Chalkbeat

Frequent school changes are hurting students. Here’s how Detroit’s educators want to fix the problem.

2018-11-16T21:39:01+00:00

As Detroit education leaders gathered Thursday night to find solutions to the problem of students frequently changing schools, it was clear that the stakes for Detroit’s students could not be higher.

When Alisanda Woods, the principal of Detroit’s Bethune Elementary-Middle School took the stage at the Detroit Public Library, she noted that six new students had enrolled in her school the day before, more than two months after the first day of school.

Katherine Andrews, a panelist who teaches in the University Prep charter school district, said the relentless arrival and departure of students haunts her classroom on a regular basis. “It’s almost like the class is going through a mourning period, like they’re going through grief,” she said. “They’re looking at it like there’s a plate missing from the dinner table. ‘Where’s Shawn? Why is Shawn not here? Why didn’t he get a chance to say goodbye?’”

Thursday’s forum came in the wake of a series of reports by Chalkbeat and Bridge Magazine called Moving Costs that examined the way students changing schools disrupts classrooms.

The discussion, which will be rebroadcast in coming days on Detroit Public Television and as an episode of Detroit Today on WDET, focused on solutions to the problem including the creation of a citywide student data systems that could keep track of where students are enrolled and where they’re moving.

Other ideas includes changes to student discipline policies so that schools can’t push students out for misbehavior.

The challenge of enrollment instability is made complicated by the fact that Detroit’s education landscape is evenly divided between schools run by the Detroit Public Schools Community District and those run by dozens of charter school boards and management companies.

Developing systems to prevent students from hopping around would depend on competitive schools working together. Such cooperation has been difficult to come by in the past. But there are signs that the antagonism has waned in recent months as the city’s district and charter schools have begun collaborating on a a new bus loop that stops at both traditional and charter schools, and on a new school rating system that will soon start assigning letter grades to all Detroit schools.

Here are some of the solutions discussed on Thursday night.

Dawn Wilson-Clark, a parent and organizer with 482Forward, and Katherine Andrews, a teacher with the University Prep charter school district, spoke about the impacts of students changing schools.

Fix the count day problem

When students switch schools, they need extra support. But the financial uncertainty created by school-hopping makes it harder for schools to meet the challenge, said Superintendent Nikolai Vitti.

As it stands, most of Michigan’s education funds are distributed based on the number of students enrolled in a school on a single day in October.

That means that schools are left in the lurch if they have more students in April than October — and that some schools might try to push out students who are more challenging to educate in late October once they’ve gotten financial credit for that child. To solve the problem, Vitti said fall and spring enrollment should be evenly weighted, a change that would have to be passed by the state legislature.

Jennifer Swanson, a first grade teacher at a Detroit charter school, said she’s seen firsthand the turmoil that can result when a school’s enrollment grows during the year. After attending the forum, she said Vitti’s proposal is a good one.

“Students do move earlier on in the year, and it’s really problematic if you get new students after November,” she said.

Ben Pogodzinski, a Wayne State University professor who has studied the issue and participated in Thursday’s forum said another idea would be to base school funding on average enrollment over three years. That would make funding less dependent on fluctuations that could result in a school getting more or less money that it needs.

A central student data system

When students change schools, teachers are currently forced to sometimes wait weeks for student records to arrive from a student’s previous school

At the same time, schools that see students leave are often left wondering where they’ve gone, unsure whether to mark them absent or call the police.

Maria Montoya, who worked for a central enrollment system in New Orleans before working on a failed effort to bring one to Detroit, said Detroit’s fragmented system for tracking students is unacceptable.

“You continue to hear, well, it’s always been that way,” said Montoya, who now works in the charter school office at Grand Valley State University. “But that doesn’t make it right. A child should not disappear with nobody accountable for them, whether it is a traditional school or a charter.”

Toxic politics killed an earlier effort to create such a system, which would require cooperation between the city’s charter school and the district. Many large cities already have such systems, including Denver; New Orleans; Washington D.C.; Newark; Camden, New Jersey; and Indianapolis.

Michael Chrzan, a math teacher at a charter high school who attended the event, said the debate over charter schools in Detroit has stymied solutions to problems shared by all the city’s schools.

He said that for the first two months of the school year, his attendance list included a student who never showed up for class. Neither he nor his school knew if the student was attending class anywhere. This week, the student’s name finally disappeared.

“He just got dropped from my roster,” Chrzan said. “It’s frustrating.”

A citywide pushback on Detroit’s culture of school hopping

Survey data collected as part of Moving Costs series showed that families moving to new homes wasn’t the leading force driving school changes. In a majority of cases, parents said they were simply looking for a better school.

“It’s different from our generation,” Chastity Pratt-Dawsey, a reporter for Bridge Magazine who grew up in Detroit. “When we didn’t like the school, momma went to the school and said ‘change it’, not ‘I’m going to move.’”

Montoya said parents often don’t push back when schools push them out, typically because they don’t know that schools that receive public money — both charter and traditional — are obligated by law to educate their children, even if they have special needs or behavioral challenges.

No one believes the culture will shift overnight, but Montoya says every interaction between educators and parents is a chance to make progress, to make sure that Detroiters understand their rights as well as the negative impacts of changing schools.

“We need to, as leaders, make sure that we’re giving parents that information,” she said.

A consistent discipline policy

Problems with behavior are a big reason students change schools.

“Honestly they’ve been kicked out (of their old school) most of the time,” said Woods, principal at Bethune, of the students who arrive at her school mid-year. “There are discipline problems, and parents are hopeful that if they take them here they’ll blend in better.”

Vitti said the district is working to design a set of discipline guidelines to push schools to work with students and try to meet their needs.

But he added that a city-wide set of discipline standards — like one being used in New York City — would ensure that troubled students receive extra attention instead of being shunted from school to school.

