Dive Brief:
- The Kent School District in Washington State is looking for alternative discipline tactics after recognizing that suspension doesn't actually improve bad behavior.
- In the three years since the district made efforts to implement new tactics and give principals more decision-making power, its suspension rate has decreased by over 30%.
- The Kent School District is not an outlier, as mounting data indicates that suspensions result in lower graduation rates, causing many districts in the state to think twice about discipline strategies.
Dive Insight:
Prior to the district's decision to look for new punishment strategies, it was at the center of an NAACP lawsuit due to the pepper-spraying and handcuffing of students. While the lawsuit made the school think-twice, according to the Seattle Times, the real journey to look for new discipline strategies started after parents began questioning what students should do if they were attacked. Under the old policy, any student who fought would be suspended, whether they were acting in self-defense or not. This left few options for students being bullied and also ignored the bigger issues causing attacks to happen in the first place.
One notable point that the Seattle Times article made is that school safety-officers have transitioned from security guards to mediators. The school-to-prison pipeline has garnered national attention in recent years, and the presence of school officers and police has only worked to buttress that system, according to the American Civil Liberties Union - Michigan, which is behind a current research project to understand the effects of police in schools.
"Zero-Tolerance" punishment is based on the "Broken Windows" theory that was popularized by the NYPD under Commissioner William Bratton in the 1990s. Under "Broken Windows," policing minor offenses like tagging graffiti or selling loose cigarettes became areas of major scrutiny and attention. Not only has zero-tolerance punishment — and related policies such as stop-and-frisk — been criticized for targeting low-income citizens and minorities, but it has been proven to be ineffective. While New York's crime rate did decrease during Bratton's tenure, so too did the crime rate in cities like Washigton, D.C., and San Diego, which pushed community policing instead.
So, how does this translate to schools? In many charter networks, zero-tolerance has been renamed "No Excuses." And under this form of discipline, students can be written up for minor infractions such as not making eye contact or having an untucked shirt. In a recent article for Jacobin entitled "Punitive Schooling," journalist and TFA alum Owen Davis looks at the "No Excuses" strategies, pushing readers to question the potentially harmful affects of asking students to "sweat the small stuff."