Bs. “Our gut tells us that summer absolutely had a part to play in the achievement we’re seeing in in those elementary schools,” she said.

From my perch, here’s a roundup of some of the more interesting happenings in that time:

Online learning in higher education

The announcement from Harvard that it was partnering with MIT to create edX caught a lot of people’s attention—and rightfully so. Some, however, such as University Ventures, have suggested that the initiative steers clear of the big disruption that’s needed in the sector.

University Ventures makes a good point (several of them actually in its letter), but what is interesting about the emergence of these programs that offer free courses with certificates is twofold.

First, it suggests that, in classic disruptive fashion, the disruption of higher education may come from completely outside our current system and obliterate the notion of a “degree” as we have known it altogether. In the future, there is a good chance that more and more companies will hire based on people’s portfolio of work and demonstrated competencies (many in Silicon Valley already do this), for which these sorts of micro-certificates and badges are tailor made. As a result, although they don’t tackle the high cost of degrees directly, if edX and others like it create a new ecosystem that, for many, renders a “degree” as we’ve known it irrelevant, they may end up solving the spiraling costs of higher education better than those efforts that take direct aim at the problem.

Second, and even more plausible perhaps, is that the emergence of the edXs of the world is systematically lowering the barriers of entry for other entrepreneurs, such as Gene Wade of UniversityNow, to create their own low-cost universities with low-cost degrees and add value by enhancing the educational process in other ways. This blog, by Lloyd Armstrong, the former provost of USC does a great job in framing the possibilities.

Khan Academy continues to disrupt class

MIT wasn’t only busy in the past few weeks announcing a partnership with Harvard. It also deepened its ties with the Khan Academy, as it announced that MIT students will create 5- to 10-minute videos for the Khan Academy. I’ve written before about how the Khan Academy is following the script from Chapter 5 of Disrupting Class in many ways, but the parallels continue to reach new heights.

The first step in creating a facilitated network that would ultimately lead to a student-centric learning system we said in our book might come from parents creating tutoring tools online to help their children—for example, the father of a mathematics genius daughter who struggles to spell might create a unique method to teach spelling to help her out on YouTube. We weren’t quite right; Sal Khan actually built tools to help his cousin in New Orleans with her math homework.

As we wrote, these “tools… make it so affordable and simple that each student can have a virtual tutor through these tools,” which is what the Khan Academy first did for many, particularly as it competed against nonconsumption in classic disruptive fashion.

“If history is any guide,” we said, “the best of these tools will spread in popularity very quickly, and exchanges will emerge through which this user-generated content can be offered to others for free.” The Khan Academy has become one of these exchanges; it isn’t only offering its tools, as it increasingly has third-party tools on its site from people like the MIT students with whom it is now partnering. We predicted that just as Netflix helps people find the movies that match their preferences, these exchanges will help people find the tools that help them best learn based on their different learning needs. The Khan Academy is also attempting to do just this.

“Over time,” we wrote, “the modules that students, parents, and teachers employ to help students solve individual learning problems in individual courses will be combined into complete custom- configured courses—the consummate purpose of modularity.” And this is precisely what we see occurring in blended-learning schools such as those in the Los Altos School District in California.

Arizona veto

Gov. Jan Brewer vetoed a bill, Senate Bill 1259, that would have dramatically bolstered the potential of online learning to transform education in Arizona. Although I was initially disappointed when I read this, Brewer had a strong reason for vetoing the bill; she was concerned about the appropriateness of the state “or an entity on behalf of the state approving online courses or curriculum.”

Her concern is one that I shared.

In an effort to regulate quality, too many states are thinking that they should employ textbook-adoption-like processes to approve online courses on the front end. The problem is that, as we also wrote in Chapter 5 of Disrupting Class, the textbook-adoption process has provided a critical reinforcement for public education’s monolithic system and worked against the customization we need to bring about a student-centric system.

The whole point of online learning is to blow past the notion of one-size-fits-none courses and allow for a variety of approaches to serve different student needs. Perhaps this will remain a pipedream until facilitated networks like the Khan Academy are more mature, but I hope not. Given that a smart part of the Arizona legislation was to pay online providers in part based on actual student outcomes, a better role for states—or the third-party entity in the case of Arizona—would be to focus on maintaining a robust assessment environment that supports innovation, allows students to demonstrate competency through a variety of ways while maintaining quality, and ties funds to demonstration of those competencies. And if states insist on having online learning clearinghouses, they should also have other mechanisms to allow providers to enter the system–through districts, for example, as they do in Utah.

Maker Faire

The famous Maker Faire opens its “doors” in my hometown of San Mateo in just a few days, but there’s a whole new component to it this year focused on education, as educators can receive a preview of Maker Faire Bay Area on Thursday, May 17.

