| ||||||||||||||||||
NY Times - Education Dept. to Hear School Closing Complaints
NJ Spotlight - Advocates for Newark Education Make Their Case in D.C….Claims of racial bias behind school closings face lengthy process, uncertain outcome
NY Times - Education Dept. to Hear School Closing Complaints
By JON HURDLE Published: January 28, 2013
PHILADELPHIA — The United States Department of Education is investigating complaints that plans to close or reorganize public schools in Philadelphia, Detroit and Newark discriminate against black and Hispanic students, as well as those with disabilities, a department official confirmed on Monday.
Community activists from those cities and 15 others are scheduled to meet Tuesday with Education Secretary Arne Duncan to urge a moratorium on school-closing plans until agreements can be reached on alternatives.
Jitu Brown, a community organizer from the South Side of Chicago, said the community representatives would seek immediate action on the civil rights complaints, and would urge officials to halt school closings, stop plans to turn public schools over to private contractors, end “phaseouts” in which schools cease to accept new students so that numbers dwindle, and stop the practice of combining public schools with charter schools. “Racism is real in the U.S.,” Mr. Brown said. “There are different rules for the students in our community.”
Daren Briscoe, an Education Department spokesman, said it has no power to put a moratorium on locally mandated school closings. The department’s civil rights office has never substantiated a complaint based on such a program, he said.
If a school district is found to have violated civil rights through a closing program, it can be taken to court or denied federal funds, but it is more likely that the parties involved will reach a settlement, Mr. Briscoe said.
Community groups in New York, Chicago and Washington have also filed civil rights complaints, although those have not been investigated.
Here in Philadelphia, the district last month published a plan to close 37 schools, about one-sixth of the total, by June in an effort to close a $1.1 billion budget deficit over five years, and reduce the number of underutilized and underperforming schools. The plan will be voted on in March by the School Reform Commission, a state-run body that oversees Philadelphia schools.
Action United, a group that opposes the closings, presented data Monday showing that 80 percent of the students affected by the planned closings are black; the district’s enrollment is 55 percent black and 19 percent Hispanic. The group released a Dec. 18 letter it had received from the Education Department saying that the closing plan is subject to an investigation under the 1964 Civil Rights Act and two other laws that are enforced by the department’s Office for Civil Rights.
“The district has not demonstrated why closing schools in predominately African-American neighborhoods with higher numbers of students with disabilities serves any educational necessity that could not be accomplished through less discriminatory alternatives,” the group said in a statement.
Fernando Gallard, a spokesman for the Philadelphia school district, said the black students who make up the majority in low-performing schools would benefit from the reorganization.
“The district understands that a higher proportion of students in under-enrolled, low-performing schools are African-Americans, and these are the schools that are most affected by the recommended facility closures,” Mr. Gallard said in a statement.
Correction: January 30, 2013
A picture caption on Tuesday with an article about an investigation by the Department of Education into complaints that school closings in Philadelphia, Newark and Detroit discriminate against black and Hispanic students as well as those with disabilities misstated the time frame in which the Philadelphia school system plans to close 37 schools. They are scheduled to close by June, not over the course of five years.
NJ Spotlight - Advocates for Newark Education Make Their Case in D.C….Claims of racial bias behind school closings face lengthy process, uncertain outcome
By John Mooney, January 30, 2013 in Education|Post a Comment
Joining counterparts from a dozen other cities nationwide, Newark education advocates landed in the spotlight yesterday as they testified in Washington, D.C., against school closures in New Jersey’s largest district, calling the closings discriminatory and a violation of civil rights.
Related Links
Office for Civil Rights Response to Newark Complaint
Newark Parents and Activists Take School Closure Complaints to D.C. for Civil-Rights Hearing
Newark Schools Chief Pulls No Punches in Depicting District’s Challenges
But by most accounts, the next step in the process may be less certain – and, at least for the Newark contingent, less gratifying.
About a dozen parents and other school advocates from Newark traveled by bus to the nation’s capital for the Tuesday afternoon hearing on a series of school closures in more than a dozen districts, which the protesters say especially discriminate against black and Hispanic populations served by the schools.
The Newark group was joined by advocates from cities as far-flung as Philadelphia, Chicago and Oakland, where dozens of schools have been slated for closure over the last couple of years. In Newark, six schools were closed last year – and in some cases, reopened under new leadership and with revamped faculties.
The hearing, held in an auditorium of the U.S. Department of Education, was hosted by none other than U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan and lasted more than two hours.
One of the leading Newark school advocates said it was satisfying to at least have their concerns heard.
“I’m optimistic it got the exposure and people are listening more than they ever have before,” said Sharon Smith, a Newark mother of three who filed the complaint with the federal department’s Office for Civil Rights and attended the hearing yesterday.
Newark is among a handful of districts filing complaints that the civil-rights office has agreed to investigate.
But, in a phone interview, Smith also acknowledged that besides the fact that Duncan stayed at the hearing for only about a half-hour, she was also warned it would be a long process with uncertain results.
“They said they agreed and want to work with us,” Smith said of federal education department staff. “But they said our complaint is a process and won’t happen overnight.”
The track record for the civil rights office is a slow and deliberative one, with no cases of school closures so far leading to larger civil-rights complaints.
Since October, 2010, the office has investigated 27 civil-rights complaints over school closures, and found none entailed a violation, according to a spokesman for the federal Department of Education. Another 33 complaints are currently pending in 22 states, including New Jersey, said spokesman Daren Briscoe.
Briscoe said the investigations can take months, if not years, involving many interviews and other deliberations. And he said while the investigations can lead to the loss of federal funding or other sanctions for a school district, cases are often resolved more amicably.
“When there is a finding, it is far more common that it leads to a agreement with a district to resolve it,” Briscoe said.
Gaining traction and media attention nationwide, the debate is posing a quandary for districts, as school closures have indeed taken place in the poorest neighborhoods with the highest concentrations of minority enrollment.
But those schools are also the ones that have shown the lowest achievement levels. In New Jersey, for instance, a vast majority of the schools earmarked as Priority Schools and subject to possible closure or other intervention steps are in the state’s poorest cities.
Add in tight budgets and declining enrollments in many of the cities in question, and experts said there are no easy answers in finding the balance between economic and educational needs.
“With everything going on, it doesn’t seem illogical that this conversation would come up,” said Maria Ferguson, director of the Center for Education Policy, a Washington think tank. “Whether it’s real malfeasance, I don’t know, but logical that this would come up in communities with high racial concentrations and poverty.”
Meanwhile, the complaint is drawing some attention back in New Jersey.
A spokesman for the Newark public schools and Superintendent Cami Anderson did not comment yesterday, but state education Commissioner Chris Cerf said he sees the issue differently.
First of all, he said in a majority of cases in Newark and elsewhere – with cities like Paterson and Camden seeing their own closures – the closing of a school has led to the reopening of the same school with new leadership and staff.
Even so, he said, the dramatic moves have been about the performance of the school, not the race of its students.
“The civil rights issue that I wish everyone focused on is that an overwhelming number of children living in poverty and of color are not receiving the effective education they deserve,” he said.
“It’s seems mystifying to me that advocates are not focusing on that issue,” Cerf said. “To say this is race based, no, this is about schools that are failing.”
Smith, the Newark mother, said she is not so sure, and she will continue to press her case. She said she was heartened that representatives of the White House also attended the hearing yesterday.
“It may have been for the press, but we will move forward,” Smith said. “I think it is clear what is going on and we have a problem.”