Better supports for poor families

While there are plenty of school-based policies that could help contain the damage caused by school changes, the panelists made clear that the problem has roots in the poverty and housing instability that continue to plague Detroit

Woods said that some of the students who arrived at her school this week were homeless. One child had not attended school at all the previous year, Woods said, eliciting an audible gasp from the crowd.

That problem will have to be addressed by the city’s residents, its politicians, and its business community, Vitti said.

“Are we serious about developing stadiums, and downtown and midtown neighborhoods, or are we serious about creating homes and neighborhoods?”

Forum to seek solutions to Detroit’s problems with frequent school moves

2018-11-07T19:01:33+00:00

Educators and experts will gather next week for a forum to discuss a Bridge Magazine and Chalkbeat special report on the chaos wrought by pupils frequently changing schools in Detroit.

Detroit Public Schools Community District Superintendent Nikolai Vitti and Darienne Driver, president and CEO of the United Way for Southeastern Michigan, are among those expected to participate in the community conversation.

The discussion, 6 to 8 p.m. Nov. 15 at the main branch of the Detroit Public Library at 5201 Woodward, will be moderated by Stephen Henderson and will be recorded and later aired on two shows he hosts, “Detroit Today” on WDET-FM and “American Black Journal” on Detroit Public Television.

Hosted by Bridge, Chalkbeat and its Detroit Journalism Cooperative partners WDET-FM and Detroit Public Television, the discussion will focus on “Moving Costs,” a series of articles that examined the toll of frequent student movement in Detroit. The series focused on one classroom where the average student had cycled through more than four schools and the road to eighth grade.

Exacerbated by school choice and neighborhood turmoil, the project revealed that 1 in 3 Detroit elementary students change schools each year. Such movement drags down test scores, worsens behavioral issues, fuels dropout rates, and makes it more difficult for all children to learn.

Panelists include series authors Erin Einhorn, Detroit bureau chief of Chalkbeat, and Chastity Pratt Dawsey, a Bridge reporter covering Detroit; Ben Pogodzinski, a Wayne State University education professor; student enrollment and engagement specialist Maria Montoya; parent and advocate Dawn Wilson-Clark of the 482Forward school advocacy organization; Katherine Andrews, a teacher at University Preparatory Academy; and Alisandra Woods, principal at Bethune-Elementary-Middle School, which was the focus of the Moving Cost series.

Registration is free but required. To register, follow this link.

Enrollment instability is a major reason why schools are struggling — so why isn’t anyone tracking the problem?

2018-10-10T20:35:38+00:00

There’s no question that Detroit schools are struggling with the serious consequences of students coming and going throughout the school year. What’s less clear is how the problem compares to other cities and states.

That’s because no one is keeping close track nationally of these frequent school moves, known by academics as student mobility or enrollment instability.

A Milwaukee news organization that surveyed the education departments in all 50 states found that half don’t collect or post data on students hopping around. And of states that do collect the data, the numbers they collect are so inconsistent that making state-to-state comparisons is nearly impossible.

Some count only mid-year switches, for example, while others include changes over the summer. In Florida, students are considered “stable” if they’re in the same school from October to February while in Massachusetts, stable is defined as those enrolled from October to June.

Without reliable data, it’s harder for policymakers to recognize the problem or fashion solutions.

“Of the many dimensions of poverty, student mobility seems to be one that has the ability to be addressed through state and federal policy,” Jeffrey Grigg, a Johns Hopkins University education professor told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. “It has great implications for the instructional work that people are trying to accomplish in schools.”

Chalkbeat last week published Moving Costs, a series of stories with our partners at Bridge Magazine about how student mobility disrupts Detroit classrooms, and not just the students who move from school to school.

We focused on a single 8th-grade classroom where the average student had cycled through more than four schools on their way to eighth grade — a rate that’s not unusual in a city where 1 in 3 elementary school students changes schools every year.

Turmoil like that has been proven to drag down test scores, exacerbate behavioral problems, and drive up dropout rates.

The Journal Sentinel’s reporting found similar issues affecting Milwaukee schools.

The paper’s series, called Lessons Lost, focused on a Milwaukee school that received enough extra money and support from local authorities to improve attendance and reduce suspensions. And yet in a city where 1 in 4 students changes schools every year, test scores remained low as students flowed in and out of the school.

Michigan gubernatorial candidates Schuette, Whitmer push for bus fixes to help Detroit schools

2018-10-03T22:07:02+00:00

Michigan’s candidates for governor are pledging to improve transportation to address rampant school transfers that contribute to low test scores in Detroit.

One day after an investigation by Bridge Magazine and Chalkbeat found 1 in 3 Detroit elementary students switched schools every year, candidates Bill Schuette and Gretchen Whitmer said their education plans could help.

During the 2015-16 school year, nearly 60 percent of Detroit kids — 50,000 students — were enrolled in two or more schools, with some possibly changing schools, then changing back, only to see test scores fall. It’s a situation compounded by a plethora of charter schools and competition from suburbs, but also family instability, poverty and frustration with the city’s traditional schools.

Asked about solutions, both Schuette, a Republican, and Whitmer, a Democrat, pointed to more money for busing.

Transportation is viewed by educators as essential to addressing student mobility, since Wayne State University research has found that just 40 percent of students who switched schools in Detroit moved to a different ZIP code.

Better busing would mean that, if their parents moved, students wouldn’t have to switch schools.

Two years ago, school advocates proposed a unified transportation system in Detroit to serve charter and public schools but it was shot down. Earlier this year, a pilot program backed by Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan began offering bus service to 10 traditional and charter schools in northwest Detroit.

Schuette, who is now attorney general, has been a proponent of schools of choice and charters throughout his decades-long political career.

He reiterated that support on Wednesday, when asked by Bridge and Chalkbeat how he’d address frequent school mobility.