In particular, EdSurge with the Charter School Growth Fund is hosting “DIY Learning: The New School,” which promises to allow people to remake school completely and celebrate how “educators, students and entrepreneurs are using technology to put students at the center of learning—and help them construct personalized learning experiences that stimulate engagement, critical thinking skills and creativity.” There’s a great lineup of events, and, as Alex Hernandez blogged last week, a big opportunity to play out how a “Fab Lab” for education would work to give innovators a canvas and allow them to prototype in a low-cost, low-risk way—which has spurred innovation in so many other sectors.

Not a bad way to keep making the innovation.

This post originally appeared at Forbes.com.

“Economists’ studies consistently conclude that African-American students who attended integrated schools fared better academically than those left behind in segregated schools. They were more likely to graduate from high school and attend and graduate from college; and, the longer they spent attending integrated schools, the better they did.”

Indeed, during the 1970s and 1980s—the time when desegregation was in full force—the achievement gap closed faster than it ever has before or since. Why did we abandon such a successful intervention? Kirp writes that “desegregation was too often implemented in ham-handed fashion, undermining its effectiveness,” but doesn’t go into detail.

In fact, the “ham-handed” way that busing was done in many cities is part of the reason for its downfall. Black students may have benefited, but there were many sacrifices that came along with busing—and not just long bus rides for black kids. Kirp doesn’t mention how black families viewed desegregation, and the flaws many saw in the way it was framed and then implemented. In reporting I’m doing for a book due out next January, Divided We Fail, I have spent the past few years talking to a group of black families about their views of busing, and why they led a charge against desegregation in their city of Louisville, KY.

The other piece of the puzzle of why desegregation disappeared is the rise of the school choice movement. Others have argued before that the two don’t mix well, and school choice won out.

None of this is to say that desegregation should be considered irrelevant. Quite the opposite. Both its successes and failures have a lot to teach those seeking to reform the public education system today.

“They said we needed to be ‘toned down,’” said Breion Burns, 18, one of eight issued a one-day suspension for the boisterous singing in November 2011. The official reason listed on the suspension slips was “willful disobedience.” Two other students received two-day suspensions for allegedly cursing amidst the singing.

Several of the suspended girls were honors students who worried the blot on their record would jeopardize college admissions. They could not understand why administrators had opted for suspension over a milder punishment, like detention.

In schools across the country, out-of-school suspensions have become the default punishment for not only drugs and fights but also for threats, displays of affection, dress code violations, truancy, tardiness, refusal to follow directions, even four-year-olds’ temper tantrums.

Suspension rates have more than doubled over the last three decades across all grade levels. At the same time, racial gaps have widened: Black students are three and a half times as likely to be suspended or expelled as their white peers, according to Department of Education data released earlier this spring. The Office for Civil Rights gathered the data from 72,000 schools in 7,000 districts, which educate approximately 85 percent of the country’s students.

That survey found one in five African-American boys received an out-of-school suspension during the 2009-10 academic year, compared to about one in 14 white boys.

National studies have also revealed persistent, although more modest, gaps between white and Hispanic students.

Suspension terms usually vary from one to 10 days, depending on the gravity of the offense and the district’s policies.

Experts say too few people link the rising, and disparate, discipline rates to lost learning time — a crucial connection given the stubbornness of the achievement gap between black and white students. Some schools even prohibit suspended students from making up missed work.

A 2011 study of school discipline in Texas found students suspended or expelled for “discretionary offenses” — those for which state law does not automatically call for an automatic suspension or expulsion — were twice as likely to repeat a grade as those who had not received the punishment. The study compared students from similar demographic groups and schools in an attempt to isolate the effect of school discipline as much as possible, although it could not prove time away from school directly caused the children to be held back.

Suspension “makes no sense because students are losing class time,” said Daniel Losen, senior education law and policy associate for The Civil Rights Project at UCLA. “They are often not being supervised. They are not learning anything. No one is teaching them about misbehavior. No one is making sure they are prepared to return to school.”

Many teachers wouldn’t disagree. They caution, however, that when a few disruptive students consistently prevent classmates from learning, the needs of the majority should take precedence.

“We know suspension usually doesn’t work for the suspended student,” said Nick McDaniels, an English teacher at Mergenthaler-Vocational Technical High School in Baltimore, a city that has cut the number of annual suspensions by thousands over the last five years. “But there is a certain point when suspension benefits everyone else.”

Gwendolyn Lawson lost track long ago of exactly how many times the New Orleans schools suspended her niece, Janeisha, a ninth-grader.

