Keeping Kids In School and Out of Court

As the education of our children -- our nation's future -- and the school-justice connection has increasingly captured public attention, the sunshine of increased graduation rates has brought into sharp focus the shadow of the so-called school-to-prison pipeline -- the thousands of students who are suspended, arrested, put at greater risk for dropping out, court involvement and incarceration. They are the subject of this Report.In school year 2011-2012 (SY2012), the number of suspensions in New York City public schools was 40 percent greater than during SY2006 (69,643 vs. 49,588, respectively), despite a five percent decrease in suspensions since SY2011. In addition, there were 882 school-related arrests (more than four per school day on average) and another 1,666 summonses issued during the SY2012 (more than seven per school day on average), also demonstrating an over-representation of students of color. These numbers might suggest New York City has a growing problem with violence and disruption in school but the opposite is true. Over the last several years, as reported by the Department of Education in November 2012, violence in schools has dropped dramatically, down 37 percent between 2001 and 2012. Indeed, violence Citywide has dropped dramatically.Emerging facts suggest that the surge in suspensions is not a function of serious misbehavior. New York City has the advantage of newly available public data that makes it possible for the first time to see patterns and trends with respect to suspensions by school and to see aggregate data on school-related summonses and arrests. The data shows that the overwhelming majority of school-related suspensions, summonses and arrests are for minor misbehavior, behavior that occurs on a daily basis in most schools. An important finding is that most schools in New York City handle that misbehavior without resorting to suspensions, summonses or arrests much if at all. Instead, it is a small percentage of schools that are struggling, generating the largest number of suspensions, summonses and arrests, impacting the lives of thousands of students. This newly available data echoes findings from other jurisdictions indicating that suspension and school arrest patterns are less a function of student misbehavior than a function of the adult response. Given the same behavior, some choose to utilize guidance and positive discipline options such as peer mediation; others utilize more punitive alternatives.The choice is not inconsequential. Recent research, including groundbreaking studies in Texas, Cincinnati and Chicago, underscore the important connections between academic outcomes and suspensions. Students who are suspended are more likely to be retained a grade, more likely to drop out, less likely to graduate and more likely to face involvement in the juvenile or criminal justice systems, thereby placing them at higher risk for poor life outcomes. Suspensions and school-related court involvement also generate significant and lifetime costs -- for extra years of schooling, for justice system involvement, and for families and all society. Notably, high rates of suspension do not yield correspondingly significant benefits, as research shows that high rates of suspensions in a school make students and teachers feel less, not more, safe.Most worrisome are patterns of suspensions for students with disabilities and students of color in New York City and across the nation. In New York City alone during SY2012, students receiving special education services were almost four times more likely to be suspended compared to their peers not receiving special education services; Black students were four times more likely and Hispanic students were almost twice as likely to be suspended compared to White students. New York City Black students were also 14 times more likely, and Hispanic students were five times more likely, to be arrested for school-based incidents compared to White students.Studies have shown that it is not the violent and egregious misbehavior that drives the disparities. For example, the Texas study showed that Black students had a lower rate of mandatory suspensions (suspensions for violence, weapons and other equally serious offenses) than White students. Black students exceeded White students only in the rates of suspensions for discretionary offenses.Innovative school districts throughout the country, encouraged by the federal government, are increasingly moving away from suspensions, summonses and arrests in favor of positive approaches to discipline that work. In New York City, a range of schools similarly have adopted constructive discipline with good results. In short, we have examples of what to do. The challenge is to take that learning system-wide and transform the small group of schools that over-rely on suspensions, summonses and arrests. Change in these schools could have a significant impact on student outcomes, re-engaging thousands of students so that they stay in school and out of courts. But research and experience tell us these schools cannot make this change by themselves. They need help and support. Change will require strong leadership and committed partnerships.New York City has a proud tradition of turning conventional wisdom on its head and achieving remarkable results. A recent example underscores this point. In the United States, conventional wisdom is and has been that mass incarceration is the cost of keeping communities safe. But New York City has proved otherwise. Even as the incarceration