“The ability to shop around, the ability to choose, the ability to go to a different school, forces others to improve. I think that’s an important ingredient,” Schuette said.

“Parents are in charge. You have to have that freedom to go to a different school.”

Schuette’s campaign said his plan to implement a rating system of schools from A to F would help parents make better choices. His plan would award grants to schools that improve.

Schuette said wants to see a scholarship fund for families that need transportation to school.

He didn’t identify specifics, such as the source or amount of the grants, but he has pledged to form partnerships with philanthropies for such programs.

“We must also help families with the greatest financial needs cover the cost of getting their children to the school of their choice,” he said.

Whitmer, a former Senate minority leader, pointed to legislation she introduced in 2013 to allow schools to use a special type of dedicated tax millage — known as sinking funds — to purchase and maintain buses.

It failed but Whitmer said she’d use her clout if elected governor to push for assistance.

“As governor, I’ll work to make sure every student can get to school safely, no matter where they are. This will help drive up test scores and help our kids get ahead,” Whitmer wrote in an email to Bridge and Chalkbeat.

Long-term, Whitmer also proposed reforms to the state’s formula for funding schools.

Now, schools get state funding based on a 1994 law called Proposal A that is based how much districts spent on students when the law was created.

Schools in different areas get different amounts of per-pupil funding, with schools in more affluent areas receiving more state funding than some schools in poor areas.

Whitmer said schools should get more money if they educate children with more needs.

“Providing adequate funding for schools — finally — will mean both kids and teachers have the resources required to improve academic outcomes in every school, but especially those with high percentages of at-risk and other factors that require more intensive educational services,” Whitmer said.

Any changes in that funding formula likely would require a statewide referendum. Proposals over the years to change Proposal A have been dead on arrival in Lansing.

This story is part of a series, Moving Costs: How students changing schools hurt Detroit classrooms, a joint project from Bridge Magazine and Chalkbeat. Chastity Pratt Dawsey is a Bridge reporter. Koby Levin is a reporter for Chalkbeat.

The children of 8B: One classroom, 31 journeys, and the reason it’s so hard to fix Detroit’s schools

2018-10-02T04:04:29+00:00

This story is part of the series Moving Costs: How students changing schools disrupts Detroit classrooms, a joint project from Chalkbeat and Bridge Magazine.

By the time she’d reached the eighth grade, Shantaya Davis had attended so many schools — at least five — that she couldn’t name them all.

“I don’t even know what grade it was,” she said of one school, the one her mother decided wasn’t safe after she was threatened by a man in a car after class one day. “I just know I went there and it was like half a year … I went to a lot of schools. That’s why I keep forgetting.”

Her classmate, Shawntia Reeves, attended four schools on the way to eighth grade. Or maybe five. Her parents weren’t exactly sure of the details, beyond the fact that she’d started kindergarten at the small neighborhood school her family had attended for generations. When the district shut the school down to cut costs, she bounced around, forced to repeatedly make new friends, then lose them again.

“It makes you feel like you ain’t got no one to talk to,” she said.

Both girls were members of the same eighth grade class at Bethune Elementary-Middle School in northwest Detroit last year. They posed with their classmates for a photo in June — a portrait of middle-school grads who looked like they’d known each other for years. But the 31 eighth-graders in Bethune’s “8B” homeroom had collectively attended a total of 128 schools — an average of more than four schools each.

The students of homeroom 8B at Bethune Elementary-Middle School at their eighth-grade graduation ceremony. Eleven of 31 students didn’t enroll in the school until eighth grade.

Five of them said they’d cycled through seven or more schools on their path to eighth grade. Just three had attended the K-8 school since kindergarten.

These students are among countless others just like them in cities like Detroit — kids who’ve spent their childhoods starting over every couple of years, navigating new schools, trying to fit in.

Stories like theirs ripple through school districts across the country where the growing push to create new options such as magnet and charter schools has put an end to the days when most students enrolled in their neighborhood school. A comprehensive federal study that tracked a group of 20,000 children from 1998 until 2007 found that one in eight had attended four or more schools by the eighth grade. Those students were concentrated in large urban areas where people living in poverty are also grappling with evictions, foreclosures, and other forces that push people from their homes.

This kind of enrollment turmoil has a debilitating impact on schools, dragging down test scores, exacerbating behavioral issues, fueling dropout rates, and making it more difficult for all children to learn — not just those who are on the move.

In short, it’s a major — but often unrecognized — reason why improving urban schools has become one of the most intractable problems facing American cities.

“You can’t create trust between a student and parent and a school when you have this constant disruption,” said Nikolai Vitti, superintendent of the Detroit Public Schools Community District, which runs roughly half the schools in Detroit. “It’s hard to hold teachers accountable to performance if children are not consistently in their classrooms. We are going to set teachers, schools, and principals up for failure if we don’t acknowledge that.”

✴ ✴ ✴

The 8B homeroom started last September with 26 students. Then new faces began to appear.

Between November and June, one student came for a week, then left. Another left for a different school, then returned.

One new student didn’t join 8B until May 21 — just weeks before the eighth-grade prom and graduation.

By the end of the year, 11 of the 31 students had arrived at Bethune as eighth-graders.

In Detroit, there are many reasons why schools are in crisis. There are overcrowded classrooms and buildings in poor condition. There are children experiencing trauma at home, unable to find a quiet place — or a reason — to do their homework. But spend time in almost any Detroit school, and educators will tell you that perhaps the single most significant factor standing in the way of children’s success is this: Students don’t stay.

“It’s one of the most difficult things we deal with,” said Alisanda Woods, Bethune’s principal, who has led the 550-student school for the past two years.

Enrollment instability — often called student mobility — is not only under-discussed, it’s also inconsistently documented. That makes it difficult to clearly compare the problem across cities and states. But Detroit, along with Milwaukee and Denver, is among several big cities where nearly a quarter of students change schools every year.

