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Predicting it is the easy part…

Predicting school dropout seems to be as easy as ABC, according to a growing body of empirical evidence it appears attendance, behavior, and course failures are pretty darn accurate by middle school at predicting who will not finish high school.

The National High School Center’s Early Warning System (EWS) Middle Grades Tool enables schools and districts to identify students who may be at risk for academic failure and to monitor these students’ responses to interventions. The tool relies on student level data available at the school or district including indicators for attendance, course failures, and behavior (if available) to calculate potential risk for eventual dropping out. The intended purpose is to support students with an increased risk of academic failure, in order to get them back on track for academic success and eventual graduation.

To learn about and download this free tool click below:

http://www.betterhighschools.org/EWS_middle.asp

The National High School Center is part of a national network of Content and Regional Comprehensive Centers funded by the U.S. Department of Education to help build the capacity of states across the nation to effectively implement the provisions and goals of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA). The National High School Center is one of five content centers covering a spectrum of topical areas especially relevant to NCLB and school improvement.

While predicting school dropout may be as easy as ABC, intervening to prevent school dropout can be a bit tricker.  I’ve included a link below that provides an overview of 10 effective teaching principles and how they relate to academic success that leads to school completion. Included are practical strategies that teachers can use to make their instruction more effective are also included.

http://successfulschools.org/resources/academic/effective-instruction-an-inconspicuous-strategy-for-dropout-prevention

Have a look and let me know if you have utilized any of the strategies provided in the link or have other strategies you have found to be effective.

The Annual Border Conference on Special Education will provide updates on special education topics including legal requirements and issues, and other related hot topics such as Accountability, STAAR, Conflict Resolution and more.

General Session: Reducing the Need and Use of Suspension: Effective policies and practices  (Dr. Robert March)

School districts across the country are rightfully concerned about the numbers of students who are being suspended or expelled for their behavior. Part of this concern is heightened by the fact that there appears to be over-representation of students with special educational needs, especially students from minority backgrounds who are suspended or expelled from school (Skiba, Michael, Nardo & Peterson, 2002). Emerging research indicates that these consequences are not likely to change the inappropriate behavior of the students involved, nor do they serve to deter other students from engaging in the same behaviors (Skiba, Peterson & Williams, 1997, 1999). Instead, these consequences make the suspended student’s academic progress more difficult, and may increase the likelihood of the student dropping out of school or having other negative outcomes.
Dr. March will review specific policies he has helped develop and effective practices he has researched that have been implemented in several school districts resulting in significant reductions in the need for and use of in-school and out of school suspension.  Each of the policies and practices has empirical evidence demonstrating positive behavioral-change outcomes for students, and provides educators opportunities to maintain or re-engage students in school rather than pushing them out of school.

For handouts of his presentation, click here “Recent Presentations“.

By FERNANDA SANTOS

The New York City Council will hold a public hearing next month to scrutinize the Education Department’s system for collecting Medicaid reimbursements for services it provides to special-needs students, after a report in The New York Times last week about the city’s failure to recover many millions of dollars in reimbursements in recent years.

The department “needs to make clear to the Council, and therefore to the city, how they’ve overcome the errors made in the past,” Speaker Christine C. Quinn said in an interview.

Ms. Quinn, who plans to participate in the hearing, said understanding the reimbursement process could be a powerful weapon during what is shaping up as a lean season this spring, when the city is likely to impose another round of budget cuts to offset declining revenues. The budget, which is made final in May, uses projections to estimate the amount the department will receive in Medicaid reimbursements. Knowing how those projections are calculated would help the Council make decisions, she said.

“This way we can say, ‘No, we don’t have to make this cut because we believe your projections are under,’ or ‘No, we don’t want to bank on this money because the projections sound too generous,’ ” Ms. Quinn said.
State Health Department statistics from 2006 to 2010 show that at $33 million, the schools-based Medicaid reimbursements received by the city last year were 60 percent below what they were five years ago.

The Bloomberg administration’s most recent financial plan, released in November, paints a decidedly more optimistic picture, estimating that the reimbursements will increase by $50 million in each of the next three fiscal years, to a total of $167 million during the period from July 1, 2012, to June 30, 2015.

Ms. Quinn said that if the Council had known that in June, when it reached agreement with Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg on the city’s most recent budget, “we could have advocated to avoid the school-aide layoffs.” The budget called for 1,000 layoffs; in October, 672 aides and other members of school support staffs lost their jobs.

The public hearing, on Feb. 28, will be held jointly by the Council’s Finance and Education Committees. Ms. Quinn said it would aim to “drill down more deeply” into how the Education Department has corrected the shortcomings uncovered by a 2005 federal audit, which ultimately led it to return $100 million in Medicaid reimbursements because it could not properly document the claims.

