City schools reported handing out more suspensions to students in the last year than before, but most of that increase was owed to a jump in less-serious infractions, while reported cases of egregious misbehavior dropped.

City Department of Education officials announced on Tuesday that the number of suspensions given students citywide increased to 73,441 in 2010-2011, from 71,721 the previous school year.

During this time, schools reported giving students fewer superintendent’s suspensions, which can force students out of school for six days or several months, depending on the severity of their actions. But schools reported many more principal’s suspensions, which can last from one to five days and are given for more minor infractions, like cursing at a teacher or cheating on an exam.

The city’s data show that black and Hispanic students are on the receiving end of most school suspensions. More than half of all suspensions were given to black students last year, though they account for about a third of students in the city’s schools. Hispanic students, who make up close to 40 percent of public school students, got about 37 percent of the suspensions. Nearly a third of all suspensions were given to special education students.

Last month, a report by the National Education Policy Center found that, nationwide, school suspensions for non-white students in grades K-12 have increased by more than 100 percent since 1970.

In a significant reversal, the Bloomberg administration said Friday that it would support a City Council bill that would hamper federal authorities’ ability to detain, and eventually deport, foreign-born inmates on Rikers Island who are about to be released.

… Corrections Department officials routinely share lists of foreign-born inmates with immigration authorities, who then take custody of, detain and deport thousands of people who had been charged with misdemeanors and felonies. The arrangement is common across the country.

The bill would not end the practice, known as the criminal detainer program, in New York City. But it would prevent corrections officials from transferring inmates to federal custody, even immigrants in the United States illegally, if prosecutors declined to press charges against them, and if they had no convictions or outstanding warrants, had not previously been ordered deported and did not show up on the terrorist watch list.

As a result, the immigrants would be released if they were not defendants in criminal cases, regardless of whether federal officials wanted them deported.

“The criminal detainer program had become the immigrant dragnet program,” Ms. Quinn said. “We don’t support that.”

Some of the companies are huge — one is among the largest private employers in the world — and they say they are meeting demand faster and less expensively than the public sector could.

But the ballooning of privatized detention has been accompanied by scathing inspection reports, lawsuits and the documentation of widespread abuse and neglect, sometimes lethal. Human rights groups say detention has neither worked as a deterrent nor speeded deportation, as governments contend, and some worry about the creation of a “detention-industrial complex” with a momentum of its own.

… In the United States — with almost 400,000 annual detentions in 2010, up from 280,000 in 2005 — private companies now control nearly half of all detention beds, compared with only 8 percent in state and federal prisons, according to government figures. In Britain, 7 of 11 detention centers and most short-term holding places for immigrants are run by for-profit contractors.

… Companies often say that losing a contract is the ultimate accountability.

“We are acutely aware of our responsibilities and are committed to the humane, fair and decent treatment of all those in our care,” a Serco spokesman said in an e-mail. “We will continue to work with our customers around the world and seek to improve the services we provide for them.”

But lost detention contracts are rare and easily replaced in this fast-growing business. Serco’s $10 billion portfolio includes many other businesses, from air traffic control and visa processing in the United States, to nuclear weapons maintenance, video surveillance and welfare-to-work programs in Britain, where it also operates several prisons and two “immigration removal centers.”

“If one area or territory slows down, we can move where the growth is,” Christopher Hyman, Serco’s chief executive, told investors last year, after reporting a 35 percent increase in profits. This spring, Serco reported a 13 percent profit rise.

Its rival G4S delivers cash to banks on most continents, runs airport security in 80 countries and has 1,500 employees in immigration enforcement in Britain, the Netherlands and the United States, where its services include escorting illegal border-crossers back to Mexico for the Department of Homeland Security.

The number of overcrowded classes in New York is the largest in 10 years, according to a survey conducted by the teachers union and released on Thursday.

As a result of attrition, budget cuts and increased enrollment in some areas of the city, nearly 7,000 classes are over their contractual limits this year, the survey, by the United Federation of Teachers, found. That figure exceeds last year’s number by almost 1,000.

The union says that about 256,000 students, roughly a quarter of total enrollment, spend at least part of the school day in an overcrowded class.

As is often the case, high schools in Queens are most affected. In a borough where many students attend zoned high schools, which must accept all students in their neighborhoods, about 2,600 classes have more than 34 students.

“I believe a strong principal is the key to almost everything,” Ms. Anderson said in an interview. “Where you have great performance, you have great principals, period, full stop. Where you have low performance, you have struggling principals. It’s not that complicated.”

