Oh, Sweet Suspensions, Wherefore Art Thou?
By Norm Scott
“City planning significant changes to school discipline
rules to cut down on suspending students,” proclaimed a headline in the Feb. 16
edition of The Daily News, resulting in yet another hail of attacks on the
liberal policies of Mayor de Blasio and schools chancellor Carmen Farina for
hastening the end of western civilization. The critics just love those charter
schools in the city which suspended students at almost three times the rate of the
public schools during the 2011-12 school year, the last year for which public
data is available. 11 charter schools suspended more than 30 percent of their
students according to Chalkbeat, the education blog. Given all that has been
going on about race recently, it should be no surprise that discipline and
suspension rates have also become hot racially tinged topics. The News
reported, “Stats for the 2013-2014 school year show roughly 90% of 53,000
suspensions in city schools involved black or Hispanic kids.” On the other
side, people raise the issue of whether these numbers represent racial bias.
Now, as a teacher, I was opposed to suspensions and harsh
discipline, feeling that having to resort to them was an admission of failure
on my part. Or an admission of failure to the administration. As an outspoken
teacher, I never wanted to give my supervisors and edge on me by asking them
for assistance. And if one of my kids got suspended, what do I do when he (most
suspensions are boys) returned from a number of days out of school or my
classroom? I preferred to deal with things in on my own.
Things can get pretty ridiculous in this debate. An
editorial slamming the policy stated, “Principals will now have to get written
approval from Department of Education headquarters before suspending a
kindergarten-to-third-grade student, or a student in any grade who commits one
of the most common infractions: insubordination.” I taught in elementary
schools for 30 years and yes there was some bad behavior by kids in k-3 grades
but suspend kids that age? A school can’t manage to figure out some
alternative? If a child has serious emotional issues then they need help, not
suspension. I never taught high school where some students may be more
threatening if they engage in serious misbehavior and containing them in the
school might be a problem. But there are answers for schools willing to explore
alternatives to suspension. Restorative justice (RJ) programs where students
must face and take responsibilities for their actions in front of a peer
pressure group have been having enormous positive impacts on schools where
discipline was an issue and have resulted in some remarkable transformations. Wary
educators without direct knowledge of these programs fear they may be just a cover
up for another failed onslaught in the blame the teacher game over the past 15
years.
My friend who teaches at a high school in Brooklyn was one
such skeptic. Now he has the entire school involved in restorative justice
programs. He reports, “I visited a few schools, one a 300 student school that
had 150 suspensions (some students suspended multiple times). They dropped to
63 suspensions after they initiated a new disciplinary program in 2012/13. Now
in the second year of implementation they have had only 2 principal's
suspensions.” These are hard facts pointing to the success of RJ programs. He
told me about mediation programs where “two students, who engaged in a verbal
or physical fight, meet in a room, sit across from each other, and each one has
a student representative trained in
meditation. Both students tell their side of the stories, the objective being
to get both sides to understand the other, discuss calmly how they could have
handled the situation differently and come to a compromise agreement on what
will happen now. Most mediations end in the two students hugging and becoming
friends.” If a school with a rational administration – not always easy to find
– wants a shot at solving the suspension issue, then giving restorative justice
a shot is the way to go.
Norm restores himself daily at his blog, ednotesonline.org.
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