Eight Detroit-area public school students returning to classes this week are plaintiffs against a school system they say has failed them.
Their families and the American Civil Liberties Union say that the Highland Park school system has denied the students the right to learn to read, and that the state has a responsibility to fix that.
Michelle Johnson has five children in Highland Park schools. Her daughter is heading into the 12th grade, but can read at only about the fourth-grade level.
"It's heartbreaking every morning when you get up and people look in your face and say, 'Oh, that's that lady, her daughter can't read,' " Johnson says.
Poor Reading Scores
Johnson says she noticed her daughter struggling a few years ago and wanted her to repeat the eighth grade. But the school wouldn't do that, she says.
"They moved her onto the ninth. She failed some of her ninth-grade classes, [and] they still passed her onto the 10th," she says.
Attorneys for the ACLU say Johnson's daughter is not alone. They point to Michigan state data showing that only one-quarter of the Highland Park district's sixth- and seventh-graders passed the state's reading exam last year.
"I think this is one of the most important lawsuits in the history of the country when it comes to basic educational rights," says Mark Rosenbaum, who is representing the plaintiffs through the ACLU.
The lawsuit accuses the state of failing to enforce a Michigan law that says students who do poorly on standardized reading tests — which are given in the fourth or seventh grades — must receive remedial help to bring them up to grade level. Rosenbaum is asking a judge to enforce that law.
"The fact is that this is the first 'right to read' case, but it won't be the last," he says. "The reality is that there are children throughout Michigan and throughout the country whose ZIP code is determining their educational opportunities."
Pressing 'The Restart Button'
No one from the school district will concede that the system has failed when it comes to remedial education. To further muddy the waters, there's been a huge upheaval in the district's administration. The state has appointed an emergency manager to fix the district's troubled finances. And this summer, that state appointee turned the entire district over to a charter-school operator.
Kansas City's Failed Schools Leave Students Behind
The charter company, The Leona Group, has now been added as a defendant in the lawsuit. While Leona Group officials won't talk directly about the court case, Pamela Williams, the superintendent of this new charter school system, says things will change. She promises that any student who does poorly on state exams or the district's own assessments going forward will get prompt remedial help.
"What we're going to do is to press the restart button," Williams says. "And when students come in, we are going to gather baseline data, and then go from there."
Those are great promises, says Rosenbaum. But, he says, "that's a long way from saying the resources, the wherewithal, the capabilities and capacity are present in this charter."
For their part, state officials are declining to comment on the lawsuit. They argue in court filings that the state constitution gives local districts full control over schools.
But the plaintiffs say that position smacks of trying to have it both ways. They argue that the state taking over the district was a drastic step — and an acknowledgement that the school system has failed here. And that, they say, means it's the state's job to fix it.
The judge has scheduled a hearing for next month.
NATIONAL PUBLIC RADIO
http://www.npr.org/2012/09/06/160244350/students-say-theyve-been-denied-the-right-to-read

By Yaman Salahi, Arthur Liman Fellow
Anyone snapping a photograph or taking notes in a public place is a potential threat to public safety.
That is the message that the LAPD continues to send to its officers and the general public through its Suspicious Activity Reporting (SAR) program.
Launched in 2008, the LAPD’s SAR program identifies a number of “suspicious activities” that officers should report to the department’s counterterrorism division. But LAPD identifies not only criminal acts like possessing fake IDs, but also “suspicious activities” including taking photographs or video, making notes, drawing diagrams — even making friends (or building “contacts,” in the language of the order).
SAR reports are reviewed not only by the LAPD counterterrorism squad, but also sent to the Joint Regional Intelligence Center in Norwalk. At this “fusion center,” an intelligence clearinghouse, staffed by various state, local, and federal agencies, the reports can be uploaded to a national database accessible by law enforcement agencies across the country.