And that average actually understates the problem in Detroit.

Here, decades of evictions, foreclosures, and financial distress have ravaged communities and destabilized housing. Nearly 200 school closures have distanced families from what used to be neighborhood schools. And state policies engineered in part by Michigan philanthropist Betsy DeVos before she became U.S. education secretary have created one of the most robust systems of school choice in the nation.

The effect: A recent analysis by two Wayne State University professors found that roughly one in three elementary school students changes schools every year — often in the middle of the school year.

Bethune doesn’t have the highest rate of student churn in the city — it’s fairly typical of district and charter schools in Detroit — but the long-struggling school housed in a stately red brick building sees new students arrive nearly every week of the school year, Woods said.

They turn up after moving from the other side of town, or arrive in search of better options after a bad experience.

At the same time, other students disappear. They’re in class one day, raising their hands to ask a question or volunteering to solve a math problem. The next day they’re gone, a single-day absence that soon turns to weeks. Staff often don’t know where they’ve gone until another school calls for their records.

“Four or five students a week are always coming or going,” Woods said. “We received new students this year all the way up to June where kids just showed up and then we were trying to figure out, ‘Should we pass this kid?’ How do we know?”

When the Wayne State professors, Sarah Winchell Lenhoff and Ben Pogodzinski, analyzed data from Detroit district and charter schools in the 2015-16 school year, they found that nearly 60 percent of students who live in Detroit — almost 50,000 children — were enrolled in two or more Detroit schools that year. Many had apparently boomeranged, returning eventually to the school where they started.

That includes nearly 7,000 children who were enrolled in three schools that year and some 900 children who were enrolled in four or more schools in a single school year.

“It’s a chaotic system,” Pogodzinski said. “If kids are moving in and out, you can’t build the systems in the school that are helpful and necessary to create a rich educational environment.”

That chaos means teachers don’t have the chance to make deep connections with their students.

It means new students are perpetually throwing off the dynamics of classrooms, forcing teachers, week after week, to shelve planned lessons so they can help new students get settled.

And it means that a significant share of the students who sit down every year to take annual state exams are children who could have fallen behind years ago, at another school. They might have arrived at their latest school just months before taking the exam.

Those exams are especially crucial for schools like Bethune.

The school, in a neighborhood that’s just now beginning to show signs of improvement after years of deterioration, was one of 38 Michigan schools threatened with closure last year because of persistently low test scores.

The schools were allowed to remain open — but only if they promised to show steady improvement on test scores over three years.

And while Michigan schools aren’t held accountable for the scores of newly arriving students, once a student has stayed long enough for her exam to count, children who are frequent movers are the most likely to struggle.

Research shows that students who change schools even once outside of routine moves such as between elementary and middle school have significantly lower test scores. They’re typically slower to improve academically than students who stay in one school. They have more behavioral problems and are more likely to drop out of school than their peers who stay put.

When the Detroit Public Schools Community District analyzed seventh- and eighth-grade student scores on tracking tests that schools use to figure out what students know, the trend line looked like a playground slide, with students who had attended just one or two schools at the top of the ladder, and those who’d attended the most schools down at the bottom.

Those transferring students are not the only ones suffering the consequences of instability. Studies show that even students who don’t themselves change schools are more likely to drop out if they attended schools where many classmates are coming and going.

“It has an impact on the students and it has an impact on the school environment itself,” said Richard Welsh, a professor of educational policy at the University of Georgia who has extensively studied the issue.

Students might benefit somewhat if they move from a low-performing school to a high-performing school, Welsh said. But in cities like Detroit, where the vast majority of schools are low-performing, most student transfers have largely negative consequences.

When there’s so much flux, Welsh said, teachers “have a hard time with momentum and a hard time with overall classroom management.”

✴ ✴ ✴

The students of 8B said their parents had good reasons for moving them from school to school.

Juliann Sanders, an 8B student who attended two charter schools before arriving at Bethune in sixth grade, said her mother pulled her out of her last school because she was alarmed by the conditions there.

“My mama said that school was ratchet,” she said, using a term for run-down or nasty. “It was dirty. She stopped making me go there because I was getting into fights and stuff.”

Jacob Cunningham, who attended a total of nine schools by eighth grade — the most in his class — attributed his moves to a mix of family housing issues and challenges at school.

He said he didn’t mind changing schools so frequently, but his mother, Angela Cunningham, said the moves were hard on him.

“It frustrated him,” Cunningham said. “He got attached to one school and he’d have to move. He’d rebel against it … He would get angry, just the idea of having to adjust to a new school.”

Many students said they transferred because of changes to their living situations, such as moving to a new house or leaving mom’s place to go live with dad.

But, like students across the city, changing homes was just one reason they moved around.

Lenhoff and Pogodzinski, the Wayne State professors, found that only about 40 percent of students in Detroit who changed schools between the fall of 2014 and the fall of 2015 had changed their address to a different ZIP code.

The rest transferred for countless other reasons. Their schools might have closed, which is what happened to roughly 200 students last week when a Detroit charter school abruptly announced it was closing its doors just weeks into the school year. Students might have been expelled, or otherwise encouraged to leave a school. Their parents might have grown frustrated with a teacher or administrator. They might have received one of the fliers that routinely show up on Detroit doorsteps advertising suburban schools, and decided to take advantage of an offer of free bus transportation.

Or they might have been turned off by policy moves, such as the state of Michigan’s decision in 2012 to seize Bethune and 14 other low-performing schools to put them in a controversial state-run recovery district. When the schools returned to the main Detroit district last year, some students who went to Bethune the previous school year were told that busing zones had changed and they no longer could ride a yellow bus to school.