“Sometimes it feels like every two weeks she’s being put out,” Lawson said in an interview last February. Janeisha lives with her aunt.

The state-run Recovery School District, which has operated most of the schools Janeisha attended in recent years, posted an out-of-school suspension rate of 11 percent for the 2010-11 school year. That was far lower than several area charter schools. Sojourner Truth, which will close down at the end of this school year because of poor test scores, reported a suspension rate of more than 40 percent last year. That means the school suspended more than 40 percent of the students at least once.

Lawson understands why administrators would need to suspend her niece for fighting, particularly if Janeisha causes the altercation. But she does not understand why the slender teen gets sent home for talking back to a teacher or walking out of class. Often, she says, academic frustration causes such “willful disobedience” or “disrespect to authority,” as the schools describe it.

“I’d be much happier if they had her clean the cafeteria, even paint the building,” Lawson says.

Since Hurricane Katrina in 2005, Janeisha has bounced among four different schools in New Orleans. Each school suspended her multiple times. It did not matter if the schools were charters. It made no difference whether her teachers were novices or experienced professionals. Eventually, Janeisha began ripping up the suspension forms in her anger over being sent home — yet again.

Recovery School District Superintendent Patrick Dobard, who assumed the post in January, said the district’s “priority is to make sure we have kids in school.” But since so many of the district’s schools are charters, many set their own policies as to what is a suspendable offense.

Dobard announced last month that charter school expulsion cases will now be reviewed by the central office. However, he anticipates no such centralization when it comes to suspensions, partly to protect charter schools’ autonomy when it comes to student discipline. But he plans to convene a series of working groups this summer aimed at lowering suspension rates. “I still hold the belief that we need to suspend kids less,” he said.

Janeisha helps her aunt clean and garden while on suspension. But she never does schoolwork because her teachers do not assign her any. “They just say if I’m suspended, it’s on me to catch up,” Janeisha says. The lost class time means she falls further behind, her frustration builds, and she grows increasingly likely to act out more, she and her aunt say.

Indeed, the online version of the district’s code of conduct from 2010-11 stated that suspended students would be counted as absent, given failing grades for the suspended days, and not allowed to make up work.

Dobard said he was not aware that had ever been the district’s policy. The current policy is to let individual principals make the call as to whether students receive work while on suspension, he said.

Nationally, school and district policies vary tremendously when it comes to what students do — or don’t do — while on suspensions. Some districts, including New York City, keep students in school settings during their suspensions, including designated suspension rooms or alternative schools. Other districts assign them work to be done at home and still others do nothing and even make it very difficult for students to make up work.

Interviews with more than a dozen school administrators, experts, and child advocates suggest the reasons for the increased reliance on suspensions, and the accompanying racial gaps, are varied and complex.

They say zero tolerance policies — and an associated “zero tolerance mindset” — have spread over the last quarter century. Throughout American society, there have been numerous efforts to get tough on crime. Teachers often face enormous difficulties getting unruly students to stay after school for detention, or even to get parents to come in for a conference. Films such as Lean on Me have popularized a no-nonsense approach to school discipline. School segregation has increased and many urban schools have high concentrations of students living in extreme poverty. No Child Left Behind put such an emphasis on math and reading test scores that schools may have less time to focus on meeting children’s social and emotional needs. And a few high-profile instances of school violence, like the Columbine shootings, have generated widespread fear of youth violence among school administrators and the public. Meanwhile, teachers and administrators may unfairly stereotype minority school children’s actions based on implicit racism.

“How unconscious bias manifests itself in an educational system is through expulsion and suspension,” said Andre Perry, associate director for educational initiatives at Loyola University’s Institute for Quality and Equity in Education in New Orleans.

Several experts also mention the application of the “broken windows theory” of policing to school discipline. That theory, first introduced in 1982 by political scientists James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling, posits that cracking down on seemingly minor and superficial problems, like broken windows or panhandlers, helps prevent more serious crimes.

The school-based version of the theory holds that taking a tough stance against small infractions, like tardiness and uniform violations, decreases the number of larger infractions, including fights and weapon possession. The challenge, of course, is that “fixing” a child is not so easy as repairing a broken window; and often days, or weeks, spent exiled from school in a home or neighborhood environment make students less likely to comply with school rules.

“I have no problem with requiring students to take off their hats in school. But sending them home when they won’t take off their hats? I have a problem with that,” says Jane Sundius, the Education and Youth Development Program director at the Open Society Institute-Baltimore, which advocates on such issues as school discipline and youth incarceration.

Sundius is particularly troubled by reports of schools suspending pre-K students in some communities, including in Maryland, where she lives and works. “A four-year-old accused of ‘assaulting a teacher’ is not assaulting a teacher,” she said. “They are having a temper tantrum.”