This kind of information sharing might sound good in theory, but a recent study from George Washington University, co-authored by the LAPD’s very own Deputy Chief Michael Downing, the head of the LAPD’s Counter-Terrorism and Special Operations Bureau, found that suspicious activity reporting has “flooded fusion centers, law enforcement, and other security entities with white noise.” In practice, the profusion of SAR reports “complicates the intelligence process and distorts resource allocation and deployment decisions.”
It’s not hard to understand why filling counterterrorism databases with files on people taking photographs makes those databases less useful. But the harm done by SAR is more than just inefficiency: by identifying lawful activities like photography as “suspicious,” police subject people who are doing nothing wrong to police encounters and questioning. Their identifying information is then shared in counterterrorism files that lead to difficulty traveling, problems with naturalizing, or inability to obtain government jobs or security clearances. Harassment of photographers by police, for example, has spiked nationally as departments across the country have adopted SAR programs modeled largely on LAPD’s.
The ACLU of Southern California has repeatedly advocated for safeguards that would limit SAR’s focus to criminal activity. Innocent people shouldn’t get detained for lawful activity, and personal information shouldn’t end up in an intelligence database when police have no reason to suspect that someone is involved in criminal activity.
The best way to prevent that from happening is for LAPD to refrain from filing SAR reports about individuals unless an officer has reasonable suspicion of criminal activity. That’s a standard that has been well-defined by courts, and one on which police officers receive exhaustive training that would make it easy to implement. And it’s a low standard: it requires only that officers be able to articulate a reason to suspect criminal activity.  And that standard is what police need to detain an individual temporarily, or pat someone down, acts that police manage to accomplish regularly all across Los Angeles.
But in proposing changes to the SAR policy at the Los Angeles Police Commission meeting on Tuesday, the LAPD expressly refused to include that guarantee, and the civilian Police Commission didn’t press them on it. The department insisted that they should be allowed to fill databases with information where there isn’t an articulable basis to believe that criminal activity is afoot. and the civilian Police Commission approved a policy that will let them do just that.
This battle isn’t over yet. The LAPD’s Inspector General is currently auditing the SAR program, and will issue a report back to the Police Commission within the next couple of months. That report should shed some light on the effects of the program, and whether it would really hurt the department’s efforts to require reasonable suspicion. When that happens, the Police Commission will have an opportunity to restore the balance between law enforcement powers and the public’s civil liberties.
The head of LAPD’s own counterterrorism bureau knows that low value SAR reports hurt counterterrorism efforts more than they help. So we should ask the LAPD to take the simple steps necessary to protect our free speech and privacy rights, and to stop harassing people engaged in perfectly lawful — and often, constitutionally protected — activities.

By Tami Abdollah
Tucked behind a state prison in the dusty high desert of Lancaster, the Challenger Memorial Youth Center is Los Angeles County’s largest probation facility. Each of its six camps is named after an astronaut who died in the 1986 Challenger space shuttle disaster; the school, Christa McAuliffe High, takes its name from the teacher who was onboard.
The sprawling grounds are austere, with squat buildings and few trees to block the harsh sunlight. Probation officers sit by brightly colored doors listening to the rumble of classes in session. Some students are hunched down behind flat-screen computers zipping through English courses; others work with high-tech building gear in goggles, while another group reads aloud about food safety, animatedly responding to questions from their teacher.
To truly appreciate this picture, you need to know what Challenger was like before — even just a year ago, when L.A. County officials settled a major class-action federal lawsuit that had made the camp's name synonymous with failure.
That failure, at one of the nation’s largest complexes for housing and educating juvenile offenders, was summed up in a class action lawsuit. The suit detailed allegations of officials systematically denying young people their fundamental right to an education by graduating a student who could not read his own diploma, locking students in solitary confinement (sometimes for months) and haphazardly kicking students out of class.
But a 2011 settlement agreement gave county officials a legal mandate to change. The agreement requires monitoring and quarterly reports by a team of experts over four years who check on 13 areas of reform, including literacy, instruction and special education. A monitor is at the site several times a month, sometimes weekly.
