Extra Credit

My friend Paul Butler, esteemed law professor at George Washington University, and Black man, is always running into the police. As he puts it, “in terms of the race/gender permutations of 21st century urban police forces, I’ve had statistically significant interactions with cops who are white men and women, African-American men and women, and Hispanic men.” His latest account is worth a read.

Whether you think about accountability from a schools perspective or a criminal justice angle, this is laughable:

Thanks PREA Prez

While education researches sometimes seem consumed with tearing each other apart over what works, certain interventions have been proven time and time again to make a difference. Here is the latest study from Arthur Reynolds and co. documenting the lasting benefits of high-quality early childhood programs. Ed Week’s summary is here.

My editorial accompanying the study is here (Why Prison Not Pre-School). My bottom line:

The Chicago Longitudinal Study examined a cohort of low-income students who attended preschool beginning at ages 3 and 4 years at Child-Parent Centers in Chicago. Many of the children and families received additional remedial services during the early elementary school grades. Reynolds et al tracked the students, now 24 years old, to measure the impact of the intervention on educational attainment, crime, economic status, and physical and mental health status.

The results are striking: students who received the services were more likely than a comparison group to graduate high school and attend 4-year college, more likely to be employed full-time, less likely to be involved with serious criminal behavior or to be incarcerated, and less likely to suffer depression. These results matter, they are consistent with other research on the long-term impact of quality early-childhood education, and they deserve wide attention.

The subject the US keeps ignoring. Once on the link, click “highest to lowest” and then “go” to see the depressing results.

NY Times reports on Brandon Garrett’s study of wrongful convictions. Bottom line: people may disagree about the precise number, but the flaws in the criminal justice system exposed by the DNA exonerations make clear that there are still plenty of innocent people behind bars. The biggest culprit, according to the study, is erroneous eyewitness testimony. And appeals don’t help in general, finds Garrett. Appellate courts upheld the convictions in almost all of the cases of people who were later proved to be innocent.

When Barack Obama decided to run for President, I had hoped that he would make an issue out of criminal justice. Specifically, I had hoped that he would talk about the fact that this nation incarcerates a higher percentage of its population than any country in the world. If that itself is not bad enough, the incarceration rates in Black America are even higher, and remain high despite 10 years of declining crime rates. Sadly, neither Obama nor the other candidates have touched the issue much, probably for the same reason Bill Clinton didn’t–fear of being branded soft on crime.

Well anyway, finally, tentatively, the Libby commutation seems to be giving Obama a chance to begin the conversation. Just an opening, but maybe there will be more. Ck out this brief clip from New Hampshire:

Thanks: Andrew Sullivan

The NY Times’ Bob Herbert is publicizing incidents of bad police practice in schools. In his latest, he describes:

a cop who grotesquely abused his power by invading a high school classroom in the Bronx because a girl had uttered a curse word in a hallway. Not only did the cop handcuff and arrest the girl in a room filled with stunned students and a helpless teacher, but he arrested the school’s principal, who had attempted to reason with the officer.

As a recent ACLU report makes clear, this is not an isolated incident.

That police practice in high-poverty schools often leaves much to be desired should not come as a surprise to education reformers. After all, the education reform community is appropriately quick to criticize bad teaching practice in high poverty schools. Yet few edu-bloggers have focused much on the issue, and some of those who have argued that Herbert has it wrong.

My friend Whitney Tilson argues,

“I’m not buying for an instant Herbert’s assertion that police officers in NYC’s public schools,” and “I suspect that incidents in which police officers are out of line are extremely rare — it’s just that in a system with 1,400+ schools and over 1 million students, even if there’s a 1/100th of 1% ‘error rate,’ that will yield dozens of juicy stories for reports (like the ACLU’s) and reporters (like Herbert) to go nuts over.”

This reaction has long surprised me–so many smart people have really high standards for teachers and really low ones for police officers. But both of these groups have a tremendous influence on poor communities, and we should have high standards for both.

