A few years ago, the nation was appalled by video of hospital staff dumping poor patients in a park rather than absorbing the costs of treating them. Our schools routinely do the same thing to our most traumatized children. Those responsible for denying treatment for students, however, claim that they are doing it for the kids!?!?
The proliferation of choice has allowed charters and other selective schools to "cream" the easiest to educate students, leaving even greater concentrations of generational poverty in neighborhood schools. The results of this increased segregation might not have been so tragic had we also invested in alternative services for the children who have endured suffering so terrible that they are emotionally incapable of functioning in the chaos of neighborhood secondary schools. Instead, we have dumped our most vulnerable children on our most vulnerable schools, turning them into way stations for those kids until they land on the streets.
The data-driven crowd countered the social scientists' explanations of why we must create safe and orderly environments with a pedagogy worthy of a faith healer. The defunding of alternative services went along with the "reformers'" claim that urban schools failed because teachers did not have the "High Expectations!" and the "Whatever It Takes!" mentality of "No Excuses!" schools. If they had not pulled the plug on alternative schools, the accountability hawks charged, teachers would just kick struggling students out.
On the eve of No Child Left Behind, I participated in a bipartisan coalition to reform the Oklahoma City schools. We were appalled to learn that our district had lost so many tens of thousands of students to the suburbs, and starved services for so long, that we needed alternative slots for 5 to 10 percent of our students. Today, the problem is worse, as 20,000 students, in our 90 percent low-income district of 40,000, are being raised by grandparents, foster parents, or other guardians.
Our coalition rejected the charade that is "Zero Tolerance." We promised a cafeteria-like array of early education, in-school services, and "Rolls Royce Quality" alternative schools. Absenteeism was to be seen as an early warning sign. Even before NCLB forced us to waste millions of dollars on primitive testing, we knew that the only way to afford humane learning environments was to create "community schools" that collaborated with other social service providers.
Even then, the chief of staff of a major urban district threw cold water on our ideals. Across the nation, he warned, discipline, attendance, and alternative schools were seen as the third rail of schooling. Those issues were "a predicament, not a problem." Even a hard problem has a solution. The predicament that makes it politically impossible to invest in alternative schools was said to be just one of those things that is best to ignore, because it has no answer. So, the normative response to students with truancy problems or who act out their pain by disrupting class has been to "wait and hope they grow out of it."
Fortunately, we now know how to serve our most vulnerable students as we create schools with respectful learning environments. As is so often the case, HBO's The Wire deserves much of the credit. In that brilliant series, a John Hopkins scholar, based on Robert Balfanz, experimented with an alternative school within a school. The Wire did not exaggerate. Balfanz' Everyone Graduates Center has since shown that we can predict as early as 6th grade the students who will drop out without intensive interventions. On the other hand, John Hopkins has shown that we need not refer most at-risk students to off-site alternatives. By addressing truancy early, recruiting mentors, and coordinating in-school interventions, we can create respectful learning environments in neighborhood schools.
We should also give credit to the Gates Foundation for its pioneering work on alternative schools. Remember the Gates' first small schools effort in New York City? Partially in an effort to rescue that experiment, New York City created alternative schools for 5 percent of its high school students, and that contributed greatly to the city's dramatic increase in graduation rates. (The Gates' also learned the hard way in another district that expanding alternative schools so that they serve 20 percent of a system's population is excessive.) Gates funded alternative schools for overage students that felt "just like a family." While neighborhood schools had a 19 percent graduation rate for overage students, the alternative schools graduated 56 percent of their older students.
The Gates research has shown another reason why it would be smart to invest in alternative services. Its polling data shows that 68 percent of teachers support those interventions for struggling students. But I do not want to go down that road. We must focus on the students' needs, not the adults' opinions. If we would concentrate solely on the evidence, and stop using our most troubled children as a battleground for adult ideologies, we would choose the humane and common sense approach, and expand the full range of alternative services.