Charter School Controversy - and Re-education programs in MI and MO

W has been putting out some fascinating stuff about education and youth that I see as so completely connected.

First of all, they did a great piece on the controversy surrounding charter schools, which have been a hallmark of Obama's education reform program. Articles in both the Boston Globe (here) and the Hartford Courant (here) outline conflicting sentiments in the communities most affected by charter school expansion. A major critique is that not all charter schools are actually better! The Courant article cites evidence from Philadelphia where a study showed that charter school students actually did not perform better than regular public school students. Also, the Globe article points out that in Boston (which has one quarter of the country's charter schools) non-English speakers are remarkably underserved; they make up less than 4% of charter school students despite being one fifth of all public school students.

From RaceWire:

Education historian Diane Ravitch says the question isn't regular versus charter schools, but an issue of social priorities:

We can't solve our problems by handing them off to businesses and community groups. Some schools will claim success by excluding the students who are hardest to educate; others will claim success by drilling children endlessly on test-taking skills.

What should we do? We must strengthen — not abandon — public education....

We evade our responsibility to improve public education by privatizing public schools. In doing so, we undermine the egalitarian promise of public education, thus guaranteeing that many children will continue to be left behind.

Even a charter school with a social mission of promoting economic and racial equity still runs up against the limits posed by selectivity and exclusion. The rush to expand this model across the country may renew, and redefine, the question of separate but equal.

I find this really interesting especially after talking to a friend of mine's older brother who is about to start teaching math in a new Philly charter school - I guess I'll have to ask him about what his experience is like, but he described a really energetic, young group of teachers that will have the ability to work with a smaller group of students than your average public Philadelphia high school. Clearly both benefits and drawbacks.

RaceWire also recently had a really interesting article about re-education programs in MI and MO about the history of racism and anti-indigenous sentiment, respectively. They say:

The new curriculum is designed to inform youth about the history of racial discrimination as well as to provide an understanding of the continued relevance of social movements today.

Um, not to get overly enthusiastic here but.. HELL. YES. It's absurd that students aren't learning about this already and while we'll see how it plays out I can't help but be excited that state governments are finally recognizing the importance of history in modern day struggles and tensions... and recognizing the need to be talking about this in our classrooms with our youth.

That is, of course, if our youth even get to the classroom. In New York, it seems that increasing numbers of children are being locked up in juvenile detention centers for mental health issues and other needs. "In New York State, 54 percent of children in the general population are Caucasian, 20 percent are Latino, 18 percent are African-American, and 6 percent are Asian. In contrast, of the girls admitted to the Lansing and Tryon facilities over the last three years, 54 percent are non-Hispanic African-American, 19 percent are classified as Hispanic, 23 percent are non-Hispanic White, and none is Asian. 10 girls, or 3 percent of the total, are Native American.... Since 1995, African-American boys and girls have consistently accounted for close to 60 percent of children taken into [Office of Children and Family Services] custody." Obviously this filters directly into New York's expansive prison system, and from the sound of these "juvenile centers" it seems as if these children are not socialized for any other kind of life. From RaceWire:

The Department of Justice’s extensive investigation of four of New York’s juvenile detention facilities sheds chilling light on a system plagued by unaccountability and abuse. The new report, released today, documents the routine use of excessive force by staff, which has traumatized and even broken the bones of children while authorities looked the other way. “Anything from sneaking an extra cookie to initiating a fistfight may result in a full prone restraint with handcuffs,” the investigators found.

So who are these kids? In 2006, Human Rights Watch profiled two of the detention centers investigated by the Justice Department, Tryon and Lansing, where teenage girls were detained for both violent and nonviolent infractions. Often, they were refugees of the foster care system, arrested after spending most of their lives cycling through the homes of strangers. Many began their path to “delinquency” in school, where “zero tolerance” security tactics were used to keep disobedient kids in line. Drugs and mental health problems drove many children into detention, after poverty and isolation from the healthcare system had kept them shut out of early treatment programs.