A survey of 100 Detroit families conducted by Chalkbeat and the nonprofit news service Outlier Media found that one of main reasons families changed schools in Detroit was because they were dissatisfied with the quality of instruction in their child’s school.

And when Detroit parents aren’t satisfied, they can leave.

Michigan’s educational system allows for an unlimited number of charter schools, and lets families cross city lines to enroll in neighboring districts. The system encourages families to shop around for the right choice.

But in a city where most schools are struggling, parents wanting the best for their child might not be happy with the first, second, or third school they try. They might keep searching, and might end up causing serious harm.

“They’re taking a risk with little evidence that these different schools they’re enrolling in are going to be that much better for their child,” Lenhoff said. “And they’re maybe not fully aware of the potential harmful effect of the move itself.”

✴ ✴ ✴

It was November when Gabrielle Elliott joined homeroom 8B.

For years, she had attended the Marvin L. Winans Academy of Performing Arts, a charter school on the city’s east side where her parents hoped she’d be able to finish middle school.

But when a sudden housing emergency in April 2017 forced the family to move to the city’s west side, that became more difficult. Gabrielle’s parents made the 35-minute drive to her old school every morning until November when winter road conditions made the drive impractical.

Gabrielle would have to spend the last seven months of eighth grade at Bethune.

“I was nervous,” she said of her first day in a new school, recalling sweaty hands and a bouncing heart. “I’m a nail-biter.”

Gabrielle Elliott is one of several students in 8B who transferred out of Bethune, only to return a few years later.

Though she knew some of her new classmates from an earlier stint at Bethune in the fourth grade, that first day was daunting.

In her English class, she sat alone on one side of the classroom, a look of fear on her face and a blank sheet of paper on her desk. All around her, eighth-graders were writing in their workbooks. But Gabrielle hadn’t gotten a workbook yet, so she sat and watched.

In science class, she spent the period nervously glancing around the room, chewing on a wad of gum during a lesson on magnetism.

It wasn’t until students were lining up at the door that her new science teacher asked if she was visiting from another class.

“No,” Gabrielle answered, “I’m new.”

“Oh,” her teacher said. “Welcome.”

In a perfect world, each of Gabrielle’s new teachers would have gotten the word that a new student was coming, maybe even had a chance to review her transcripts.

But, in Detroit, so many new students arrive so frequently, teachers say they’re often blindsided by new arrivals.

Lydia Nickleberry, a second-grade teacher at Bethune, said she returned to her classroom after meeting with a parent last winter to find a new student sitting in her class.

“That was in January,” she said. “At that point I had 32 students and she was number 33 and I said, ‘I don’t have a desk for her.’ I have to go get a desk, get a chair.”

Nickleberry said it takes her roughly two weeks to figure out what new students need.

“It makes it hard because there’s gaps in education,” she said. “One student, he came in December, I had to go and ask if he had a history of some type of [disability] because obviously not everything clicked. It was hard for him to understand basic questions.”

When a new student transfers into the school, paperwork documenting student disabilities and spelling out therapies and support for those children is supposed to come with them. The child’s former school, when requested, is supposed to send over transcripts, test scores, and other paperwork.

But teachers say it can take weeks to get a student’s transcript from another school, even from other schools in the same district.

The state education department is developing a centralized data system that, in the next few years, will enable schools to quickly access the records of new students.

But for now, schools must make the request, then hope for a timely response.

If it takes too long, the new teacher might never know if the child who just arrived had behavioral problems in her last school, or if his last teacher thought he might need glasses.

Student transience affects nearly every school in Detroit, yet few schools have any kind of formal system or specialized training for teachers to help them support the students who show up halfway through the school year. That’s despite the fact that new students are often reeling from a sudden move.

“Some of these kids have a lot of problems that nobody’s addressing, and they’re coming in and a lot of times they’re unstable,” Woods said. “Our teachers will receive these children and work with them from the time they walk through the door until the time they leave … But then new students arrive and we have to start all over again.”

At Bethune, when parents report a new student has emotional issues, someone from the school’s “culture and climate team” typically meets with the new student to explain the school’s expectations and ease the transition, said Alisha Webster, who was the school’s social worker last year.

She did group therapy and one-on-one counseling to support children in the school, she said.

But it can be hard to make much progress with students who might not stay long.

“It’s like treading water,” Webster said. “They enter with social issues, trying to fit in and not be bullied. But how can they stay focused if they’re constantly catching up?”

✴ ✴ ✴

The children of 8B showed up at graduation looking their best. The girls wore fresh hairdos and wobbled around in high heels; the boys wore pressed pants and dress shirts.

Gabrielle got stylish new hair extensions for graduation, wearing her hair in long, wavy curls for the big day. She’d ended the school year feeling like she’d made friends and gained a bit of popularity.

Bethune Elementary-Middle School’s eighth-grade graduation took place at the neighborhood high school, Mumford High. About half of the students in homeroom 8B said they planned to attend Mumford High for ninth grade. Others chose charters or suburban schools.

She had a few academic setbacks at Bethune, like a project she failed to finish for a science fair. After the fluctuation in her grades, she had to file an appeal to try to get into Cass Technical High School, one of the city’s top high schools.

In the end, she’d found a way to fit in at Bethune and was planning to enroll at Cass this fall.

“Now I’m more relaxed,” she told a reporter in May. “People ask me to sit with them. People want to be my friend.”

By graduation day, some of her classmates still weren’t sure what high school they would go to next. They have choices, after all, Woods said.

Ads for online schools, charter schools, and suburban schools would soon be running on the radio to lure families out of the Detroit school system for high school.

As the kids milled around the common area at Mumford High School, where Bethune’s eighth-grade graduation took place, Woods’ eyes settled on Jacob, the boy who had been to nine schools.

Where would he end up next? Which high school would he graduate from?

Would a child who moved through so many schools sit still long enough to graduate on time, she wondered.