rate in New York City declined significantly, with a drop in the prison population of 17 percent between 2001 and 2009 and in the jail population by 40 percent from 1991 to 2009, the number of felonies reported by New York City to the Federal Bureau of Investigation also declined, down 72 percent. New York City proved conventional wisdom wrong with the result that thousands fewer people have been incarcerated -- saving the City and State taxpayers two billion dollars a year.Similarly, New York City can refute the conventional wisdom of critics who think that sacrificing a few students -- although the thousands of students who were suspended, arrested or issued summonses each year is not a "few" -- can be justified on the theory it protects the many by improving safety and academic outcomes. There is no research that supports this belief and a growing body of research that suggests the opposite. Students in schools with lower suspension rates have better academic outcomes than students in schools with high suspension rates, irrespective of student characteristics. Students and teachers in schools with lower rates of suspension and arrest also feel safer than students and teachers at schools with high rates. Students who feel safe can learn, and teachers who feel safe can teach.The students interviewed by Task Force members during their school visits echoed what the research also says: the best approach to keeping schools safe and improving academic outcomes is to support a positive school climate where students and teachers feel respected and valued. Evidence-based interventions like restorative justice, positive behavioral supports, and social-emotional learning are giving teachers and school leadership the tools they need to deal with school misbehavior and help build that positive school climate while keeping students safe and learning.In 2011, Judge Judith Kaye, with the support of The Atlantic Philanthropies, convened the New York City School-Justice Partnership Task Force to bring together City leaders to address the question of how best to keep more students in school and out of courts. She invited a group of stakeholders who do not often come together -- judges and educators, researchers and advocates, prosecutors and defense counsel -- to learn more about how the systems they serve impact each other and how they might partner together to achieve better outcomes. The Task Force heard from experts from around the City and country on promising practices. It examined data to improve understanding of the challenges and look for bright spots, schools that were succeeding even in the face of a wide array of challenges. Task Force members visited local schools and heard from principals and students about what they need. Members learned from each other and debated what avenues would be best.The work of the Task Force leads us to conclude that New York City can safely reduce the number of school-related incidents that can ultimately lead to court involvement. Indeed, the City already has models of promising practice -- schools that have high needs populations with low rates of suspensions and arrests. Learning from these schools and other reform-minded districts across the nation can guide leadership across systems to further safely reduce court involvement, arrests and suspensions while improving academic outcomes.We recognize that progress toward this objective will require a laser-like focus on shared outcomes and an unprecedented level of partnership among city agencies, and collaboration with the courts, and it must include parents, students, teachers, principals, researchers and advocates. Leadership and partnership at the top is the key. It will make possible the adoption of shared goals to improve outcomes for New York City's children across agencies so that schools do not have to go it alone. It will make possible the ability to divert summonses and arrests unnecessarily referred to the courts. It will make possible the ability to direct services where those services are needed and stop the flow of students with disabilities and youth of color into the suspension system and the courts. It will make possible the ability to raise up our support, expectations and standards for educational achievement and outcomes for students who do become court involved.In 2014, a new Mayor will assume office. It is already clear that school reform will be a high priority, as it has been for the Bloomberg administration. Over the past decade and more, we have learned a great deal about what works and what does not work, even as we recognize there is more to be learned. Now we have an opportunity to build on what has worked well.Reducing unnecessary suspensions, summonses and arrests is a challenge we can tackle and we must if our students are to succeed. In the end, many more young people can grow into successful and productive adults -- and it is our duty as adults to find the supports necessary to make that happen. Frederick Douglass was right on target in his observation that it is better to build strong children than repair broken men and women. This Report summarizes almost two years of learning, and it advances recommendations to make that happen.As the next New York City Mayor sets the course for education reform, these recommendations offer a roadmap of next steps for a Citywide effort to take advantage of emerging approaches to school and justice system leadership that are effective and fair as a means to improve outcomes for all of our children -- to keep our students in school and out of court