As the Times reported earlier this month, juvenile detention has become a makeshift "asylum" for children whose mental health needs have been neglected in their communities, due to poverty and social disinvestment.

If you can stomach the full article it can be accessed here.

Why Our Criminal Justice System OBVIOUSLY Has Nothing to do with Justice

The irony and counter-intuitiveness of our prison industrial complex and criminal processing system is overwhelming now, more than ever. And now, more than ever, I am convinced that the only way we will ever escape the demons we are creating and learn to look each other in the eye and treat each other like HUMAN BEINGS is complete and total prison abolition. A new start, a new way of understanding ourselves, understanding the word 'community' and understanding how to love and respect one another.

Today, hundreds of California inmates rioted (for ELEVEN HOURS) in the Reception Center West at the California Institution for Men in Chino. No one was killed but hundreds were wounded and those wounded were disproportionately Black and Latino. Guess what our government is gonna do? CHARGE THEM WITH ADDITIONAL CRIMES... lengthen their sentences. Yea, that makes sense... how??? Read the full NYTimes article here (Of course, it isn't easy getting out either with unemployment being what it is - the latest on unemployment from Racewire here.)

Another article that made me cry was about a sixteen-year-old mentally ill boy named Donald, who has been locked up for two years because of a breaking-and-entering charge despite his diagnosis of several serious mental health disorders. They put him in juvie because they thought he'd get the best treatment there, but have KEPT him there because of violence he has inflicted on himself, on animals, and his attempt to fight a guard. Can anyone not understand that these are clear indications that a violent padded cell is SO CLEARLY not working for this ill PERSON?!? Sorry for the caps but it is just so obvious... and frustrating. And disappointing. And typical. The NYTimes reports:

As cash-starved states slash mental health programs in communities and schools, they are increasingly relying on the juvenile corrections system to handle a generation of young offenders with psychiatric disorders. About two-thirds of the nation’s juvenile inmates — who numbered 92,854 in 2006, down from 107,000 in 1999 — have at least one mental illness, according to surveys of youth prisons, and are more in need of therapy than punishment.

“We’re seeing more and more mentally ill kids who couldn’t find community programs that were intensive enough to treat them,” said Joseph Penn, a child psychiatrist at the Texas Youth Commission. “Jails and juvenile justice facilities are the new asylums.”

At least 32 states cut their community mental health programs by an average of 5 percent this year and plan to double those budget reductions by 2010, according to a recent survey of state mental health offices.

Juvenile prisons have been the caretaker of last resort for troubled children since the 1980s, but mental health experts say the system is in crisis, facing a soaring number of inmates reliant on multiple — and powerful — psychotropic drugs and a shortage of therapists.

In California’s state system, one of the most violent and poorly managed juvenile systems in the country, according to federal investigators, three dozen youth offenders seriously injured themselves or attempted suicide in the last year — a sign, state juvenile justice experts say, of neglect and poor safety protocols.

In Ohio, where Gov. Ted Strickland, a former prison psychologist, approved a 34 percent reduction in community-based mental health services to reduce a budget deficit, Thomas J. Stickrath, the director of the Department of Youth Services, said continuing cuts would swell his youth offender population.

“I’m hearing from a lot of judges saying, ‘I’m sorry I’m sending so-and-so to you, but at least I know that he’ll get the treatment he can’t get in his community,’ ” Mr. Stickrath said.

But youths are often subjected to neglect and violence in juvenile prisons, and studies show that mental illnesses can become worse there.

This trap that we're put into - this epistemological resignation, leads us to think that more legislation and more criminalization are the only way. Racewire recently did a great writeup of how hate crime legislation does not effectively counter hate crimes at all and rather contributes to the expansion of the prison and police systems. We need something else. And we need it now.

The New Face of the "Delinquent"

From Racewire:

Zoot suit riots, West Side Story, Bloods and Crips—America has long had a fascination with the deviant teen. While the dramatic narrative has always been threaded with race and class struggle, the gender dimension of youth “delinquency” is often pushed into the backdrop.

