Tell Truth on School Crime

Maybe California high school students aren’t ready to take the state’s exit exam, but at least they should feel physically safe during the school day. So it’s disappointing to hear that state officials, who just postponed the academic exit exam for two years, are setting a ridiculously low bar for school safety.

Under the federal No Child Left Behind Act, students at persistently dangerous schools have the right, starting this fall, to transfer to a safer campus. The law leaves it to states, though, to define “persistently dangerous,” and California’s definition flunks any reasonable test. In fact, the state has declared that it has no such schools.

Instead of addressing actual crime, the state measures how administrators reacted. If at least 1% of a school’s students were expelled for violent crimes, the school is defined as dangerous. But only if there was also at least one incident involving a firearm in each of the last three years. A campus can come up clean even if students are regularly robbed at knifepoint or beaten.

Consider L.A.’s Dorsey High School, the site of 30 cases of battery, six robberies, four sex offenses and two assaults with a deadly weapon in 2001-02. A student’s chances of being attacked during the school year were nearly 1 in 50. The number of crimes averaged more than one a week. And those were just the reported, violent crimes.

The state’s head-in-the-sand attitude encourages principals to hide crimes by avoiding the expulsion of troublemaking students and brushing off parent complaints. Moreover, it allows school officials to ignore problems instead of shining a light on them. Three years ago, there was one crime of violence during the school year for every 100 students at L.A.’s Fremont High. After the state ordered sweeping changes at the school in late 2001, that rate fell by more than half. In addition, the number of drug-abuse cases dropped from 37 to one.

California reacted very differently to the federal law on the scholastic front. The state set a high standard for academic proficiency, even though students at failing schools also have the theoretical right to transfer. The state of Arkansas, meanwhile, defined proficiency so broadly that it had no failing schools. Just as California has no crime-plagued campuses. It looks as if California education officials have been taking instruction from the wrong place.

After the feds told Arkansas to look again, it came up with a few failing schools. Strange to think that California might need Washington to tell it to get real about campus crime.

This is an intense issue for families. Hundreds of L.A. or Compton parents who live near Downey illicitly enroll their children in the schools there each year, feeling they will be safer. Downey even hires people to ferret out phony addresses and fake relatives.

The state needs a real-world definition of dangerous schools. Bureaucrats, who can generally afford to live in low-crime neighborhoods, should keep in mind how they would feel about enrolling their children at some of the schools they’re labeling safe.