When Andres Alonso took over as chief executive officer of the Baltimore City Public School system five years ago, he made cutting the system’s high suspension rates one of his first priorities.

Alonso’s desire was based partly on his own experience as a classroom teacher. “If I sent a child out of my classroom, I was sacrificing authority and communicating the classroom was not the place for the child,” he said.

The district made several changes, including revising the code of conduct to eliminate suspension as an option for many first-time “soft offenses,” like talking back to a teacher. Alonso required principals to obtain his permission, or that of a designee, if they wanted to suspend a child for more than five days in a single stretch. He put an alternative school for students on long-term suspensions or expulsions, called Success Academy, inside the district’s central office. The last move was designed partly to send the message that troubled students were at the center of the district’s mission — not disposable.

The district also significantly increased its use of so-called student support teams, which convene at the school level to develop behavior plans tailored to individual children, and added to mental health services in some schools.

But Alonso left it up to individual principals to decide on specific approaches to cutting suspension rates inside their buildings.

For some schools, that has proven easier than for others.

At City Springs Elementary/Middle School, Alonso’s push coincided with Principal Rhonda Richetta’s decision to introduce a “restorative justice” approach to school discipline. Instead of automatically suspending students when there is a problem, staff and students sit together in circles to talk through many thorny and contentious issues. Often, the end result is a punishment tailored to the specific crime.

When one eighth-grader was caught selling BB gun pellets, for instance, Richetta required him to come to school early and sell fruit snacks to younger students. Richetta wanted him to learn that he could earn money through legal means (although in this case he was required to turn over all proceeds to the school).

Initially, Richetta received significant push back from teachers. Eight left during the first year “restorative justice” was implemented partly because they disliked the shift away from suspension.

“It was really hard for adults to change their behavior, particularly when they were used to the least little infraction resulting in suspension,” Richetta said. “In the past, if a child said something disrespectful, that was a suspension. If a child got up and walked out of class, that was a suspension … The problem is: It’s really hard to educate kids when they are not here.”

During the 2007-08 school year, City Springs issued about 50 suspensions, compared to 21 as of April 6th this school year, even as enrollment grew significantly. But Richetta considers the cultural shift inside the building — which she measures through the increased number of students smiling on their way to class in the morning — just as important.

“I think people are giving up on our kids because of their behavior,” she said. “They are not seeing that that behavior is really reaching out for help.”

Baltimore’s Reginald F. Lewis High School has also seen a sharp drop in suspensions, from well over 100 annually before 2010 to fewer than 20 so far this school year.

The school felt unsafe to students Markira Thomas and Jaquel Mullen when they started as freshmen in the fall of 2008. Earlier that year, a student had sucker-punched and pounded an art teacher in her classroom. (The school’s principal later alleged the teacher had actually provoked the fight.) Students smoked pot openly, ran through the halls, and gambled with dice and cards in class. On her first day of school, Thomas begged her mother not to leave here there alone.

When Barney Wilson, one of the district’s top principals, took the helm two years ago, he announced the whole school would embrace what he called “Lewis Love.”

It sounded corny to many of the teachers at first. But over time they discovered the slew of small changes that constituted “Lewis Love” — holding assemblies to recognize students for positive contributions, creating peer mediation programs, bringing parents in for conferences — transformed the school into a much happier place.

Essentially, it boiled down to better communication among students, parents and teachers, said Danielle Rembert, the assistant principal.

“Some people are like, ‘This is touchy-feely,’ she said. “But this is foundational. If we don’t lay that foundation, none of the other stuff we try will work.”

At other campuses, including Baltimore’s Mergenthaler-Vocational Technical High School, the war against suspension has not gone so well.

During the 2009-10 school year, Mergenthaler issued 342 suspensions and expulsions, one of the highest numbers in the district. Teachers say the vast majority of their students are not disruptive. But suspensions for the minority who do act out on a regular basis help keep order in the building, a fortress-like structure serving well over 1,000 teenagers.

“With more suspensions, the administration had more time for classroom support,” said McDaniels, the Mergenthaler English teacher. “They weren’t just chasing kids around the hallways.”

Since then, the edict has come down that suspensions must be decreased. “It’s kind of become like NBA rules: no blood, no foul,” says Tony Polvino, another teacher.

Teachers say the administrators try hard to be supportive, but they must inure themselves to all manner of verbal threats. Students usually cannot be suspended for declaring, “I’m going to kick your ass,” or calling classmates “bitches and hoes.”

“Hearing ‘F—  you’ is not something that fazes me,” says McDaniels. “I can’t let it faze me. There’s nothing I can do.”