According to the Government Accountability Office’s recent report on programs dealing with “girls’ delinquency,” girls and boys are on surprisingly divergent trajectories in their dealings with law enforcement:

from 1995 through 2005, delinquency caseloads for girls in juvenile justice courts nationwide increased 15 percent while boys’ caseloads decreased by 12 percent. Also, from 1995 through 2005, the number of girls’ cases nationwide involving detention increased 49 percent compared to a 7 percent increase for boys. More recently, in 2007, 29 percent of juvenile arrests—about 641,000 arrests—involved girls, who accounted for 17 percent of juvenile violent crime arrests and 35 percent of juvenile property crime arrests.

Moreover, the GAO found, there’s a severe lack of research on what programs are effective at reducing or preventing delinquency among girls.

According to a 2001 American Bar Association report, “multiple stressors” drive young women into criminal justice involvement, including physical and sexual abuse, separation from parents, mental health issues, and problems in school. One study found that girls are disproportionately incarcerated for nonviolent “status” offenses, like prostitution or running away—that is, “criminal” behavior that might in fact be a desperate response to abuse, poverty or other problems not within their control. In addition to often entering the system in a very vulnerable state, girls are routinely subjected to abuse while incarcerated. And, reflecting general racial patterns in the criminal justice system:

African American girls make up nearly half of all those in secure detention and Latinas constitute 13%. Although whites constitute 65% of the population of at-risk girls, they account for only 34% of girls in secure detention. Seven of every 10 cases involving white girls are dismissed, compared with 3 of every 10 cases for African American girls.

Yet the public dialogue on women of color and juvenile justice is prone to many blindspots, due to stereotypes and distorted perceptions about gender dynamics. In a Justice Department paper on female gang involvement, researchers wrote:

Autonomy and male dominance, which are ongoing issues for all female gangs, tend to vary with ethnicity. For example, gender expectations in each ethnic group might suggest that African American and white female gang members would be more autonomous and Latinas more subordinate to males. They usually are, but not always. In other words, there is no universal ethnic continuum. Indeed, some factors related to female autonomy and male dominance affect gang members regardless of ethnicity. Male unemployment and the incarceration of the many males who are convicted of illegal economic activities remove males from both Latino and African American households. As a result, women must rely on their own resources to support themselves and their children.

The juvenile justice system pits society's belief in law and order with its compassion for young people in tough circumstances, and that tension amplifies every underlying inequality. The lack of knowledge about girls caught up in the system not only deprives them of critical support and interventions; it also reveals how little we understand about the interplay of gender, race and culture in our homes and neighborhoods.

Juvenile Justive Hearing!

To my faithful readers,

Sorry for being so bad at blogging. I'll try to get back on my game.

From the Sentencing Project:
Legislative Hearing:
"Juvenile Justice Accountability
and Improvement Act"

On June 9, the U.S. House of Representative's Committee on the Judiciary, Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism, and Homeland Security will convene a hearing at 2:30 p.m. in the Rayburn House Office Building, Room 2141, to listen to testimony about sentences of juvenile life without parole (JLWOP). Marc Mauer, Executive Director of The Sentencing Project, submitted testimony to the Committee urging Congress to eliminate sentences of JLWOP in the states and the federal system.

"The Sentencing Project opposes sentences of juvenile life without parole (JLWOP) because they declare that young people are beyond reform. All other nations have devised strategies to hold youth accountable, promote public safety, and prioritize rehabilitation to limit recidivism without resorting to this extreme punishment," states Mauer in his written testimony. "We support legislation that acknowledges the critical differences between youth and adults and imposes age-appropriate sentences that protect public safety and gives a second chance to young people."

To read more of his testimony, click here.

The following bill will be considered: H.R. 2289, the "Juvenile Justice and Accountability Improvement Act of 2009."

Witness List

Bryan Stevenson,
Executive Director, Equal Justice Initiative

Mark Osler,
Former Prosecutor and Professor of Law, Baylor Law School

Linda White,
Victim, Texas

Anita Colon,
Sister of JLWOP Inmate, Pennsylvania