All she could do was hope.

“I pray for him,” Woods said. “I pray for all of them.”

Detroit makes it easy to switch schools. So parents do. Frequently.

2018-10-02T04:03:52+00:00

This story is part of the series Moving Costs: How students changing schools disrupts Detroit classrooms, a joint project from Chalkbeat and Bridge Magazine.

One Detroit mom said she moved her son to four schools by the third grade because he kept getting bullied.

Another said she transferred her daughter to three different schools by the sixth grade in hopes of finding a better experience.

Her child’s first school “couldn’t keep a teacher for her class the whole school year,” she said. The second one “was completely unorganized.”

Other Detroit parents who responded to a survey conducted by Chalkbeat and the nonprofit news service Outlier Media offered a mix of answers for why they moved their children from one school to the next. Their reasons: academic struggles, issues with school discipline, and personal upheavals that forced them to find a new home.

But, overwhelmingly, Detroit parents said they moved their children to new schools because they wanted better for their child — a safer school, a cleaner school, the kind of school where their children could thrive.

Chalkbeat and Outlier, together with our partners at Bridge Magazine, conducted the survey over three weeks last spring to better understand the forces behind what some educators say is the largest hurdle blocking academic success in Detroit: The fact that students don’t stay.

Across the city, a recent study found that one in four students change schools every year. In elementary schools, the rate is one in three. And many students make those moves during the school year.

All of that movement — fueled in part by state policy in Michigan that has given Detroit one of the most robust systems of school choice in the country — has created a level of instability with serious ramifications for children and schools. It brings down test scores, drives up dropout rates, and exacerbates behavioral problems.

But while studies have clearly documented the effects of students moving from place to place, there’s not much research on why parents make so many moves.

Ben Pogodzinski and Sarah Winchell Lenhoff, two Wayne State University professors who have spent the last year analyzing data on student transience in Detroit, found that only about 40 percent of children who changed schools between the fall of 2014 and and the fall of 2015 changed their address to a home in a different ZIP code.

Chalkbeat and Outlier set out to identify the other reasons. We surveyed 100 Detroit parents using a text messaging platform called GroundSource that enabled us to reach a representative sample of parents across the city, asking respondents how often their children had changed schools — and why.

Roughly half of the 100 parents who responded to our survey said their children had made at least two school transfers beyond routine moves, like moving from middle to high school. That includes 30 parents whose children had made at least three non-routine moves and nine who said their children changed schools five or more times.

In all, the parents we surveyed moved their children 197 times outside of routine moves, with roughly 40 percent of those moves taking place during the school year.

And their reasons were varied:

30 percent of moves were attributed to school performance issues, such as the quality of instruction. That includes a sizable number of parents who said their children have disabilities that were not being properly addressed by their schools.
25 percent of school transfers were related to family moves.
15 percent were related to the school environment, including concerns about crime and safety.
10 percent said they moved their children because of logistics such as a new job that put a child’s school in an inconvenient location.
The rest said their children left for other reasons, including school closures or students being pushed out for academic or behavioral reasons.

It’s easy to switch schools in Detroit because parents here enjoy far more school options than do their peers in other parts of the country.

Detroit parents can choose from more than 100 district schools and 88 charter schools in the city. Or they can cross the city border to one of many suburban district or charter schools that accept out-of-district kids. Since Detroit and many of its surrounding communities have significantly more school seats than children, many schools in the area have space available for nearly anyone who wants to attend.

That means parents who aren’t happy with their local school, who don’t think it’s safe, or who discover that a new job or a new shift makes a school’s location or schedule impractical for the family are free to go somewhere else.

It’s a luxury for which many parents are grateful.

“When it comes down to it, I’m looking out for the best interest of my kids,” said Lyjuan Smith, who had two children at Detroit’s Bethune Elementary-Middle School last school year but moved them to a charter school this year because she thought they would get a better education there.

Randy Liepa, who heads the county educational agency that supports school districts in Wayne County, including Detroit, said most of the districts in the county see students coming and going as parents explore their options.

“It’s definitely grown over time,” Liepa said. “Mom and Dad will think, ‘He needs a new environment,’ so they move him, and then that doesn’t work, and then they wind up back where they started. Then they try another option.”

In the Chalkbeat/Outlier survey, a majority of parents, 66 percent, said they thought switching schools made it easier for their child to succeed in school.

Only 11 percent said they thought switching schools made things harder.

Some research suggests that moving from low-performing school to a higher-performing school can benefit students. But in Detroit, very few schools are considered high performing.

The main Detroit district has the lowest test scores in the nation, and charter schools in Detroit are not much better. A recent analysis found that the vast majority of Detroit children — 70,000 of the 85,000 attending public school in the city — are in schools that don’t meet the state’s basic criteria for performance. And many cash-strapped schools also struggle to maintain their buildings and give children enough support to prevent fights and behavioral problems.

That means that while families keep moving, continually looking for something better, the odds are that they’ll find similar problems at their next school and have to move yet again.

And the cycle will continue, making things more difficult for each child with each move.

They don’t even say goodbye: The heartbreak and challenge for teachers in schools where students are on the move

2018-10-02T04:02:52+00:00

This story is part of the series Moving Costs: How students changing schools disrupts Detroit classrooms, a joint project from Chalkbeat and Bridge Magazine.

Some days, it’s a scared-looking child who needs a textbook, a desk, and perhaps a kind word.

Other days, it’s a familiar face that’s no longer there — a beloved student who has left without saying goodbye.

This is life for teachers who work in schools across Detroit, where a majority of students — nearly 60 percent, according to a recent analysis — were enrolled in two or more schools during a recent school year, many apparently jumping from one school to another, then back again.

All that movement has serious consequences for kids, including significantly lower test scores and higher dropout rates, research shows.

For their teachers, it’s a recipe for heartbreak.

