President Obama is making a push to end the practice. But conservatives say the administration has gone too far.
All on equal footing?
(Thinkstock)
I
t
sounds like something from 1955: In a public school in the United
States, kids who come to school less than five minutes late are allowed
to go directly to class — unless they're Native American. When these
students are tardy, the school's safety officer detains them until the
grace period is over, and then sends them straight to the principal's
office, according to a report released jointly this month by the Department of Education and Department of Justice.
With two million American kids suspended
or expelled from junior and high schools each year, the Obama
administration decided to figure out what the heck is going in America's
classrooms. The results of the investigation weren't pretty:
Discriminatory policies that push students of color, and those with
disabilities, out of the U.S. education system.
The administration has now issued guidance that aims to end
discrimination and curb out-of-school suspensions, particularly for
nonviolent offenses. But with conservatives arguing that the
recommendations go too far, and resources for public school teachers
stretched thin, change won't be easy.
Fifteen percent of students in the report's data pool were
African-American — but they accounted for 44 percent of students
suspended more than once. The discrepancy was "not explained by more
frequent or more serious misbehavior by students of color," the
investigators wrote.
One district, for example, booted more black students than
white students to the alternative school, even though both groups had
committed a similar number of offenses. Investigators also found
policies that weren't intended to be discriminatory, but ended up having
a disproportionate impact on minorities.
"There's this idea that young people are pushed out of
school for violent behavior, and that's just not the case — it's things
like truancy, cell phone use, not having supplies, and uniform
violations," says Thena Robinson-Mock, director of the Advancement
Project's Ending the Schoolhouse to Jailhouse Track program. "And
students of color are punished at higher rates. It's a fact."
Reform advocates say that America has a "school-to prison-pipeline,"
whereby a combination of overcrowded classrooms, inadequate resources,
and zero-tolerance policies force kids out of school and into the
justice system. In 2011, a sixth-grade girl in Austin, Texas, says she sprayed herself with perfume in
class, because bullies were telling her that she smelled. She ended up
with a misdemeanor and a $150 fine from law enforcement, which cited her
for disrupting class.
"When I was in school, I might get a talking to by the
principal, but now you have law enforcement coming in, which creates
criminal records," says Deborah Vagins, senior legislative counsel for
the ACLU. According to the Obama administration's guidance, schools
should rely less on outside law enforcement to solve in-school problems.
Conservatives say that the Obama administration is going
too far. "As best I can tell, they are telling schools that even if you
have policies that are clearly neutral, that are clearly evenhanded,
that are clearly designed to create safe environments for students and
educators, [the Department of Justice] still might come down on you like
a ton of bricks," Frederick Hess, director of education policy at the
conservative think tank the American Enterprise Institute, told the Daily Caller.
But Robinson-Mock, from the Advancement Project, disagrees,
arguing there's overwhelming evidence that the Obama administration's
guidance is long overdue. "Racial profiling doesn't work outside of the
classroom and it won't work inside," she notes.
Many teachers say they approve
of the general principles behind the Obama administration's plan. But
some educators are concerned that the resources to keep troubled kids in
schools simply aren't available. "Out-of-school suspensions are less
effective in many cases," writes Ian Keith, a teacher at Randolph Heights Elementary School in Minnesota.
"But I'm worried that without a strong commitment to [alternatives],
that the problems in our classrooms will only get worse." (As part of
the plan, the Obama administration is proposing to dedicate $150 million
to place more counselors and resource officers in U.S. schools.)
James Forman Jr., a clinical professor at Yale Law School, told the New York Times
that schools also currently have a strong incentive to kick out
students, rather than give them second chances: "A kid is causing
trouble, that's probably not a kid who is testing well."
Vagins, of the ACLU, acknowledges that "this is only the
beginning, we need schools to make sure that these are implemented." But
Robinson-Mock says keeping classrooms safe and productive, while ending
discriminatory policies, are not contradictory goals: "There are clear
practical approaches in this guidance. And we put our budget where our
values are. I've heard people say, how can we afford to do this? Well
how can afford not to?"
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