No excuses!
Newark’s largest charter-school network suspends students with disabilities at a disproportionately high rate, violating their rights, according to a new complaint filed with the state.
The complaint alleges that North Star Academy gave suspensions to 29 percent of students with disabilities during the 2016-17 school year. The network disputes the complaint’s allegations and says the actual figure was 22 percent.
North Star removed students with disabilities from their classrooms for disciplinary reasons, including suspensions and expulsions, 269 times that school year, according to the complaint filed by an attorney at the Education & Health Law Clinic at Rutgers Law School in Newark. The complaint is based on state data and reports by parents who contacted the clinic.
Those numbers stand in sharp contrast to ones at Newark Public Schools, where students with disabilities were sent out for disciplinary reasons just 87 times that school year, according to state data. Overall, just 1.3 percent of special-education students and 1.1 percent of all students were suspended in 2016-17, according to the attorney’s analysis of state data. Excluding North Star, the city’s charter schools together suspended about 9 percent of students with disabilities, the analysis found…
North Star is part of the Uncommon Schools network — one of several large charter-school organizations whose reliance on strict discipline and demanding academics is sometimes called “no excuses.” Some of the schools have softened their discipline policies in recent years, but others have held firm, insisting that their no-nonsense approach to misbehavior creates a safe, orderly environment where students can focus on academics.
According to the complaint, North Star continues to take an exacting approach to managing behavior. Each week, students receive behavior points in the form of “paychecks.” They can lose points for even minor infractions, such as not paying attention in class or violating the school-uniform code. If their points dip below a certain level, they can be sent to detention or suspended, the complaint says.
The complaint alleges that some students with disabilities struggle to follow the rules, and wind up being punished at a higher rate than non-disabled students. Federal data from the 2014-15 school year appear to support that claim. In that year, students with disabilities made up 7.2 percent of North Star’s enrollment, yet they received 16.5 percent of in-school suspensions and 12.9 percent of out-of-school suspensions, according to data compiled by the U.S. Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights
Diane Ravitch's blog 
This is a tactic most if not all publicly funded, private sector charter schools follow to harass the children they don’t want and drive them out.
I am often reminded of an analogy found in the book The Tipping Point where the author mentions equally talented basketball players being observed in both a well-lit gym and one where the many of the lights were not functioning. While the well-lit players kept hitting the basket and those in the poorly-lit gym kept missing, the observers EVEN WHEN TOLD THAT THERE WAS A DISCREPANCY IN LIGHTING simply argued that the players in the well-lit gym were “just better.” Control the environment, do not play fair, and still the pubic will laud your great success.
Say it ain’t so, Joe!
Charter Schools SUCK.
Charters seem to repeatedly get away with driving out the vulnerable and more expensive to educate. Parents with children that have been classified are better off in public schools where IDEA must be followed, and the teachers have met minimum requirements through certification.
” North Star continues to take an exacting approach to managing behavior. Each week, students receive behavior points in the form of “paychecks.” They can lose points for even minor infractions, such as not paying attention in class or violating the school-uniform code. If their points dip below a certain level, they can be sent to detention or suspended, the complaint says.”
Well, all they need to do is offer paychecks with bonus points and perks for full conformity to all of the rules all the time, every day. Then they will have a version of the social credit system in China and fully affirm that every student is worker with more or less value to the boss depending on their compliance with the rules. The paycheck for good behavior is an ugly idea to begin with–another case of monitzing everything possible.
This doesn’t surprise me in the slightest, but thank goodness someone is keeping an eye on the 17k charter students in Newark. Apparently not the state [nu]. But kudos to Rutgers Law School’s Education & Health Law Clinic for calling out North Star, which educates 4k of them.
Placing a SpEd child in a no-excuses charter must be a tough decision, presumably done under duress. It was hard enough in a fine pubsch w/a good SpEd dept to convince teachers to give my socially-clueless boys some slack [2 of my 3 had IEP’s].
“They can lose points for even minor infractions, such as not paying attention in class ?? I guess they believe kids w/ADD can be simply browbeaten out of the disorder. And such a rule suggests lessons are delivered via lecture to kids sitting in rows, hands folded. (How 19thC factory-style… Where’s BDeVos when you need her?)
I think the no excuses charter schools browbeating and bullying children with ADD or other learning challenges might end up causing PTSD that the child will live with for the rest of their lives even after they are adults.
https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/post-traumatic-stress-disorder-ptsd/causes/
This is a very interesting subject, & I like the summary given at your link. Clearly, PTSD occurs across a spectrum determined not just by the degree of severity or length of exposure, but also by variants in the individual’s genetic makeup and life experience. This means that the longterm med/low-level abuse inflicted by, say, inflexible adults on
LD kids will be just a bumpy ride for some, & create a lifelong stumbling block for others.
My experience – both w/SpEd children’s ed, & w/an auto crash – confirms that mental illness makes a huge difference here. In both cases, one involved had bipolar; these folks are fragile & often experience long-term PTSD from experiences others overcome w/o lasting damage. Such illnesses are fairly common [1 in 40 for bipolar] & are often undiagnosed until late in K12. Which makes the exposure huge in no-excuses schools just willy-nilly treating every rule infraction w/disapprobation and cookie-cutter punishments.