“I just say, ‘Have a blessed day,’” adds teacher Tom Proveaux, a 34-year veteran.

Ben Andersen, a second-year teacher, said when he interviewed for the job, administrators asked him, “How well do you let things roll off your back? How do you respond to being mistreated? What do you do if someone cusses you out?”

“If you say all that stuff won’t bother you, then they say, ‘Well, you’re going to do well here.’”

The Mergenthaler teachers say they do not like to suspend students. But they do not believe they have enough support, particularly enough social workers, to help students who consistently act out in offensive and disruptive ways. And keeping those students in the classroom to cuss out and harass their teachers and classmates can mean everyone loses out.

Proveaux described leaving the school in an ambulance one day after a particularly disruptive student shattered the glass in one of his classroom cabinets.

“If I prefer one student’s constitutional right to be here, what about the constitutional rights of the other 28 students?” he says.

In New Orleans, the Sojourner Truth suspensions of the singing girls were eventually overturned. Community activists rallied around the suspended students, printing T-shirts reading,”Save Sojourner’s 10.” The girls appealed their suspensions with the help of a local collaboration between area law students and the Juvenile Justice Project of Louisiana.

For Janeisha, the ninth-grader in New Orleans, the tide also seems to be turning.

In April, Janeisha’s teachers at Reed High School, where she transferred in January, created a behavior plan for the teenager. The plan allows Janeisha more flexibility to visit the school counselor during the day, and calls for a weekly check-in on her behavior with her teachers.

“They are finally asking what they can do to improve her behavior, apart from suspending her all the time,” said her aunt.

But Gwendolyn Lawson sometimes worries too much damage has already been done. The dozens of suspensions — and two forced school transfers that essentially amounted to expulsions — seem to have convinced Janeisha that some teachers and school administrators do not want her around.

If the behavior plan fails and the suspensions resume, Lawson suspects her niece will eventually give up.

“At some point, she won’t be wanting to go back to school,” Lawson said.

This story appeared on Time.com on May 22, 2012 as part of an exclusive collaboration. Republication is not allowed.

Dan Chambliss (Photo by Nick Pandolfo)

How does someone succeed in college? It’s the $64,000 question—or, these days, more like the $150,000 question—whose answer has been sought by countless policymakers, researchers and universities over the years.

In a new attempt to provide insight into the discussion, sociologists Dan Chambliss of Hamilton College and Christopher Takacs of the University of Chicago took the long road to an answer. In 2001, they started conducting what would turn into a 10-year study of Hamilton College students in an attempt to learn what had the greatest effects on their college experiences. What were the turning points? What mattered most? What didn’t?

The Hechinger Report sat down with Dan Chambliss recently to discuss the results of the study, which will be included in a forthcoming book titled How College Works, and what implications the results might have for U.S. higher education.

Q: Tell me more about the study.

A: In 2001, we started tracking a cohort of students as they went through the college. We took 100 people, randomly selected, and we interviewed them every year they were in college and every year after they got out. In addition to that, we collected a lot of information about these people. We collected papers they wrote while they were in college and papers from high school. And we basically tried to learn what were the important turning points—what kind of things made a big difference, and what things didn’t. The goal of this was to find how colleges or universities could have relatively resource-neutral, reliably effective interventions that really help students in a big way. In other words, how can you do stuff that you know you can do, that you know will make a positive difference, but you don’t have to turn the world upside down or have a big capital campaign and spend a lot of money.

So what were they?

It’s all about people, not programs. Colleges spend a huge amount of time and effort worrying will they have writing-intensive programs or a freshman seminar program or if a major is set up right or if their curriculum is done this way or that—all the kind of stuff about the content and information for kids and students. That’s not where it’s at. The problem is not access to information. The problem is motivation. And student motivation goes up and down a lot. And the key to motivation is face-to-face contact with another human being. That’s what really works. And it doesn’t take that much of it to have a big impact on a student’s career.

So, for instance, having a great intro. teacher is incredibly important and schools don’t spend much time on that at all. Yet it’s very, very doable. A single department chair can impact thousands of students’ educational careers just by moving one professor. Because if they have a great experience in an intro. class, that paves the whole way throughout academia. If they have a bad experience—Bam! The door slams shut. So getting the right people together at the right time is key. And that goes for faculty contact with students but also with students meeting other students. These apartment-style dormitories that are now coming up—it’s a terrible idea. Students think they want it, but what happens is they don’t make any friends. They’re isolated. It’s much better to be in a dorm they don’t like that has long hallways and shared bathrooms …

When you interview the students, a lot of times they’ll say that the crucial thing for them was sitting down for a one-on-one with a professor. One time in their college career! It was this thing about a single conversation that really struck us. And it’s not technical information. It’s literally just the idea of taking it seriously and saying, “Let’s look at this,” and then the kid starts working on it with someone sitting there and they think “I can do better,” and they have this revelation.