In a statement, Dennis M. Walcott, the city schools chancellor, said, “We are committed to addressing the issues associated with our Medicaid claims, and are in the midst of implementing an aggressive plan in order to increase our reimbursements and to ensure we create a long-term sustainable solution so our students and schools receive the money to which they are entitled.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/07/education/council-to-scrutinize-nyc-schools-medicaid-reimbursements.html?scp=1&sq=Hearing%20to%20Scrutinize%20Medicaid%20Reimbursement%20to%20Schools&st=cse

WASHINGTON – U.S. public schools suspend black, Hispanic and disabled students at much higher rates than others, according to a new report by a Colorado-based civil rights group.

The report by the National Education Policy Center (NEPC) says that frequent suspensions and expulsions should “raise questions about a school’s disciplinary policies, discrimination, the quality of its school leadership and the training of its personnel.”

The report follows several recent studies in which advocacy groups have questioned harsh school disciplinary policies. Most notably, the Council of State Governments, a Kentucky-based research organization, looked at suspension and expulsion rates for Texas public schools and found in July that nearly six in 10 students had been suspended or expelled at least once between seventh and 12th grade.

The latest findings “strongly suggest a need for reform,” according to the NEPC, based at the University of Colorado-Boulder’s School of Education. The center is a left-leaning think tank that studies racial justice in K-12 education.

The report doesn’t provide any new findings, but instead reviews current statistics from states and the U.S. Education Department’s Office of Civil Rights.

The federal government found that between the 1972-73 and the 2006-07 school years, suspension rates for white students rose from 3% to 5%. Meanwhile, suspension rates for black students rose from 6% to 15%.
Suspension rates for Hispanic students rose from 3% to 7%.
Justin Hamilton, a spokesman for the U.S. Department of Education, said department officials hadn’t seen the new report, but he said they were aware of “troubling reports across the country” of the disparity in minority and white discipline rates. He said the department is taking the reports seriously. “In the end, we want to make sure that every student is treated fairly and given the opportunities and the resources to succeed,” he said.

Recent federal findings also show that minority students with disabilities are suspended at a much higher rate than white students. In the 2007-08 school year, 16.6% of black disabled students were suspended, vs. 6.7% of white disabled students.

“I think there is a growing movement to say, ‘Wait a minute, we can do better,’” said Daniel Losen of the Civil Rights Project at UCLA. Losen, who wrote the NEPC report, says recent statistics show that minority and disabled students are often suspended for minor offenses.
“Suspending kids right and left for minor offenses is not a sound educational policy,” Losen says.

http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/story/2011-10-04/minority-students-face-more-suspensions/50661220/1

In an unprecedented study of nearly 1 million Texas public secondary school students followed for more than six years, nearly 60 percent were suspended or expelled, according to a report released in July 2011 by the Council of State Governments (CSG) Justice Center in partnership with the Public Policy Research Institute of Texas A&M University.

Breaking Schools’ Rules: A Statewide Study of How School Discipline Relates to Students’ Success and Juvenile Justice Involvement (click title for article) and Juvenile Justice Involvement features these other key findings:

• Of the nearly 1 million public secondary school students studied, about 15 percent were suspended or expelled 11 times or more; nearly half of these students with 11 or more disciplinary actions were involved in the juvenile justice system.
• Only three percent of the disciplinary actions were for conduct in which state law mandated suspensions and expulsions; the rest were made at the discretion of school officials primarily in response to violations of local schools’ conduct codes.
• African-American students and those with particular educational disabilities were disproportionately disciplined for discretionary actions.
• Repeated suspensions and expulsions predicted poor academic outcomes. Only 40 percent of students disciplined 11 times or more graduated from high school during the study period, and 31 percent of students disciplined one or more times repeated their grade at least once.

Schools that had similar characteristics, including the racial composition and economic status of the student body, varied greatly in how frequently they suspended or expelled students.

This is the first post in what will be regular contributions on successful schools.  I encourage educators to use this site as a sounding board for their practices and an opportunity to share what they find works.

Teaching special needs kids

May 19, 2009

A look at a school for special needs children in Allentown, Pennsylvania that is working.

http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/living/2009/05/19/natpkg.centennial.school.cnn?iref=videosearch

GAO report: Special-needs kids abused in schools

Mon May 18, 2009

GAO report uncovers abuse of techniques used to restrain or discipline children.

http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/05/18/siu.schools.abuse/index.html

Welcome to Successful Schools’ Field TRIP’s.  Field TRIPs are brief practical guides that Turn Research into Practice (TRIP). Field TRIPs summarize the latest research in the education field, and translate it into ready-to-use strategies for your classroom.

Please let us know how you’ve used our Field TRIP’s or if there are topics you would like to see us address in future Field TRIP reports.

successfulschools.org/resources/field-trips