STUDENTS: the US Dept of Education just released data on racial disparities in every school and school district in America (from preK-12). Here’s how you use the data to show if/how your school discriminates against black students and other marginalized groups. A thread.
Search for your district on this page, and then follow the link to its discipline report.
Click on the Discipline Report on the right side and you’ll see which groups of students your school is most likely to suspend, expel, and refer to law enforcement. You can also see who’s more likely to be arrested at school using the “school related arrests” tab. pic.twitter.com/6ZJKrvPRec
Screenshot of the first page of the discipline report for DSISD showing pie charts for enrollment, in-school suspensions, out-of-school suspensions, and expulsions broken down by race/ethnicity.
Black students are 0.7% of enrollment and account for 2.1% of in-school suspensions, 7.1% of out-of-school suspensions, 0% of expulsions, and 2.7% of referrals to law enforcement.
Hispanic students are 20.1% of enrollment and account for 28.1% of in-school suspensions, 21.4% of out-of-school suspensions, 50% of expulsions, and 34.2% of referrals to law enforcement.
IDEA students are 9.7% of enrollment and account for 36.5% of in-school suspensions, 42.9% of out-of-school suspensions, 50% of expulsions, and 31.5% of referrals to law enforcement.
When you present data showing black students are more likely to be disciplined, you will inevitable find people who try to say that it’s because black students misbehave more. That’s a racist lie. Be prepared to shut them down with the facts: https://t.co/Ld0NDIE4hXpic.twitter.com/y5bmp2b8jq
Make sure you are intersectional in your analysis: black girls tend to be disciplined at particularly high rates compared to white girls and students with disabilities (defined as IDEA on the site) – especially students of color tend to be disciplined at the highest rates.
Read about how other schools have taken action to address the issues you’ve identified. The Advancement Project / Dignity in Schools are good resources. Reach out to activists and organizations #onhere if you have questions. Share your insights with others, organize, take action.
Agile teams, distributed collaboration, and the hacker ethos of flexible improvisation and rapid iteration are powerful artifacts of the disruptive rise of software. They are life and industry changing. When informed with neurodiversity and the social model of disability in an open by default culture, they are a future for education and work where we collaborate and iterate our way through massive software-driven change. We will navigate disruption with compassion, finding opportunity and inspiration in the diversity of our shared humanity. We are humans making things for and with other humans, helping each other cope with sentience and senescence on our pale blue dot. Communicate, collaborate, iterate, launch. With these tools we’ll make it through.
There is thoughtlessness all around us, in all human systems. In this thoughtlessness is opportunity. Engage learners in designing for real life. Start by designing a shared, grassroots culture together with students.
Culture can be the foundation for all future innovation, or it can be the single biggest resistance to innovation. Don’t fuck up culture.
If your school culture is someone else's IP, it's not your culture. Bring the creative commons to the classrooms & hallways of public ed.
A great fallacy born from the failure to study culture is the assumption that you can take a practice from one culture and simply jam it into another and expect similar results. Much of what bad managers do is assume their job is simply to find new things to jam and new places to jam them into, without ever believing they need to understand how the system—the system of people known as culture—works.
My family didn’t realize an election for Dripping Springs ISD was happening until my mom received an early voting ballot in the mail. After too much digging, we found this page on the pretty awful district website.
The bios there are a handful of paragraphs that do not communicate vision or provide much of a writing sample. I need writing samples to elect someone to a school board. School systems demand much of our kids, and school representatives should put at least as much effort into their campaign writing as a student does on a writing prompt on a standardized test.
Finding the election information page took some doing. The district website is a tough one to navigate and follow. The main sections of the site are District News and Calendar. I can find no mention of the election in either section. To find the election page, you must search for “election”.
How easy is the election to find from social media? A search for “election” on the district’s Facebook page has no results since 2013.
Twitter fares no better. A search for “election” there likewise doesn’t turn up anything since 2013.
How about the candidates, how visible are they? I found Facebook groups for the two incumbents. One is closed to comments without joining the group and the other is closed completely without joining the group and has only 12 members.
This is not transparent.
What to do about it? Well, I recently met Austin Kids First at a do_action event. They are working on transparency and candidate cultivation in Austin ISD. Sounds like AISD was in a similar situation a few years ago. I get the feeling this is typical of most districts. Now, thankfully, these questionnaires offer a sense of the vision, policy and writing of AISD board candidates.
I’d like DSISD candidates to answer the questions in those questionnaires as well as these:
Are you on board with Most Likely to Succeed and project-based learning?
Where can I go online to find out about you and your vision for Dripping Springs education?
What is the board’s role in modernizing the tools and workflow of DSISD to accommodate project-based learning and transparency?
What is the board’s role in ensuring that the digital, physical, and cultural infrastructure of DSISD accommodates all people, regardless of gender, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, disability, neurodivergence, personal appearance, body size, race, ethnicity, age, religion, or nationality.
Should creationism be taught in school?
I think those give a feel for a candidate’s grasp of modernity. The first question is particularly important given that DSISD is becoming a district of innovation so it can embrace the Most Likely to Succeed narrative and project-based learning. This is a big deal, yet I know nothing about the candidates’ positions on MLTS and project-based learning. The district’s social media and website have said nothing about it since announcing some screenings of the film back in January.
We need an Austin Kids First style effort for DSISD, and the district needs some publishing and social media flow. I happen to know some people who can help with publishing, for free, including freedom zero. Involve students in the project of bringing modern, open source publishing flow to the district with the help of volunteers from the communities and companies that will be in some of their futures. Start project-based learning by involving them in publishing and technology. Allow them advocacy and agency by letting them participate in building the digital infrastructure of a modern, project-based, transparent district in touch with the creative commons and the future of work.
Humane indie ed-tech compatible with distributed collaboration and the social model for minds and bodies. https://t.co/5AOGnbY26o