Hamilton is a particular environment. It’s a small, selective and expensive (about $55,000 a year) private college. What implications do your findings have for community colleges or state schools that aren’t as selective and have a lot more non-traditional students?

Part A is we don’t know because we haven’t done that research. Second, I think we would say—I have a co-author—the processes probably work in somewhat the same way in other places, too. In some places, like a big university, you’re never going to have that kind of personal contact with faculty. But a little bit goes a long, long way. That’s part of the message. Even in a place like that, people would be as appreciative of literally a single meeting with a professor.

We did this one thing at Hamilton, and I think the logic transfers. We do these senior surveys and we keep all this data in databases. And the sheer fact of ever having been a guest in a faculty member’s home has this big impact on a student’s reaction to their entire college experience. Talking to alumni who graduated 30 years ago, they’ll bring up, “I went to Professor So and So’s.” What is this? One time? Are you kidding me? But it works. I don’t know why. But a little bit of contact with the right person at the right time seems to have this disproportionate impact. I would wager [with] you that that same effect would occur anywhere. It’s a low cost kind of intervention.

The quality of intro. faculty, that’s going to work anywhere. If you’ve got 500 kids in an intro. history class, it’s all the more important that you’ve got a good person teaching it. You can see this if you ride the subway in New York: there are all these ads for all kinds of schools. All the time they have a picture of this kindly professor looking over the kid’s shoulder. They always advertise, “You’ll work with real professors,” this kind of stuff. They’re trying to sell that kind of contact because it’s what a lot of students really want.

It’s clear from your study that face-to-face meetings are critical. How does the growth of online education in universities factor in?

I think there are a lot of things you cannot do online. Online is great for, let’s say, certain kinds of information exchange, for training people [to do] kind of predictable tasks, things like that. What can’t be conveyed well at all is attitudes about things, the right way to think about a topic … There’s just a level of expertise past which you cannot go unless you’re talking with another human being.

Based on your research, if I were a senior in high school and the first person in my family to go to college, what advice would you give me?

First, you want to have contact with a good number of people—dozens of people—early on. And it needs to be regular contact. So either live in a dorm or join the choir or play on the football team, or something where you have a lot of ongoing contact with a significant number of peers.

Second, ask around who the good teachers are. Try to get into courses with teachers who are exciting and fun and make it challenging. In other words, pick your teachers and not your courses.

Third, it’s who you hang around with. So if you’re struggling after a year, look around and see who you are spending time with. It matters.

Allan Goodman

Increasing higher education attainment is becoming a global goal. From the United States to the European Union to China, places around the world are setting goals for how many college and university graduates they want to have.  And as the numbers of students enrolling in higher education are going up, so are the numbers who are traveling abroad for some or all of their college careers. To find out why, The Hechinger Report talked with Allan Goodman, President and CEO of the Institute of International Education, a nonprofit that administers programs designed to increase the international flow of students, including the Fulbright program.

Q: What are some of the common strategies countries are using to improve access to their higher education systems?

A: They’re communicating that they value and welcome international students. They’re better explaining the process. Every country’s process for admission is different, and in the past – and when I talk about the past it was like, 10 years ago was the dark ages and then over the past decade things have changed a lot. One of the things that’s changed is countries and institutions are better able to explain how students apply to their institutions or to their country. They’re trying to make to the process, especially with respect to getting visas, much more transparent. Every country has different immigration and visa policies. Almost every destination country has had terrorism, so in the wake of terrorism they’ve begun to change their visa regulations or their visa policies. And when you do that, you have to be really clear in explaining to international students and their families how it works.

Why is making it easier for international students to come to countries such a big priority?

So many countries just no longer can educate all the young people who finish high school. You can’t build higher educational institutions in 18 months. It takes years, if not half a century or longer, to really develop a well-respected institution of higher education. The students are looking to be educated and there’s just not the national capacity.

Why every country that receives international students wants international students? There are probably two reasons. One is that’s the best way you make friends between your people and if most of your citizens can’t afford to study abroad or don’t study abroad, one of the best ways to get acquainted with the world is sitting next to a student from another country or another culture. So in America’s case – 70 percent of Americans don’t have a passport even.  So if it’s, as I believe it is, really important in the era of globalization for our young people to know the world, how are they going to do that if they don’t study abroad? Well, one way is to have a much more internationalized set of classmates. So that’s one big set of reasons, friendship between people, long-term relationships that emerge from them. The other reason is to try to get the best and brightest from around the world to solve problems, whether it’s cancer or global warming or solving a mathematical equation. You want to bring the best resources you have to bear on the problem and that means you have to look globally.