Edu-types should get this, because many of the same things that lead to poor teaching lead to poor policing, and many of the same structural issues that protect bad teachers also protect bad officers. These include: low pay, low barriers to entry into the profession, poor training (if you think education schools are bad, talk to smart officers about the police academies in some cities), strong job protections, administrators who don’t document poor performance, and a culture of low-expectations. Indeed, the same low expectations that allow terrible teaching practice to continue also let terrible policing practices to go on. Too many people think poor kids don’t deserve better.

Teachers and educators and education reformers should all care about this issue, a lot. The bottom line is that our work in schools is trying to change students perceptions of who they are and who they can be. When they are treated like criminals instead of scholars by police officers, either in schools or in their neighborhoods, that has an impact.

Update: I e-mailed a version of this post to Whitney, whose response is here. I take Whitney’s point about the bias in the ACLU report, but I would still recommend people check out the reference to Julia Richman, on page 24. Regardless of how big a problem bad policing in schools is, I think it is pretty clear that the Julia Richman approach to school safety is the way to go.

Paul Butler, a former prosecutor, now law professor, and regular contributor to Blackprof, spoke to NPR’s Ed Gordon regarding crime and incarceration in the black community (audio here). The conversation was over a year ago, but I listened to it again recently and was reminded that Butler’s analysis and recommendations stand the test of time. Butler argues that since black people are disproportionately represented as victims and defendants in the criminal system, what black people have to say about what we should do about crime deserves special consideration.

I have long been saying this about black youth–black youth are disproportionately victimized by criminals and by police abuse, so we should listen to what they say about policing and crime prevention. If we do it right, they can be effective advocates for safer communities and more just policing. For more on this, see Community Policing and Youth as Assets on my homepage (warning, the article is long).

Of course, the black community is hardly monolithic. But there is wide agreement on a number of the points Butler makes: we need increased economic investments to raise employment opportunities, educational investments that increase the number of kids who graduate from high school, and community-wide investments in mentoring for teens and health care for infants. Butler also talks about what individuals can do in their own neighborhoods and communities. It is 11 minutes, and worth a listen.

In 1996, when David and I first started developing an education and job training program for kids from the juvenile justice system, we did so because we wanted to fight 2 problems–the under-education and over-incarceration of low-income kids of color. 10 years later, we face some sobering facts. African-Americans have made significant progress over the last 50 years in most domains, including education. Today, 79% of African-Americans have high school diplomas, compared to 34% in 1970. 17% have college degrees, compared with 5% in 1970. Median income has increased substantially (35k in 2000 compared to 25k in 1970, in constant dollars), as has home ownership (46% of blacks owned homes in 2000, compared to 35% in 1950) and life expectancy (72 years in 2001 compared to 64 years in 1970). Poverty has declined (25% of black families lived in poverty in 2003 compared to 55% in 1959), and infant mortality rates have plummeted (14 deaths per 1,000 birth in 2000 compared to 33 deaths in 1970). The number of black elected officials has increased 600% (from approx 1,500 in 1970 to over 9,000 in 2001). Most people would assume that if a community’s indicators had increased in all those ways, this would correspond with a decrease in incarceration rates. And yet . . .

Exactly the opposite has happened. African-Americans comprised 30% of our nation’s prisons in 1954, when Brown v. Bd. of Ed. was decided and Jim Crow was law or custom in much of the nation. Today, the numbers are worse–blacks make up 50% of our prisons. And in 2003, there were more African-American men incarcerated than enrolled in higher education.

In future posts I will discuss how this has come to pass, but for now consider three questions raised by the juxtaposition of progress in so many areas combined with the horrific increase in incarceration rates.

1) Are there limits to what education can do if educational outcomes have improved alongside a massive rise in incarceration? Those of us who are educators need to come to grips with this—we need to expand our domain of concern beyond the classroom if we are educating more kids but incarceration rates are still getting worse.

2) Why isn’t there a greater national outcry over the incarceration statistics—if we knew 50 years ago that African-Americans were going to make progress in virtually every domain, but incarceration rates were going to get dramatically worse, wouldn’t we have predicted that the mass incarceration of blacks would be the lead issue for the civil rights community, concerned citizens, and progressives everywhere?

3) Shouldn’t conservatives and centrists care a lot about this issue—after all, these prisons are hugely expensive, drain resources and raise taxes.