Suspensions are dumb, in general. My high-school got rid of them in favor of an "in-school suspension" policy, wherein the student still had to go to class but was banned from after school activities and had to essentially work for the school doing e.g. grounds keeping and other tasks. The policy was effective, and got at the problem: students hanging out with the wrong crowds with too much idle time. I'm sympathetic to the argument that problem-students can be disruptive to the learning environment (though my sister is a teacher and disagrees, and is flatly in favor of outright suspensions) but I'm of the opinion that there's better ways to deal with that than telling them to sit at home and do nothing, creating more idle time and more chances to start trouble.
I kind of agree with you. I went to school with latchkey kids and some were disruptive and distracted the class (some threatened pupils as well as got into fights off-campus). Some kids would get suspended and some expelled.
I think suspensions and expulsions should remain options but last resort and before we get there opt for other kinds of activities which could change their behavior. It'd be interesting to see if those tactics work or if they become "badges of honor" rather than disincentives.
I think most of high school is a case study in self selection. If you select yourself into a high performing group early on you’re golden, and the social pressures become such that you want to do well at academics, sports etc. If you don’t you’re basically screwed, and it’s extremely hard to select out of those bad groups because of the same types of social pressure. Policies should be aimed at interrupting and directing these selection mechanisms toward positive ends. I don’t have kids yet but this is something I’m paying a lot of attention to for eventually selecting a school for my kids - and all of this is, again, just an extension of the same selection pressures.
This is not to mention that suspension can be considered a reward for the especially problematic students because then they're going to just go off and do whatever they want.
That said, this bill isn't banning suspensions entirely for violent or bullying behavior. They just can't suspend students for willful defiance, which as the stats showed has some clear racial bias associated with it.
Forced labor of any sort just seems tricky especially when there is a racial disparity among those so penalized. Prison work programs also seem like a good idea ("teach a trade" etc.) but then they are couched as essentially slave labor and they sound less good.
I’m not sure why there’s a racial component to this. I’m merely talking about a proportional response to disrupting class. Is your view that this punishment would be unfairly leveraged against certain races?
I’m also unconvinced that prison work is bad. Should they just hang out and do nothing? When tied to a shortened sentence, prison work seems just fine.
I think prison labor's impact on the larger labor economy should also be considered, as should the financial incentives for longer prison terms it may create. I doubt either of these are insurmountable problems, but are arguably problems with the current implementation of the system.
In the case of public schools using child labor for discipline one possible problem is that the children, if they were actually effective laborers, might tempt a school district to suspend more children to get more work done around the school, and possibly even reduce the number of maintenance workers they hire. You'd want such a system strictly regulated and audited to ensure this sort of thing doesn't happen.
For context, since the article glosses over the actual data: Black students made up 5.6% of California school enrollments in the last school year, but got hit with 15.6% of all 'willful defiance' suspensions for the school year. Also, a previous initiative to ban the practice in LA school districts actually increased graduation rates [1].
Is there a reason that this was considered problematic and not coincidental? It seems like an equally viable explanation to the situation is that the suspended students were problematic enough to warrant suspension. California has some of the strictest hiring standards for teachers in the country so it seems weird that it's just being assumed that the educators are the ones in the wrong here.
The article does not say that. It merely says that the leader of that special interest group claims that the total number of graduations went up. No supporting data is given for even that claim.
> Teachers would retain the ability, under the proposed law, to suspend students from their classroom for disruptive behavior
That clears it up. At first reading it seems that teachers couldn't suspend a student if they are being disruptive, but that's not the case.
Thinking about some more I am not sure if this changes the equation much as I can imagine the teacher can reinterpret the "they disobeyed me" into a "they were being disruptive" situation in most cases.
Having chaperoned a few field trips for my kids' school and having dealt with students who are disruptive, I can sympathize with teachers trying to get a handle on one or two kids who just refuse to listen. It can ruin the environment for the rest of the class and take away precious learning time. Having said that I don't really have a solution. Not sure if assigning extra work or isolating them to a separate class would work.
