Noelia Rivera-Calderón, Law & Public Policy Scholar, JD Anticipated May 2019
We all know we are doing school discipline wrong. We see the statistics on racial disparities in discipline: Black and Latino students are suspended and expelled at significantly higher rates than white students. When it comes to finding solutions, though, well-intentioned but misguided policies from all points in the political spectrum—from zero tolerance to suspension bans—end up leaving us little better than we started, taking one step forward and one step back. We must acknowledge the complexities inherent in reforming school discipline, avoiding what seem to be the easy answers, and we must listen to the perspectives of all parties with a stake in school discipline reform, including parents, students, teachers, and community members. Because of my own history and varied experiences, I come to the issues in race and school discipline from multiple perspectives: as Program Director of the School Discipline Advocacy Service (SDAS), which provides advocacy for students in Philadelphia going through formal and informal disciplinary processes; as a former Philadelphia middle school teacher; and before everything, as a former Philadelphia student.
As a student, while I was not in trouble in school very much, owing both to my painful shyness and my desire to prove myself as a first-generation immigrant, I did get in trouble a couple of times. When I was in first grade, I didn’t speak English very well yet, and, because of my limited English proficiency, I misunderstood a direction that was written on the board and did a workbook exercise incorrectly. The teacher saw that another student, who was literally in the opposite corner of the class from me, had made the same mistake, and started screaming about how one of us must have copied their work from the other one. She sent us both out of the room, not to return until one of us admitted our dishonest behavior. I tried, in my broken English, to explain that I hadn’t understood the direction, but she wouldn’t hear it. (This is, by the way, a teacher who later asked me to come to school “in my native costume” so the other students would know what Puerto Ricans looked like.) At the time I was mortified at having been placed in the hallway like a “bad kid” where everyone could see me, so I took the blame so I could go back to class.
This experience of being sent out to the hallway and given detention unfairly is, in the grand scheme of things, not a big deal, but it did demonstrate something I ended up learning in law school as I started researching school discipline: teachers and administrators, given large amounts of discretion, tend not to give the benefit of the doubt to students of color. Where there is some subjectivity and discretion involved, some ambiguous misbehavior, some sense of “disruption,” teachers and administrators are more likely to punish Black and Latino kids than white kids. However, when white kids are subjected to school discipline, it is more likely to be for more objective offenses—bringing a weapon to school versus the more subjective “being disruptive in class” or, in my case, “failing to follow directions.”
I have also been on the other side of school discipline, as a teacher. I was in situations every day where I had to evaluate the safety of my classroom, the effects of students’ behavior, and what disciplinary measures I needed to take to make sure that my classroom was a safe place where students could learn without unnecessary distractions. I think that being in a safe school where you can learn is a privilege that too few children have, so I considered maintaining discipline to be one of the very best things I could do for my students. I felt that holding students accountable for their actions, so they could learn that their actions have consequences and that they needed to be more thoughtful in the future, was a vital part of aiding their development as members of society. Part of showing someone that they matter as a person is showing them that their behavior matters, and that they are worthy of being held to high standards.
As a teacher I have (very rarely) recommended that a child be expelled, but have made those recommendations for serious fights, once when one student punched another and continued to beat the other student on the floor. I felt that this student may not have been ready to be in that particular school environment. And when my other students, who came to this school in part because it was known to be safe and who had been shaken by the experience, saw that this student was not going to be expelled (the final decision of the school’s board) and said “that’s not fair,” there was nothing I could tell them.
These days in education circles, you hear a lot about “restorative discipline,” which is basically a contrast to “exclusionary discipline.” Exclusionary discipline, like suspensions and expulsions, involves excluding children from the learning environment; with restorative discipline, you work with the child to instead restore them to the learning environment by restoring their relationships with those whom their behavior hurt. Statistically, children of color are subjected to exclusionary forms of discipline much more than white children. Restorative discipline should be the goal, but actual restorative discipline is misinterpreted a lot in ways that can actually do more harm than good. It is interpreted, often, as “just stop suspending kids,” leading some to call for all-out suspension bans. The problems are that 1) some actions are harder to restore than others, and blanket school discipline policies never make sense; 2) you cannot ban one practice without replacing it with another—restorative discipline requires extensive, time-consuming training which school districts are not always able or willing to pay for even if they do implement a suspension ban; and 3) sometimes kids are not always ready to be restored, and in those cases there must be alternatives. Being restored means to take ownership for one’s actions, to apologize and to make amends, and to change the behavior, and sometimes kids are not ready to sincerely do that. In those situations, restoration cannot and should not be forced, and exclusionary punishment must be available as an option because it at least can maintain school safety for serious offenses while showing the child and the school community that the behavior is not to be tolerated in school.
School discipline must be fair to be meaningful. First, school and district codes of conduct should be written in a way that removes as much ambiguity and room for discretion as possible when defining charges—there should be no “causing a disruption” or “failure to follow directions” as a basis for punishment; that has to be more specific. In the same way that we expect to know what conduct is illegal before we are arrested for it, students should be very clear on what behavior is expected of them so they will not be impacted by the implicit bias of an educator given a large amount of discretion. To further limit the impact of implicit bias, we badly need to diversify the teaching profession. Second, we need to understand what restorative discipline actually is, not use it as an excuse to tolerate harmful behavior, and we need to recognize that there is a legitimate time and place for forms of exclusionary discipline. We need to hold schools accountable for implementing fair discipline through programs like SDAS, so we can push for restorative discipline where it makes sense—for example, in a case I participated in with a child who accidentally brought a box cutter to school, not threatening to hurt anyone with it, and who apologized and agreed to ensure it would not happen again. Finally, we need to have this conversation in a way that acknowledges that behavior matters and that being held to a high standard shows that each child, as a person, matters. We should be neither allowing discretionary discrimination nor making misguided excuses for student misbehavior. School discipline need not be nonexistent; it just needs to be fair.