For the countries that do have the capacity, that are trying to get foreign students to come to them, but also want to send their own students abroad, how do they work to strike that balance?

For most countries in the world it’s a simpler question than for America because most countries have a centralized national education system. They will set up quotas, they will have so many foreign students and they pretty much achieve that. They make individual country decisions: “We want to have an equal number from country X as our students go to country X, or do we just want to have a certain percentage?” In America’s case, it’s every institution making an individualized decision. Many different criteria are applied. Sometimes it is mutual and balanced. The Fulbright program, which is the Department of State’s flagship education exchange program, is a bi-national exchange program which means [that generally] the same number of Americans go to the country as the country sends on Fulbright to the United States. That’s an example of something that is [more] balanced. But many universities don’t demand and don’t insist that there’s a one-for-one exchange. It’s all up to the individual institutions.

A lot of the rhetoric we hear about higher education attainment revolves around the idea of competition between countries — they want to have the highest percentage of college graduates, for instance. We don’t focus usually on the collaboration.

Universities and higher education have always really been collaborative, especially in research, projects that scientists undertake really don’t know boundaries or borders. Scholars are used to working with each other. Knowledge is global and through the Internet everything else is globally transferred. We don’t start with a paradigm that says this is a competition. But as a country for you to be competitive economically, scientifically, medically, the reality is you need people who have a wide range of talents and they come from a wide range of countries. And that’s okay.

What are some of the ways that we see global collaboration now?

Science, medicine, business, technology, the application of technology. Our space truly is flat. If you have an aspiration to be a good university or a good professor or a good student, it’s really inconceivable to think of doing that without crossing borders, without depending on research products and experiences of people in other countries. The structure of knowledge has really changed.

Nationally, the question of whether value-added calculations should be included in teacher evaluations remains controversial. Critics of value-added models argue that they’re not reliable enough to be used in high-stakes decisions, and that the tests on which they’re based are themselves a poor measure of student achievement.

In the latest issue of Education Next, the study’s authors present their findings. Raj Chetty, John Friedman and Jonah Rockoff write that the students of teachers with high value-added scores “are more likely to attend college, attend higher-quality colleges, earn more, live in higher socioeconomic status (SES) neighborhoods, and save more for retirement. They are also less likely to have children during their teenage years.”

The authors analyzed two decades of test-score data on more than 1 million children in grades 4 through 8.

“I think we’ve shown pretty convincingly that there is likely a role for student tests in teacher evaluation,” said Rockoff, a professor at Columbia Business School. “However, nothing we’ve said in our paper says that the role has to be very large.”

Having a teacher with a high value-added score increases a student’s cumulative lifetime earnings by $50,000, according to the researchers. Teen pregnancy rates were also found to be lower, on average, for the students of teachers with high value-added scores.

“We can say that the teachers who tend to raise their students’ test-scores also provide them with something that is going to help them down the road,” said Rockoff.

Though he doesn’t believe value-added scores should be the sole measure of a teacher’s quality, Rockoff said he takes offense at “people who say it should go down to zero.”

The study adds to a growing body of research on the validity and reliability of value-added modeling, as educators and policymakers work to change how teachers are evaluated across the country. Many schools are in the midst of overhauling their evaluation systems as part of the federal School Improvement Grants program.

Rockoff and his colleagues acknowledge some of the potential pitfalls that could come with a greater focus on value-added scores, such as greater teaching to the test and cheating. Rockoff also said that knowing one’s value-added score doesn’t do much to help a given teacher improve his or her teaching.

“One really important reason why value-added can’t be the only component in evaluations is that it provides no feedback to teachers,” Rockoff said. “It’s like telling a baseball player what [his] batting average is. You know you batted .320 last year and that’s good, but it doesn’t tell you what you did that made you do poorly or do well, or what you have to change to get better.”

She was, according to this report, the worst eighth-grade math teacher in New York City, where she has taught since 2007.

“I was angry, upset, offended,” she said. Abbott sought out her principal, who reassured her that she was an excellent teacher and that the Teacher Data Reports bore no relation to her performance. But, the principal confided, she was worried; although she would enthusiastically recommend Abbott for tenure, the Teacher Data Report could count against her in the tenure process. With a new district superintendent reviewing the tenure recommendation, anything could happen.

Using a statistical technique called value-added modeling, the Teacher Data Reports compare how students are predicted to perform on the state ELA and math tests, based on their prior year’s performance, with their actual performance. Teachers whose students do better than predicted are said to have “added value”; those whose students do worse than predicted are “subtracting value.” By definition, about half of all teachers will add value, and the other half will not.

