A USA Today article discussed students missing thousands of hours of school due to being suspended for minor things like putting their finger in someone’s hamburger. Does it make the case for eliminating suspensions?
Unfortunately, the article takes an outside, bureaucratic view of the facts. Of the 14 individuals it quotes, only one is a teacher. Here’s the inside view of its claims:
• The article says students have been suspended for “low-level infractions” that don’t “seriously hurt anyone or threaten school safety,” including being “disorderly, insubordinate, disruptive, disobedient, defiant and disrespectful.”
It would be nice to have a job where disobedience, defiance and disrespect are remote enough to be considered “low-level”; in schools, they’re sky-high. Serious problems that “threaten school safety”— physical assaults, sexual assaults and shootings — don’t appear out of the ether. They germinate from disrespect, disruptiveness, and the rest. Outsiders might not be concerned with insubordination and defiance flourishing in schools, but if faced with such behavior in their own workplaces, I bet suspensions and worse would occur.
• Students have been suspended for innocuous offenses like tardiness and swearing.
Shatara Clark, the teacher quoted in the article, quit after 10 years due to disrespect. She notes the lack of context in discipline records: “Say, for instance, a boy got suspended for talking out of turn. Well, you’re not going to know that he’s done that five times, and I’ve called his parents. Then you see someone that’s been suspended for fighting, and it looks like the same punishment for a lesser thing.”
• “Decades of research” show that students suspended from school have “increased involvement with the criminal justice system.”
It doesn’t take “decades of research” to realize that students who habitually disobey school rules will likewise disobey laws. Illogically, some blame suspensions — not the behavior that earns them — for the increased likelihood of crime, but if time out of school causes people to break laws, we should ban orthodontia and pink eye.
• Policymakers have tried to limit suspension to severe misbehavior that “could harm others.” California, Philadelphia and New York have banned suspensions for willful defiance or low-level misconduct.
“Harm others” how? Doesn’t it “harm others” when students can’t learn because of a few continually disruptive students? And who are the “others?” Shouldn’t teachers count? Forever managing disrespect and defiance takes a toll. Maybe this is why California has over 10,000 teacher vacancies, Philadelphia has 20 percent of teachers quit after their first year and New York has 18 different shortage areas when a decade ago it only had two.
• Roberto Rodríguez, assistant U.S. education secretary, said, “We need more tools in the toolkit” besides suspension.
What other “tools” is he talking about? We can improve suspension so that it happens in-school under educational guidance, but bureaucrats still consider that “exclusionary discipline.” You can’t “reward” your way to eliminating misbehavior. Taking away privileges only works at low levels. The prevailing bureaucratic answer is Restorative Practices, where teachers forfeit their planning periods to play the role of psychoanalysts. Without suspension, the toolkit is bare.
• Johanna Lacoe, research director at UC Berkeley, said: “We know suspensions aren’t good for kids.”
Which kids? They’re great if you’re the kid with a bully’s finger in your hamburger. The article quotes Adam Tyner, a Fordham Institute director: “If a student is disrupting the class, it may not help them all that much to take them and put them in a different environment, but it sure might help the other students who are trying to learn.”
• Suspension does nothing to deal with the “underlying reasons” for misbehavior, such as anxiety and personal problems.
It’s not supposed to. It’s just to help kids follow rules, not fix human suffering. Moreover, the “underlying reasons” are typically just peer pressure or impulsivity.
• Suspensions have led to “hundreds of thousands of missed days of school every year.”
Okay, but who’s standing up for the underdog? Who’s on the side of ordinary children and teachers who come to school to learn in peace? Who’s tracking the instructional time missed by beleaguered students who can’t focus or get their teachers’ attention?
When adults complicate things, children pay the price. This isn’t difficult: districts have codes of conduct. Students and parents agree to abide by those codes or accept the consequences. The consequences should fall on those who violate the code — not the innocent kids and teachers who abide by it.
Jody Stallings has been an award-winning teacher in Charleston since 1992 and is director of the Charleston Teacher Alliance. To submit a question, order his books or follow him on social media, please visit JodyStallings.com.