Perhaps prescient is Jonathan Kozol’s discussion of Joe Clark, a school principal in Paterson, New Jersey and a favorite of the Reagan White House “who became the subject of a film and was presented to the public as a salvatory figure”:

Sometimes the dynamic-sounding program introduced by a new principal does have a galvanizing and perceptible effect and one that lasts for more than a few years. In other cases, it is really just an avalanche of words and short-term measures that temporarily establish a degree of calm within the school and sometimes bring a sudden spike in test results or graduation rates, although the academic gains more frequently than not turn out to be short-lived and, in some cases, they have proven to be spurious.

… There are hundreds of principals in our urban schools who are authentic heroes, few of whom… receive the notice and support they deserve. But there is a difference between recognizing the accomplishments of able school officials and the marketing of individuals as saviors of persistently unequal systems. As with the hero children, so too with the hero principals, there is this inclination to avert our eyes from the pervasive injuries inflicted upon students by our acquiescence in a dual system [of apartheid schooling] and to convey the tantalizing notion that the problems of this system can be superseded somehow by a faith in miracles embodied in dynamic and distinctive individuals I don’t believe that this is true. I don’t believe a good school system can be built on miracles or on the stunning interventions of dramatically original and charismatic men or women. I don’t think anyone really believes this.

Jonathan Kozol, The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America 199-200 (2005).

Another 2.6 million people slipped into poverty in the United States last year, the Census Bureau reported Tuesday, and the number of Americans living below the official poverty line, 46.2 million people, was the highest number in the 52 years the bureau has been publishing figures on it.

… The past decade was also marked by a growing gap between the very top and very bottom of the income ladder. Median household income for the bottom tenth of the income spectrum fell by 12 percent from a peak in 1999, while the top 90th percentile dropped by just 1.5 percent. Overall, median household income adjusted for inflation declined by 2.3 percent in 2010 from the previous year, to $49,445. That was 7 percent less than the peak of $53,252 in 1999. Part of the income decline over time is because of the smaller size of the American family.

This year is not likely to be any better, economists said. Stimulus money has largely ended, and state and local governments have made deep cuts to staff and to budgets for social programs, both likely to move economically fragile families closer to poverty.

Minorities were hit hardest. Blacks experienced the highest poverty rate, at 27 percent, up from 25 percent in 2009, and Hispanics rose to 26 percent from 25 percent. For whites, 9.9 percent lived in poverty, up from 9.4 percent in 2009. Asians were unchanged at 12.1 percent.

And last month, PBS ran a strong piece as part of an occasional series on inequality in America:

Watch the full episode. See more PBS NewsHour.

The number of homeless students in city public schools has quad­-rupled since the economy tanked in 2008 — weighing down an already overburdened system with an additional 30,000 kids lacking permanent homes, The Post has learned.

The shocking Department of Education data put the number of kids without fixed shelter at 42,980 as of October 2010 — while state data show those numbers to be even higher.

The count was at 10,209 in October 2008.

Education officials said the numbers have skyrocketed not just because of the struggling economy, but also due to better reporting — which has resulted in increased federal funding — and better coordination with agencies like the Department of Homeless Services.

But some critics say the city’s policies are equally to blame for the dramatic spike.

“This speaks fundamentally to the failures of the administration’s approach to the problem of homelessness,” said Patrick Markee, senior policy analyst at the Coalition for the Homeless.

“This administration has failed to recognize what 30 years of research and experience taught us — that it’s a housing-affordability problem.”

The DOE’s figures are required by federal law to count not just kids living in shelters, but those living in multiple-family households or motels, or awaiting placement in foster care.

The surge has walloped some schools more than others — with Brooklyn’s Fort Hamilton HS in Bay Ridge and New Utrecht HS in Bensonhurst each seeing their populations of homeless kids more than double from 2009 to 2010 to about 250 students.

DOE officials said every school is responsible for creating a plan to address the needs of kids in temporary housing, and that they are each provided a liaison to help coordinate services from other agencies.

DHS officials said that, contrary to the reported school surge, they’ve seen the number of children living in city shelters flatline since 2008.

THE NYPD has blown its first deadline to release data on arrests in city schools – by more than a month.

As part of the city’s Student Safety Act enacted in January, the NYPD had to provide the figures by the end of July.

“There is no excuse for it,” said New York Civil Liberties Union executive director Donna Lieberman. “It’s critical to understanding what the over 5,000 police employees are doing in the New York City schools.”

In the past, the department ignored similar deadlines to provide “stop and frisk” data on how often cops stop citizens without making an arrest.

Councilwoman Melissa Mark-Viverito (D-East Harlem, Mott Haven) said the delay on the school safety data was troubling.

“[The NYPD was] not in favor of this legislation to begin with,” she said. “This may be reflective of that opposition.”

NYPD officials cited the need to be accurate as a reason for the delay.