“It’s devastating,” said Takeleh Eaton, a first-grade teacher at Bethune Elementary-Middle School on Detroit’s northwest side, where school officials say they see students coming and going nearly every week.

Parents of most of the children who leave don’t notify the school, so their teachers are left to wonder how they’re doing.

“They’re just gone,” Eaton said. “Emotionally, it’s draining. And it’s sad because … you don’t know what the situation is like for them.”

The next day or the following week, Eaton said, another child might arrive in her classroom. And that takes a different kind of toll — the kind that can throw off the culture a teacher works hard to establish.

“It affects the other students,” Eaton said. “I had a new student come in [last] year and he was very rambunctious. His behaviors were very challenging and when he came in, the other boys started imitating him. And it really made me change my behavior plan, because he was a little out of control. He wasn’t used to the structure of my class.”

Kaira Gandy, a seventh- and eighth-grade English teacher at Bethune, said it takes her two weeks to get to know a new student. And that work to understand a student’s needs and abilities often takes place while trying to handle disruption that the new student creates.

“Some of them are tough because they’ve been to four schools and they know, ‘I gotta get in there and I gotta make a name for myself so I fit in, so I don’t get lost in the shuffle’ … Some of them are like Oliver Twist. They are used to being orphans, used to traveling. They’ve learned to stick up for themselves.”

Teachers say they wish they had a better way to learn about new students when they arrive.

Lydia Nickleberry, a second-grade teacher at Bethune, faced a far different situation at a previous teaching job a couple years ago at Chandler Park Academy, a charter school in Harper Woods. Students largely returned every year, Nickleberry said, and it was easy to get information about students from their previous teachers.

“When you have the previous teacher in your building, you know who to contact,” she said. “Even here [at Bethune], we have sheets we will fill out on the student, tracker sheets. We show where the scores are, what their writing looks like, which parent is the most supportive parent, which one you can call. It’s a whole sheet. It will say this child is supposed to be wearing glasses, but if you see he’s not wearing glasses, you can put him in the front of the class.”

But much of the time, she said, the tracker sheet doesn’t get used because the child changes schools.

Nickleberry said Detroit schools — district schools, charter schools, suburban schools — should work together to develop a system to transmit that kind of information no matter where a child lands.

“Whatever teacher gets that child should be able to pull up what they did,” she said. “They shouldn’t have to search that down.”

That would help teachers stay on track when a student arrives. And it might reduce some of the distress for teachers and staff who build relationships with children, only to see them go.

“That hurts so bad!” said Monica Tarver, the PTA president and a teacher’s aide at Bethune. “You’ve got this relationship. You’re working on the progress … You set a goal once you work with them, and then you can’t even finish the goal. It’s emotional. It really is.”

At a Detroit school, two women become detectives when students stop showing up

2018-10-02T04:01:54+00:00

This story is part of the series Moving Costs: How students changing schools disrupts Detroit classrooms, a joint project from Chalkbeat and Bridge Magazine.

When children stop showing up at Detroit’s Bethune Elementary-Middle School for an extended period of time, Sherry Taylor and Myrna Capela try their best to track them down.

One or two students leave Bethune every week, but Taylor, the school secretary, says only a handful — maybe 5 percent — notify the school of their plans to leave.

The rest have to be found.

Taylor and Capela, the attendance agent, spend hours on the phone and knocking on doors trying to account for students who have just up and left.

When a child first leaves, teachers typically mark a child absent for a few days before notifying the office that something beyond a routine stomach bug could be the culprit.

“After a week, the office will make a call,” Taylor said.

Sometimes a parent will answer and say the child is at a different school, she said, but that’s not always the case. “I can’t drop them until I verify that school has the child,” Taylor said. “We have to know where those students are so they don’t come up missing.”

When students leave Detroit’s Bethune Elementary-Middle School, school secretary Sherry Taylor, left, and attendance agent Myrna Capela are the ones who make sure they’re safe.

Sometimes the school discovers that family contact numbers are no longer working. Sometimes parents don’t answer their phones.

Some students eventually return to school. “They’ll pop up and we say, ‘Where you been?’” Taylor said. “They say they went to another school.”

If the students who leave head to another district school, they will turn up in the district’s computer system and it will be obvious where they’ve gone. But if a family leaves town or transfers to a charter school, staff members at Bethune have to find them.

Capela visits family homes and talks to neighbors.

“Most of the time, somebody knows,” she said. “They say, ‘Oh, I saw them moving out.’”

But there are cases when it’s not clear. That’s when concern turns to worry.

“It bothers me a lot,” Capela said. “It bothers me a great deal.”

When the city reacted in horror three years ago to the news that two children had been found murdered, hidden in their mother’s freezer, many Detroiters asked how two children could be missing from school for so long without anyone noticing.

But in a city in which schools are run by dozens of different entities that don’t share information, educators say they never know if children could be in grave danger.

In recent years, a school advocacy organization raised $700,000 and built a common enrollment system that would have kept track of where Detroit students are enrolled. But the system, which would have given parents a single application to use for every school in the city, was controversial. Detroit’s main district, then going through a leadership transition, declined to participate as some worried that a common application would give charter schools an advantage in the city’s intensely competitive school landscape. Some charter leaders worried that the system was rigged to promote the district. In the end, so few schools participated that the effort was shelved.

Another possible solution is a data system now being built by the state of Michigan. Within the next few years, that system will let schools quickly access the transcripts and records of students transferring in.

Eventually, said Tom Johnson, a data manager who has been working with the Michigan Department of Education on the new system, it could also allow a child’s former school to see where he or she has enrolled.

“That’s something we could explore,” Johnson said. “A system that would alert a prior district when a student enrolls in a new one … We’ll have some conversations about the value of that.”

But for now, when children leave Bethune, it’s up to Capela and Taylor to find them and make sure they’re safe.

