School Discipline

The US Department of Education has just released new data on school discipline and arrests.  

Students of color, disabled students, and low-income students are all disciplined more often and more harshly than their classmates, despite evidence that they don’t misbehave more often or engage in more troubling behavior.

We’ve all heard the saying: the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over expecting a different result. Unfortunately, this approach has guided discipline policies in most Washington schools for decades. Misbehaving students routinely are suspended or expelled – despite overwhelming evidence that such practices don’t work.

Children’s misbehavior should never be something they can’t recover from. That was the overarching message I heard on a recent trip to meet with leaders and advocates from the Baltimore City School District.

This week, one of the largest school districts in Florida announced it is replacing suspension and expulsions with a new restorative approach to school discipline – the same type of alternative approach that the ACLU of Washington is promoting here in Washington state.

Kids can’t learn if they aren’t in school.  That’s why our state has a mandatory attendance rule that requires students to go school or give a good reason why they have missed a day of class time.  But our current discipline laws allow schools to expel or suspend kids as a punishment for breaking rules sometimes for even minor infractions.

Thinking back to myself at 13 years old, I recall a constant tension between the child I was and the adult I was becoming. Now I try to picture that version of myself being pulled from a classroom and taken to a conference room where two police officers and two school administrators want to question me about a neighborhood robbery. Would I have told officers I preferred they stop questioning me?  Or that I wanted to leave?

Last month, a high school in southeastern Washington conducted a suspicionless drug search. Students were asked to leave their classroom so that a police officer with a “drug-detection dog” could check their backpacks for signs of drug possession. After the search, two students were singled out for a more invasive search and questioning. One had marijuana paraphernalia in his backpack; in the other, no signs of drugs or drug paraphernalia could be found. Good news for the second student—after the humiliating and anxiety-producing search was complete, he was permitted to go back to class.

Women's History Month gives us an opportunity to reflect on the great strides women and girls have made toward achieving equal rights and equal treatment. Yet, in some ways we are still stuck in the past — as I was reminded of recently when I had the opportunity to step into classrooms in urban Seattle and hear the stories of pregnant and parenting students who are being pressured to drop out of school. As I stand in front of these young women and share information about their rights under Title IX, jaws drop and hands shoot up with questions.