They also noted data collection and analysis were complicated, and the agency had no new resources.

Photo by Adarsha Benjamin

Davide’s Renaissance
Giuseppe Veneziano
2011
Painted bronze
270x140x185 cm

Corporations are getting better and better at seducing us into thinking the way they think—of profits as the telos and responsibility as something to be enshrined in symbol and evaded in reality. Cleverness as opposed to wisdom. Wanting and having instead of thinking and making. We cannot stop it. I suspect what’ll happen is that there will be some sort of disaster—depression, hyperinflation—and then it’ll be showtime: We’ll either wake up and retake our freedom or we’ll fall apart utterly. Like Rome—conqueror of its own people.

David Foster Wallace, The Pale King 130 (2011).

What’s more, researchers are beginning to track the links between poverty and kids’ psychological and educational development. Researchers at Cornell University have found that kids who grow up in poverty are deeply affected by the instability of their home lives, and those environmental stressors hamper their ability to excel in school. It seems intuitive, but there’s growing evidence that there’s, in fact, a causal relationship between family income and kids’ academic success.

Meanwhile, the New York Times reported recently that “[s]tudents preparing to apply to college are increasingly tailoring their summer plans with the goal of creating a standout personal statement — 250 words or more — for the Common Application in which to describe ‘a significant experience, achievement, risk you have taken or ethical dilemma you have faced and its impact on you.’ Specialized, exotic and sometimes costly activities, they hope, will polish a skill, cultivate an interest and put them in the spotlight in a crowded field of straight-A students with strong test scores, community service hours and plenty of extracurricular activities.” Jenny Anderson, For a Standout College Essay, Applicants Fill Their Summers, N.Y. Times, Aug. 6, 2011, at A1:

Josh Isackson, an 18-year-old graduate of Tenafly High School in New Jersey, spent the summer after his sophomore year studying Mandarin in Nanjing, China. The next year he was an intern at a market research firm in Shanghai. When it came time to write a personal statement for his college applications, those summers offered a lot of inspiration.

… So Mr. Isackson wrote about exploring the ancient tombs of the Ming dynasty in the Purple Mountain region of Nanjing, “trading jokes with long-dead Ming Emperors, stringing my string hammock between two plum trees and calmly sipping fresh green tea while watching the sun set on the horizon.”

Jill Tipograph, who founded a consulting company called Everything Summer, helped Mr. Isackson plan the China trips. To Ms. Tipograph, his experience was the best possible outcome: he loved China, and the trips offered priceless fodder for the cutthroat college application process. (Mr. Isackson will attend Yale University this fall.)

“Students are planning their summer experiences to augment who they are and discover who they are, and that absolutely helps the college process,” she said.

Responses included the following:

To the Editor:

Such college essays reveal wealth and opportunity more than intrinsic scholarly aptitude.

Most high school students can barely afford college as it is, never mind forgo the main opportunity they have to make money to get themselves over the financial bar. Most cannot even consider taking nonpaying internships, never mind ones that entail the additional expense of flying to China and maintaining a residence there.

Perhaps college admissions boards should give points to the students who can identify challenges and ethical choices in the quotidian events of high school rather than to the students whose privileged lives afford them exotic adventures, and discount the “bought” experiences that drop into their laps.

BRIAN E. HOFFMAN
Middle Grove, N.Y., Aug. 6, 2011

To the Editor:
College applicants who hire consultants to arrange trips and decorative internships so they can write a standout college essay could save money by looking for some of the “lost children” in Charles M. Blow’s accounting of America’s hungry and homeless, low achievers and dropouts (column, Aug. 6).

A consultant in your article says self-discovery “helps the college process” by giving students something to write about. Instead of a trip to India or China, a few weeks as a volunteer addressing the struggles of 12th-grade students who cannot read, or listening to the stories of a fraction of the many homeless children in public schools, might bring the shock of recognition that drives all good writing.

MICHAEL J. CONLON
Endwell, N.Y., Aug. 7, 2011
The writer is an associate professor of English, Binghamton University, SUNY.

Charles M. Blow, The Decade of Lost Children, Aug. 6, 2007, at A17:

One of the greatest casualties of the great recession may well be a decade of lost children.

According to “The State of America’s Children 2011,” a report issued last month by the Children’s Defense Fund, the impact of the recession on children’s well-being has been catastrophic….

• The number of children living in poverty has increased by four million since 2000, and the number of children who fell into poverty between 2008 and 2009 was the largest single-year increase ever recorded.

• The number of homeless children in public schools increased 41 percent between the 2006-7 and 2008-9 school years.

• In 2009, an average of 15.6 million children received food stamps monthly, a 65 percent increase over 10 years.