To reiterate yet again, the Obama-era "guidance" regarding school discipline was wrong and did harm, and it's not just me saying so:
When President Trump rescinded an Obama-era directive pressuring schools to adopt lenient discipline policies, almost every major education advocacy organization united in outrage.One could be excused for remembering President Bush's warning about "the soft bigotry of low expectations".
Despite Pulitzer-Prize-winning reporting showing how similarly lenient disciplinary policies allowed the Parkland school shooter to slip through the cracks, the liberal media insinuated that it was absurd for the Trump administration to recommend rescission of Obama-era lenient policies.
And despite study after study showing that these leniency policies hurt some students, advocates insinuated that the Trump administration was oppressing students of color by ending a policy intended to help them.
Fortunately, a recent Thomas B. Fordham institute teacher survey has given teachers a real voice on this issue. The Obama administration declared flatly that “suspensions don’t work.” The report reveals that teachers overwhelmingly disagree.
Roughly 80% of teachers believe that suspensions are useful to send a signal to students’ parents about serious misbehavior and around 85% believe that temporarily removing disruptive students helps well-behaved students learn. Meanwhile, nearly 80% believe that suspensions help ensure a safe school environment and almost 70% think suspensions encourage other students to follow the rules...
The Obama-era disciplinary policy pressured school districts to decrease suspensions, and suspensions did in fact decrease substantially. But about 70% of teachers believed that the decline was at least somewhat due to a higher tolerance for misbehavior, and almost half believed it was due to under-reporting, suspending students without officially recording it...
Even more notable, though, is that despite this difference in perception of discrimination, African American and white teachers are on the exact same page when it comes to school discipline policy. Among white teachers, 46% believe that suspensions are used too little and 9% percent believe they are used too frequently. Among black teachers, 50% believe that suspensions are used too little and 7% believe they are used too frequently.
Last month, the United States Commission on Civil Rights issued a report which noted that students with disabilities are disciplined too frequently and lamented that discrimination was at work. Teachers agree that students with disabilities are discriminated against when it comes to school discipline — they just believe that the discrimination goes in the opposite direction as what detached government bureaucrats assumed.
Almost 55% believe that students with disabilities were treated more leniently for the same offense.
3 comments:
"around 85% believe that temporarily removing disruptive students helps well-behaved students learn. Meanwhile, nearly 80% believe that suspensions help ensure a safe school environment."
I've always said is that you need a lawsuit from a well-behaved student's parent for real change to affect. Special ed kids get their stuff because of lawsuits, but what about that well-behaved kid? The parent will usually just request have that student in another class or send that kid to a charter/private school or homeschool if they can.
When students with disabilities are mainstreamed they are supposed to be held accountable for the same behavior goals in class. In reality administrators are terrified to send a special education student to in school suspension even when it disrupts the entire class on a daily basis. Mainstreaming sounded like a good idea for the parents of these students. You always see the stories about the cheerleader with Downs Syndrome or the kid in a wheelchair allowed to score a touchdown with the cooperation of both teams. What nobody sees are the students who are adept at circumventing work by referring to their IEP. Nobody sees the kids who rely on accommodations to make life easy rather than striving to achieve. Nobody sees the teachers who often must make fully different lessons for a list of students because their IEP makes it where it is impossible for them to follow even the least standards for the class. And when it comes to behavior, a classroom may have a non-verbal, non writing student who is supposed to be allowed to watch videos as a reward for not going through other students' backpacks. How can anyone teach with standards like this? In reference to the comment above, my daughter was the well behaved student who was paired with a child later described as mentally ill. He would pinch and bite her in third grade. He would steal and destroy her work. He would jump on their shared desk and scream obscenities. Not until one old school teacher carried him kicking and screaming to the office with the ultimatum "He goes or I go" did my daughter get any sort of relief. Due to that episode she became wary of all other special education students and who could blame her?
Heresy!
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