In an article by veteran journalist Heather Vogell, ProPublica asks hard questions about alternative schools.
The word “alternative” implies a choice. But in an era when the freedom to pick your school is trumpeted by advocates and politicians, students don’t choose the alternative schools to which districts send them for breaking the rules: They’re sentenced to them. Of 39 state education departments that responded to a ProPublica survey last year, 29, or about three-quarters, said school districts could transfer students involuntarily to alternative programs for disciplinary reasons…
Thousands of students are involuntarily reassigned to these schools each year, often for a seemingly minor offense, and never get back on track, a ProPublica investigation has found. Alternative schools are often located in crumbling buildings or trailers, with classes taught largely by computers and little in the way of counseling services or extracurricular activities.
The forced placements have persisted even though the Obama administration in 2014 told schools they should suspend, expel or transfer students to alternative schools only as a last resort — and warned them that they risked a federal civil rights investigation if their disciplinary actions reflected discrimination based on race. Federal data shows that black and Hispanic students are often punished more than white students for similar violations.
Moreover, despite legal protections afforded students with disabilities, a disproportionate number of those exiled in some districts have special education plans…
Now, the Trump administration is being pressed to view such removals more favorably. In November, a group of teachers and conservative education advocates met with aides to Education Secretary Betsy DeVos to express concerns about the 2014 guidance. The group said the Obama-era approach made schools less safe, allowing disruptive students to hijack classrooms.
That meeting has raised fears among civil rights advocates that the Trump administration will rescind the guidance, prompting schools to increase the number of children excluded from regular classrooms. “We’re deeply concerned this administration is not committed to protecting the civil rights of students,” says Elizabeth Olsson, senior policy associate for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. She cited reports that DeVos may scrap a rule aimed at preventing schools from unnecessarily placing minority students in special education.
A federal education spokesman on Nov. 29 declined to comment on the issue.
To be sure, many students are sent to alternative schools for major offenses involving drugs, alcohol, weapons or violence. But others are forced to go for reasons that include rudeness, using their cellphones at inappropriate times, or — in about half of the states ProPublica surveyed — nondisciplinary problems such as bad grades. In states like Florida, students who fall academically have been pushed to transfer to alternative schools as a way to game the state’s accountability system. Pennsylvania law lets school officials relegate students to that state’s Alternative Education for Disruptive Youth program for showing “disregard for school authority.” In Aiken, about 40 percent of transfers in 2014-2015, the year Logan was reassigned, were for lesser offenses, including 13 for using profanity, 27 for truancy, 28 for not following an adult’s instructions and 18 for showing disrespect.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
This is definitely happening here in New York.
So-called reform has many dirty secrets; one of the most insidious is that “school choice” – charters, vouchers, and increasingly even some public schools responding to the pressures they’re under – is really about the schools choosing their students, not families choosing their schools.
Look at all the big charter chains – KIPP, Success Academies, Uncommon Schools – and you see they’re all notorious for culling students, filtering them on the front, enrollment end and suspending/expelling/counseling out on the back end.
School choice: the schools choose your kid, or not; you don’t choose the schools.
NYC has an entire District (79) devoted to alternative high schools. My wife taught in three different ones for years.
Many of these schools were created to serve students who couldn’t function adequately in regular school settings: pregnant teenagers, homeless teenager mothers (that was my wife’s first job in the District), gay and transgender students (at a time when things were far less tolerant than now), as well as students with discipline/behavioral issues. The school located on Riker’s Island, where imprisoned teenagers are kept, was also a District 79 school. I currently have a friend teaching Culinary Arts there.
When my wife started working there, the District Superintendent was a wonderful educator and man named Stephen Phillips, who advocated powerfully and successfully to provide resources for his students and teachers.
Then Michael Bloomberg became Mayor. Budgets were cut, resources denied, Stephen Phillips was forced out and replaced by the dreadful Cami Anderson, who went on to later infamy as the serial public school-killing/charter school-opening Superintendent of the Newark schools.
There is a place for Alternative Schools, but God forbid they be placed in the hands of so-called reformers, who see them as little more than dumping grounds and holding pens.
Nice exposition, Michael, for which I thank you. I spent my first three years as a teacher in New York City in District 75 school in the South Bronx–until Bloomberg and his minions maimed it.
“Regular” schools were never designed to serve all students. Therein lies the problem. Until that changes, the atrocities will continue. Students are sent to alternative schools to allow regular schools to win the competition by keeping their artificial test scores up.
Envision a school system where all children have equal access to a quality education, taught in a way that is real, taken from “where they are” on their pathway to success at their best rate. Where learning opens doors to the dreams of every child, recognizing that no one will ever know where or when genius will unfold until it evolves. Imagine a school where assessment is not cheapened by the narrow scope of the standardized test, but broadened to become a stepping stone for the whole child learning experience. A school where, as in life, learning is a constant flow of problem solving experiences driven by the reality that failure is not only an option but an integral tool, guiding students on their pathway to success.
When the system of education changes from competition to collaboration on an even playing field, the world of education turns upside down and children become the winners.
“Among the speakers was Diane Tavenner, the founder of Summit, a charter school network that also provides software to district schools to support tech-based personalized learning. Summit has been supported by the Gates Foundation, won an XQ prize from the Emerson Collective, and is backed by Chan-Zuckerberg.
Mark Zuckerberg specifically mentioned the group in a recent post describing his approach to charitable giving. “Our partnership with Summit Public Schools has helped encode their teaching philosophy in tools that will be used in more than 300 district, charter, and private schools this fall,” he wrote.