“There’s a lot of pressure on everybody,” said school principal Marsha Watkins. “We live in a fishbowl pretty much. But the real bottom line is it comes down to kids. ...We weren’t doing what we needed to do for kids, and now we are.”
Yet even as Challenger emerges as a possible model for teaching incarcerated kids, budget worries may endanger these reform efforts. Cuts to state funding have already forced a round of layoffs since the settlement, and such new and innovative programs —as well as the training for them — require more resources. There is a fear that, though support and focus is here now, that won't remain the case in the future.
Challenger is home to about 240 teenage boys spread through three camps. Up to 40 percent of the youths are special education students, while 40 percent are English-language learners. Roughly 65 percent are Latino and 25 percent are African-American. With its 24-hour medical access, the maximum-security facility is where many boys with mental disorders are assigned.
“They’ve committed numerous crimes, everything from drive-by shootings to petty theft, to drugs — you name it, we have it all,” said Steve Gores, a special assistant with the probation department who's been at Challenger since Nov. 2010.
Over the last year, the camp has changed from a place where books were banned in dorms to one where there is a library and daily silent reading sessions after lunch. A slew of vocational programs have sprung up, including a building skills construction trade course, a ServeSafe food handling class and a landscaping program.
Students are also involved in after-school programs such as bicycle repair and dog grooming. The county has introduced a new reading comprehension program and an educational credit-recovery course.
“The kids are beginning to see that somebody really cares about their environment, and they’re taking better care of it themselves,” said L.A. County Office of Education Superintendent Arturo Delgado. “They’re getting turned on to some of the programs we put before them, and when you talk to them, they talk a little different now. ‘Yeah, I really like this program, it was boring before.’ So it’s not boring anymore.”
Practical skills
In a cavernous room, six students dressed in dark brown jumpsuits work intently over broad workbenches under the watchful eye of two probation officers, as well as their teacher, Judy Warner.
The shop rivals any high-tech woodshop outside the camp’s walls — except that the equipment is attached to the tables.
“This is the best,” Warner said. “That’s how it compares. It has all trades, where a lot of the woodshops are woodshop specific. And you can see, the gentleman over there sweating copper pipe for plumbing, the gentleman over there hooking up electric light bulbs — we’re teaching this gentleman here cabinetmaking.”
Watkins quietly pointed out that the two students sharing the blowtorch on the copper tubing are rival gang members. One of those is Dwayne. (Because of court restrictions, only students who were 18 were able to talk to this reporter, and their last names were not disclosed.)
Dwayne, 18, previously a student at Washington Preparatory High School, has been at Challenger for three months, with seven to go. It’s his second time in the camp; his last time was in 2009-2010, he said.
“When I first came, none of these programs was here,” Dwayne said. “It was just stressful, boring. … All the programs, they make your time go by faster now … instead of in the dorms sitting around. Keeps you out of trouble. I like it.”
So far he’s studied electrical work, plumbing and wall framing. Each section takes about 10 days, “but I just read through the book and watched the DVD, and I’m a quick learner, so after I did it, I just learned how to do it, so like two days,” Dwayne said. “When I get out I want to see if I can get a job or go to school for this.”
The building skills program started in March and is part of the career technical education that the camp is required to provide for all students as part of the settlement.
Only some boys are allowed in this program because of the potentially dangerous equipment, but school officials said they are working on creating other programs in high-demand careers such as medicine and technology that would require fewer safety precautions.
At a nearby table, Keimond, 18, expertly measured out pieces of wood, marking them with a pencil. He was working on making a cabinet and had already finished some bookshelves.
“I plan to take it all home,” Keimond said. “The plumbing for sure, there’s a lot of stuff I can use around the home. … I know I can do some plumbing around the house, drywall, anything that can be broke, I can fix it, instead of having my mama call, pay for it.”
Keimond was a student at Compton High School before he got to Challenger. He’s been in a month and a half, and had three months left.