Observation-based Cooperation Enforcement in Ad Hoc Networks

Ad hoc networks rely on the cooperation of the nodes participating in the network to forward packets for each other. A node may decide not to cooperate to save its resources while still using the network to relay its traffic. If too many nodes exhibit this behavior, network performance degrades and cooperating nodes may find themselves unfairly loaded. Most previous efforts to counter this behavior have relied on further cooperation between nodes to exchange reputation information about other nodes. If a node observes another node not participating correctly, it reports this observation to other nodes who then take action to avoid being affected and potentially punish the bad node by refusing to forward its traffic. Unfortunately, such second-hand reputation information is subject to false accusations and requires maintaining trust relationships with other nodes. The objective of OCEAN is to avoid this trust-management machinery and see how far we can get simply by using direct first-hand observations of other nodes' behavior. We find that, in many scenarios, OCEAN can do as well as, or even better than, schemes requiring second-hand reputation exchanges. This encouraging result could possibly help obviate solutions requiring trust-management for some contexts.Comment: 10 pages, 7 figure

Resilient Misbehaviour Detection MAC Protocol (MD-MAC) for Distributed Wireless Networks

Chaminda Alocious, Hannan Xiao, B. Christianson, 'Resilient Misbehaviour Detection MAC Protocol (MD-MAC) for Distributed Wireless Networks' paper presented at the 2016 IEEE Wireless Communications and Networking Conference (IEEE WCNC). Doha, Qatar. 3-6 April 2016Wireless network security requirements are becoming more important and critical. The modern network security architectures require more attention to provide security in each network layer. This will require understanding of protocol vulnerabilities in existing protocol architectures. However, providing security requirements are not just limited to confidentiality and integrity, also availability and fairness are important security elements. IEEE 802.11 MAC protocol is one of the most common standard in modern day networks and has been designed without a consideration for providing security protection at MAC layer. IEEE 802.11 assumes all the nodes in the network are cooperative. However, nodes may purposefully misbehave in order to obtain extra bandwidth, conserve resources and disrupt network performance. This research proposes a Misbehaviour Detection MAC protocol (MD-MAC) to address the problematic scenarios of MAC layer misbehaviours, which takes a novel approach to detect misbehaviours in Mobile Adhoc Networks (MANETs). The MD-MAC modifies the CSMA/CA protocol message exchange and uses verifiable backoff value generation mechanism with an incorporated trust model which is suitable for distributed networks. The MD-MAC protocol has been implemented and evaluated in ns2, simulation results suggest that the protocol is able to detect misbehaving wireless nodes in a distributed network environment

FAIR: Forwarding Accountability for Internet Reputability

This paper presents FAIR, a forwarding accountability mechanism that incentivizes ISPs to apply stricter security policies to their customers. The Autonomous System (AS) of the receiver specifies a traffic profile that the sender AS must adhere to. Transit ASes on the path mark packets. In case of traffic profile violations, the marked packets are used as a proof of misbehavior. FAIR introduces low bandwidth overhead and requires no per-packet and no per-flow state for forwarding. We describe integration with IP and demonstrate a software switch running on commodity hardware that can switch packets at a line rate of 120 Gbps, and can forward 140M minimum-sized packets per second, limited by the hardware I/O subsystem. Moreover, this paper proposes a "suspicious bit" for packet headers - an application that builds on top of FAIR's proofs of misbehavior and flags packets to warn other entities in the network.Comment: 16 pages, 12 figure

LightChain: A DHT-based Blockchain for Resource Constrained Environments

As an append-only distributed database, blockchain is utilized in a vast variety of applications including the cryptocurrency and Internet-of-Things (IoT). The existing blockchain solutions have downsides in communication and storage efficiency, convergence to centralization, and consistency problems. In this paper, we propose LightChain, which is the first blockchain architecture that operates over a Distributed Hash Table (DHT) of participating peers. LightChain is a permissionless blockchain that provides addressable blocks and transactions within the network, which makes them efficiently accessible by all the peers. Each block and transaction is replicated within the DHT of peers and is retrieved in an on-demand manner. Hence, peers in LightChain are not required to retrieve or keep the entire blockchain. LightChain is fair as all of the participating peers have a uniform chance of being involved in the consensus regardless of their influence such as hashing power or stake. LightChain provides a deterministic fork-resolving strategy as well as a blacklisting mechanism, and it is secure against colluding adversarial peers attacking the availability and integrity of the system. We provide mathematical analysis and experimental results on scenarios involving 10K nodes to demonstrate the security and fairness of LightChain. As we experimentally show in this paper, compared to the mainstream blockchains like Bitcoin and Ethereum, LightChain requires around 66 times less per node storage, and is around 380 times faster on bootstrapping a new node to the system, while each LightChain node is rewarded equally likely for participating in the protocol

Data-centric Misbehavior Detection in VANETs

Detecting misbehavior (such as transmissions of false information) in vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) is very important problem with wide range of implications including safety related and congestion avoidance applications. We discuss several limitations of existing misbehavior detection schemes (MDS) designed for VANETs. Most MDS are concerned with detection of malicious nodes. In most situations, vehicles would send wrong information because of selfish reasons of their owners, e.g. for gaining access to a particular lane. Because of this (\emph{rational behavior}), it is more important to detect false information than to identify misbehaving nodes. We introduce the concept of data-centric misbehavior detection and propose algorithms which detect false alert messages and misbehaving nodes by observing their actions after sending out the alert messages. With the data-centric MDS, each node can independently decide whether an information received is correct or false. The decision is based on the consistency of recent messages and new alert with reported and estimated vehicle positions. No voting or majority decisions is needed, making our MDS resilient to Sybil attacks. Instead of revoking all the secret credentials of misbehaving nodes, as done in most schemes, we impose fines on misbehaving nodes (administered by the certification authority), discouraging them to act selfishly. This reduces the computation and communication costs involved in revoking all the secret credentials of misbehaving nodes.Comment: 12 page