Carolyn Abbott was, in one respect, a victim of her own success. After a year in her classroom, her seventh-grade students scored at the 98th percentile of New York City students on the 2009 state test. As eighth-graders, they were predicted to score at the 97th percentile on the 2010 state test. However, their actual performance was at the 89th percentile of students across the city. That shortfall—the difference between the 97th percentile and the 89th percentile—placed Abbott near the very bottom of the 1,300 eighth-grade mathematics teachers in New York City.

How could this happen? Anderson is an unusual school, as the students are often several years ahead of their nominal grade level. The material covered on the state eighth-grade math exam is taught in the fifth or sixth grade at Anderson. “I don’t teach the curriculum they’re being tested on,” Abbott explained. “It feels like I’m being graded on somebody else’s work.”

The math that she teaches is more advanced, culminating in high-school level algebra and a different and more challenging test, New York State’s Regents exam in Integrated Algebra. To receive a high school diploma in the state of New York, students must demonstrate mastery of the New York State learning standards in mathematics by receiving a score of 65 or higher on the Regents exam. In 2010-11, nearly 300,000 students across the state of New York took the Integrated Algebra Regents exam; most of the 73 percent who passed the exam with a score of 65 or higher were tenth-graders.

Because student performance on the state ELA and math tests is used to calculate scores on the Teacher Data Reports, the tests are high-stakes for teachers; and because New York City uses a similar statistical strategy to rank schools, they are high-stakes for schools as well. But the tests are not high-stakes for the eighth-graders at Anderson.

By the time they take the eighth-grade tests in the spring of the year, they already know which high school they will be attending, and their scores on the test have no consequences. “The eighth-graders don’t care; they rush through the exam, and they don’t check their work,” Abbott said. “The test has no effect on them. I can’t make an argument that it counts for kids. The seventh-graders, they care a bit more.”

The state tests, she believes, are poorly equipped to assess real mathematical knowledge, especially for high-performing students. “They’re so basic; they ask you to explain things that are obvious if you’re three years ahead,” she says. The Anderson students “understand it at a different level. They want to explain with equations, not words.” But the scoring of the free-response items on the tests emphasizes a formulaic response, with the scoring instructions often looking for a single keyword in a response to garner credit.

“They’re not accepting answers that are mathematically correct,” Abbott notes, “and accepting answers that aren’t mathematically correct.” And the multiple-choice questions?  “Multiple-choice questions don’t test thinking,” she declares. Knowing how to answer them is “just an art.”

When she taught PSAT prep classes while on the faculty at the Bronx High School of Science, she realized that she was “teaching how to eliminate the wrong answer, not how to get to the right answer.” She didn’t mind doing that outside the classroom—but in her classroom, “mathematics is about deep understanding, and enjoying the process.”

How do her students perform on the content that she actually does teach? This year, the 64 eighth-graders at Anderson she teaches are divided into two groups, an honors section and a regular section. All but one of the students in the honors section took the Regents Integrated Algebra exam in January; the other student and most of the regular-section students will take the exam in June. All of the January test-takers passed with flying colors, and more than one-third achieved a perfect score of 100 on the exam.

“They did phenomenally,” Abbott said. “If they did so well, I don’t see how they can say I added no value whatsoever.”

In mid-February, the courts authorized the public release of the Teacher Data Reports, and they were published in print and online by major media outlets in New York City. “It was humiliating,” Abbott said. “To be published online, and stay there forever—it felt like an invasion of privacy.” She was terrified about the possible backlash from parents.

But of the parents of the 128 seventh- and eighth-graders she is teaching this year, only one wrote to her school principal—to express appreciation for a number of things she had done in her classroom. Anderson parents are a notorious bunch; they’re like helicopter parents on steroids. “I’d be more worried about the parents whose students haven’t had me—their preconceived notions that I must be a bad teacher,” Abbott said. “They have this idea that I’m the worst eighth-grade math teacher in the city.”

This summer, New York State will release the new iteration of the Teacher Data Reports, ranking English and math teachers in grades four through eight all across the state on their contributions to their students’ scores on the state tests. For Carolyn Abbott, the numbers will be little more than a curiosity. She has decided to leave the classroom, and is entering the Ph.D. program in mathematics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison this fall.

“I love to teach,” she says. And she loves mathematics. Ultimately, she decided, the mathematics was more important than the teaching, although she envisions teaching mathematics at the college level in the future. “It’s too hard to be a teacher in New York City,” she says. “Everything is stacked against you. You can’t just measure what teachers do and slap a number on it.”