“We do the best we can,” Taylor said. “But I worry. If I haven’t seen this kid in a while, where are they?”

5 ways to stop students from changing schools — or at least reduce the impact

2018-10-02T04:00:55+00:00

This story is part of the series Moving Costs: How students changing schools disrupts Detroit classrooms, a joint project from Chalkbeat and Bridge Magazine.

Solving the damaging problem of Detroit students moving frequently between schools would require sweeping policy changes to both stabilize housing and improve the quality of public education.

But schools and policymakers could also take simpler, smaller steps to help ease a crisis created when more than one in three elementary school students change schools every year.

Here are five of them:

1. Ease access to student records

Centralized student records databases do not prevent students from frequently changing schools, but they do allow schools to more quickly assess and acclimate their new students.

The Michigan Department of Education is developing a new data system called the Michigan Data Hub that will allow districts to see the test scores their new students posted on state exams. The idea is one day to have a system that gives schools real-time access to new students’ test scores, transcripts, and discipline records from schools they previously attended.

Currently, districts can choose to use a state-run portal called MiLearn that allows schools to see MSTEP and other state assessment data for all students currently enrolled. Fewer than 100 school districts are participating in MiLearn out of more than 500 districts and 300 charter schools.

Typically, teachers and schools ask a student’s parents the name of their former school and then call that school to request records. Those records, when they arrive, don’t always include state test scores or special education plans.

If a child’s former school has closed, records are sometimes lost or hard to track down. This is an acute problem in Detroit, where about 200 traditional public, charter, and private schools have closed since 2005.

“Sharing of records solves admission issues and ensures that you have a really good idea of a child’s prior performance,” Richard Welsh, a professor and researcher in the College of Education at the University of Georgia who has studied the problem of students frequently changing schools.

Michigan’s new records system could be operational in two to three years, said Tom Johnson, data manager with Michigan Data Hub and Kalamazoo County’s education service agency.

2. Adopt a unified enrollment system

Unified enrollment systems, also known as common enrollment systems, typically involve a computerized application that allows a family to apply to a number of charter and district schools by using only one form.

A number of cities have unified enrollment systems, including Denver; New Orleans; Washington D.C.; Newark; Camden, New Jersey; and Indianapolis. The systems aim to help make enrollment simpler for families, especially students from low-income families who want to attend a school outside their neighborhood, and provide greater transparency in how seats are assigned. Some districts use them to create shared transfer policies and monitor trends in enrollment.

Supporters of common enrollment say that kind of information leads to increased competition and transparency that prompts schools to improve quality — which ultimately reduces the number and frequency of students changing schools.

The most robust systems ensure that when a student enrolls in a new school, officials can easily access information such as test scores and grades through a central database, said Maria Montoya, who was a co-founder of the unified enrollment system in New Orleans, called OneApp.

“Unified enrollment systems help cities and communities establish transfer policies and make sure kids don’t get lost in the system,” Montoya said.

Montoya, who is now manager of school and community partnerships at the Grand Valley State University Charter Schools Office, was part of the advocacy organization that piloted a common enrollment system for Detroit in 2016. It would have given parents a single application to use for every school in the city.

But the $700,000 system was controversial in a city where schools compete aggressively for students. Few charters participated due to fears the system was rigged to promote the district. The district, then run by a state-appointed manager, tabled the issue until a new school board could be elected. The board has been in office since January 2017 and has shown no interest in a common enrollment system.

3. Expand transportation

Currently, older students can use the city’s public buses, but for the younger students too small to ride the public bus alone, busing options are few. Many schools don’t offer busing. And those that do typically offer bus service only to students who live in certain areas.

That means students who change addresses often must change schools, too.

“If we really want to cut down on mobility, it has to be attacked through the choice process or transportation process,” Welsh said.

Detroit schools Superintendent Nikolai Vitti said it’s worth considering whether the district should provide busing to families who move so students can remain in their previous school.

“That may appear to be expensive,” he said. “But is it less expensive than losing that child?”

Every time a child transfers from one school to another, Vitti said, schools that have to reshuffle class sizes and put time and money into helping new students adjust, testing them, gathering their records and making sure they know school rules and culture. And that disruption costs money, Vitti said. “We don’t quantify in dollars accurately enough the impact that this has.”

4. Standardize curriculum

Michigan has statewide academic standards that dictate what each student should learn every year. But state officials have no way of knowing how many districts and charter schools use curriculums that comply with those standards.

That means if a child moves from one school to another during a school year, the child invariably encounters vastly different lessons, textbooks, and expectations.

“The more standardized the curriculum is across the state, the better position you’ll be in to have school districts teaching similar type of things,” said Randy Liepa, superintendent of the education service agency for Wayne County.

But a standard curriculum, even across schools in the same district, can be a tough sell for teachers, who often say they want — and need — to have control over what and how they teach students.

“It’s a challenge for local school districts,” Liepa said. “They’re often not able to reap the benefits of a curriculum that builds off of each other’s [lessons]. It’s a significant challenge.”

5. Hire more and better trained staff

Kaira Gandy, a teacher who saw a dozen students join and leave her eighth-grade English class at Bethune Elementary-Middle School last school year, said students who move from school to school often require more individual attention.

“With transience, you need more hands on deck,” she said.

Detroit is ramping up its recruiting in response to a teacher shortage and large class sizes. Last year, the district fanned out across the country to historically black colleges and universities to try to fill its 200 teacher vacancies.

Hiring additional teachers would reduce class sizes and help all children, not just students who frequently change schools. To create a stable school culture, the district would likely need to hire more social workers and psychologists, too — and invest in training teachers to deal with the trauma or special needs of highly mobile kids, Gandy said.

This could both help schools cope with students coming and going and potentially reduce the problem. If students are more successful, parents will be more likely to keep them where they are.