The leader of the Grand Rapids Public Museum High School, which also won a $10 million XQ prize, was present, as was a representative of Leap Innovations, a nonprofit group that consults on personalized learning and has been praised by Bill Gates and Jim Shelton of Chan-Zuckerberg.”
Wow, what a diverse set of voices get invited to DC!
This was the Emerson Chan-Zuckerberg Gates forum.
There are about 90,000 public schools in the US and about 6700 charter schools.
Why is this so insanely and narrowly skewed toward an approach endorsed by four billionaires?
https://www.chalkbeat.org/posts/us/2017/12/19/four-takeaways-from-betsy-devoss-summit-on-innovation-in-k-12-education/
To be fair to alternative schools: I taught in my district’s alternative junior high for three years. Yes, kids were “sentenced” to them, and also, yes, the facilities weren’t terrific, and yes, a few kids (but not many) were sent there for weird reasons, but we did everything to get those kids back to their regular schools. Most kids stayed for about five or six months, and we instituted “mini-terms” (at quarters and at the midterms of those quarters) so that we could send kids back to their home schools as fast as we could. There were some that stayed their entire junior high career, but that wasn’t what we worked for, just that some were too dangerous to send back.
The school was a true godsend for many of these kids. The classes were really small, with a lot of personalized attention, and we did everything we could to make connections with kids and provide them with lots of opportunities to talk things out and make better decisions. We did a TON of service learning all over the community, we did field trips, taught the kids to cook and sew, had a major ceramics program, and in general worked our tails off to help these kids. I have never worked as hard as a teacher in my entire career as I did at that school.
I have a few kids that didn’t make it–I have three former students in prison and one dead (and that’s just who I know about), BUT I have also seen quite a few students graduate from high school and working in the community. The alternative school system can really work.
Our county alternative program does more with less than any other program I have experienced. They serve children adjucated, neglected, and marginalized for a huge list of reasons. They do it without political support from the average citizen, who views these kids as refuse to be put out of sight.
An alternative school should not be the same as a reform school. A true Alternatve School should have small class sizes, individualized instruction, counseling – both individual and group, and opportunities to succeed with an eye towards returning them to their home schools when they are deemed ready.
There are many reasons a child should be placed in an alternative setting, but minor offenses should not be a major consideration.
Unfortunately, with the focus on test scores, I can see districts “getting rid” of the “riff raff” so as not to effect their statistics. An unwarranted but nonetheless realistic result of the “reform” movement.
In the public school district in which I taught, we started out w/a trailer & moved on to a dedicated school (it was an extremely small school w/a very odd layout–as such, it had been closed for a few years before it was seen to be ideal & a better solution (than a trailer) to house the alternative school. Generally, middle school students who had committed suspendable offenses (pretty serious) were sent there. When the program first started, it was a little rough, w/somewhat sketchy communication & disorganization between the regular classroom teachers & the a.s. teacher & aide(s); a.s. students were expected to complete ongoing classroom work that had been assigned to students in the regular classes. As, later, teachers who had been in classrooms were assigned to the a.s., there was better communication & understanding of expectations, and the alternative school experience went smoothly for students–there was a lot of good learning–both academic & social-emotional–going on (also, a school social worker was assigned to these students, as most of them had previously been seeing her/him). It was a good deterrent to serious misbehavior, because these students had previously expected–even hoped–to be suspended, which used to mean home suspension–whoopie!–vacation! There was definitely a decrease in recidivism. I might add that this was a middle-to-low income, diverse, suburban public school system. (See, reformers, public schools DO do some things right, & BETTER than charters!)
But–aha & alas! This is sure to now be seen as yet another bu$ine$$ enterpri$e–for-profit alternative $chool$ (like for-profit pri$on$ & for-profit immigrant detention center$). Plus, it can be a cooperative effort: charter $chool$ kick kid$ out, then recommend them to their “partner” (or $ilent partner) alternative $chool. Ka-ching!
And, better yet, a more direct $chool-to-pri$on pipeline.
For “other people’s kids.”
Off topic, but interesting: There is a major scandal underway in Prince George’s County (suburban WashDC) public schools. See
https://www.nbcwashington.com/news/local/Prince-Georges-Grade-Tampering-Report-Graduation-454970073.html
PG County schools are so bad, that many families illegally enroll their children in the WashDC public schools, and sneak them in, on an “underground railroad”
You post scandals from non-public schools (correctly, they should be posted). I suggest that you give equal time to the scandals at public schools as well.
also see
http://www.fox5dc.com/news/local-news/prince-georges-co-schools-performed-internal-audit-on-student-records
This has the scent of a “cover-up”, the PG school board knew of the irregularities, long before the mandated audit.
When I first began to teach, I taught at a private school that was in the midst of trying to re-define its mission. A hundred years before, it had been a mission school for people in a remote region. By the time I took a teaching position there, it had decided to try its hand at alternative education. The idea behind the school was that some of the students failing in traditional schools needed more attention and different curriculum approaches.
I visited several alternative approaches in treatment centers and public schools over my years there and after. All had one characteristic in common: they had their own approach to whatever problem they perceived as their mission. Students that did not fit that mission were eventually moved elsewhere.
During the forty years that have almost elapsed since then, I have seen the public define alternative schools in terms of the failure of the students. A student is caught with a joint, he goes to alternative school. A student has committed some offense placing him in position to receive negative feedback from his peers, he goes to alternative school. This is not the vision of the places I visited or worked at. Real alternatives to traditional classes should exist for students whose needs are different enough so that teachers and parents see the need for a change.
These efforts are expensive. But they pay off.