More schools rethinking zero-tolerance discipline stand
Posted By The Editors | June 3rd, 2011 | Category: Education | 1 Comment »
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Zero-tolerance rules, once hailed as the panacea to an explosion of serious student misbehavior in schools, are now recognized more and more as part of the problem, not the solution and are being significantly modified or replaced altogether by policies that are “more child-centered,” according to a news article in the Washington Post.
“The tide is beginning to turn,” Matt Cregor, assistant counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, told a Post reporter, “but we have a very long way to go to see these reforms realized for all districts across the country.”
Cregor and other observers say that zero-tolerance policies – which mandate that school officials respond to student misbehavior in inflexible and often harsh ways, regardless of the circumstances or context — have been a critical cause of the exploding school suspension and expulsion rates of the past three decades. In addition, the recourse to harsh punishments has produced in most school districts across the country suspension and expulsion rates that are disproportionately racially-skewed. Black and Latino youth overwhelmingly bear the brunt of those extreme punishments. That, in turn, puts them in jeopardy of being captured by the dynamic that has come to be known as the school-to-prison pipeline.
Read the full Washington Post article.
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Young Angels of America has a program on L.A.’s affluent Westside and a program in Watts. We are very aware of the disciplinary inequities between higher-income schools and lower-income schools. Higher-income neighborhoods and schools seem to take a “We can work this out,” approach, while lower-income youth are treated with a “guilty until proven innocent” attitude. Our Watts students, judging by the social networking we follow, seem to be constantly stopped, searched, cuffed, and we are very aware of an underlying determination to continually prove that minority youth, especially males, are criminals. This attitude seems to us to be pervasive and not the fault of any one factor, but its over-arching impact on achievement is huge. As we travel between Watts and the Westside, it seems to us that higher-income children are treated by the world they interact with as Golden at Birth, while the world that the lower-income child encounters makes sure they understand that they are Guilty at the Gate. Of course this is a huge simplification, but it’s quite true.