“I want to go to college,” Keimond said. “It really wasn’t a thought until I got here. But I wouldn’t mind taking up construction at L.A. Trade Tech.”
 
 
 
The camp is full of new programs. In one classroom, students sit in a room with rows of new computers, staring at the screens for four-hour blocks at a time. It is the new AdvancePath Academy, the first such credit-recovery program in a lockup environment. In a week and a half after its April launch, students were completing an entire semester English course.
Such programs have their detractors, who question the quality of an online program built for speed. But teacher Shelley Torres said the new course has already resulted in a “dramatic change” in students’ behavior.
“They’re more actively engaged, and I think they feel they’re much more in control of their education or their process,” Torres said. Instead of relying on the teacher to deliver instruction, “they have instruction at their hands.”
Torres has been a county teacher for 10 years and has taught at Christa McAuliffe for the last year. She said the changes have changed the entire atmosphere of the school.
“They had a basketball team here from the camps, and it’s off-season now, so they don’t have that now, but you know, I’ve had students asking me, ‘Are you staying today? Can you stay ‘til 4 p.m. and come watch us play? We’re competing against X camp,’” Torres said. “So you’re hearing that, stuff like that. Whereas before, you wouldn’t hear a student say … 'can you stay and come,' because nothing like that was really happening.”
The changes, including the introduction of a reading comprehension course, have come swiftly with a new program added nearly every month over the past year. The expert reports and court filings have told the tale of a sometimes-rocky road to reform; county officials and observers noted that these are the first tentative steps toward what officials hope will be long-term progress.
“It has the potential, [but] I wouldn’t say it’s a model program yet,” said Peter Leone, a professor of special education at the University of Maryland. Leone is a national expert at delivering education in detention settings and a monitor in this case. He has been involved in monitoring and reform at dozens of facilities for 25 years.
“If it was a wall, we’d say the paint’s still wet,” Leona said.
He said the key piece is sustainability.
“It’s never easy to make a big change, but it’s easier when you’ve got some attention, because then you’ve got the support and you have consensus about what needs to be done,” Leone said.
“It’s harder to maintain that over time if there isn’t sufficient both community support and organizational support. So on LACOE’s side, you have to have a culture that supports the notion that the students who are incarcerated in the probation camps are entitled to high-quality educational services ... because we know that the likelihood of being arrested and re-offending is correlated with their levels of achievement.”
The initial gains were lost last year when the county’s budget problems forced it to send pink slips to teachers at Challenger; the principal also left, and behavior problems rose once again. This year, the school’s 29 teachers barely avoided another round of layoffs after the county put out a robust incentive package to get people to retire early.
“We are very pleased about the changes that we are seeing, but we also remain concerned about sustainability and quality assurance over the long term,” said Laura Faer, lead counsel and education rights director for Public Counsel, which was a party in the lawsuit. “The key to lasting reform in this case is ensuring that the changes are actually systemized. … We don’t want to be back here 10, 15, 20 years from now.”
The reform efforts have been led by Superintendent Delgado, who started last summer, as well as Principal Watkins, who took the helm in January. Together, the two have revitalized the reform.
Delgado said that, during his job interview, a supervisor told him something he always remembers: she didn’t feel that the county’s Office of Education understood its mission.
“One of my goals is to make sure that everybody understands what the mission is,” Delgado said. “The mission is to save these kids, to give them hope, and we do that through education, and we do whatever it takes.”
And though Watkins has agreed to remain principal for one more year, the school will need to find a replacement — a task many worry will not start early enough.
We need “to really grow long, deep roots,” Watkins said. “We really need to institutionalize everything we’ve done. Everything is startup, everything is new, and that’s great, but it needs to have sustainability, it needs to be able to continue, regardless of who’s sitting in this chair.”
http://www.scpr.org/news/2012/08/29/34065/countys-challenger-youth-camp-overcomes-troubled-p/