> Black students made up 5.6% of California school enrollments in the last school year, but got hit with 15.6% of all 'willful defiance' suspensions
Interesting. Is it inherent systemic racism coming from teachers? Is that worth investigating more rather than just making the statistic go away by banning those types of suspensions. Something about that doesn't seem right.
> How does this show "systemic racism coming from teachers?" This subtle (or not so subtle) attack on teachers is sad.
Someone pointed out that black students were disproportionately affected by these suspensions. Suspensions are handed out by the teachers. So what is your explanation then? Racism can be manifested both institutionally a well as personally, unconsciously even. Are you implying someone or something else is telling the teacher to assign these punishments?
> This stat alone doesn't tell us anything, let alone who to blame.
So why bother publish it if it doesn't tell us anything? They seem to have changed the rules for the whole state of California based on such statistics. Do you think they are inaccurately gathered?
It shows this group of students is suspended at a higher rate than other, not whether that is justified or not.
There maybe different reasons for that. Maybe some kids are more disruptive than others. This could be for a myriad of reasons, that have nothing to do with the teacher.
Racism exists but blaming everything on racism, especially on teachers, who on average are probably more social aware than the avg person doesnt solve any problems, and might actually make them worse.
It could be a correlation between socioeconomic demographics rather than race.
Regardless though, suspensions always seemed counter productive to me: "You were misbehaving so as a punishment we won't let you learn anything for a few days."
Instead, put the disruptive into self-study rooms where they have to do school work and the only talking allowed is with an instructor assigned to assist students with the work. Or any other even vaguely related learning activity. But "you're not allowed to learn" is just ridiculous.
> But "you're not allowed to learn" is just ridiculous.
Hmm, I might have missed something. Sorry about that. Can you point out where I said the "you're not allowed to learn". I searched my comment for that phrase and couldn't find it there.
> Interesting. Is it inherent systemic racism coming from teachers?
More likely it is the the systemic racism of society imposing struggles on the students' communities, which then manifests in the students' disobedient classroom behavior.
The teachers, meanwhile are operating in the same frame of systemic racism and associated socioeconomic conditions as any of us are. We all - black people included - are conditioned by society's default systemic racism towards black youths. But public school teachers serving struggling black communities are made to confront this more directly in the course of their work.
We expect public school to function as social work facilities, treating the social dysfunctions our society creates in young people while also preparing them intellectually to be contributing members of society, but we don't fund them enough to carry out that work.
Given this, public schools, which must by law serve a higher ratio of troubled youth than schools that can choose which students they admit, should be able to employ a higher ratio of behavioral health specialists to do this.
Better yet, those issues should be treated, or prevented, before the children arrive at school, but that would require a conversation about the distribution of wealth, security, and community stability that we as a society don't seem to be ready to have yet.
"increased graduation rates" I'm sure they're happy to rubber-stamp standard tests and push students to graduate, doesn't mean they will have learned anything
Assuming all schools chase the metrics like that, a relative increase is still a positive thing. Like if all grades were inflated one full grade, improving from a C to a B is still good, even though the uninflated grade went from a D to a C.
Maintaining order is essential to stopping bullying, and infringing on the rights of students who want to be there and want to learn. IMHO this is going to lead to chaos.
I don't know how well my experience extrapolates to others, but disobeying a teacher's instructions in front of the teacher was pretty orthogonal to all the ways I was bullied. This doesn't seem related to me at all.
I'm pretty sure bullying could still lead to suspensions. The new law doesn't ban suspensions for rules the school creates, just for disobeying a teacher. Also why are we suspending 1st through 5th graders? Children in those grades are 11 years old and younger. What kind of system is that? These are small children.
This doesn’t mean that bullying will go in punished. Nor does it mean that disruptive students will be allowed to continue disrupting class without consequence.
It simply means that teachers have a lot less discretion, which will remove a lot of the potential for bias to affect their students in negative ways.
I think this just disallows suspensions for disobeying a teacher's arbitrary commands. Other laws define what you may suspend students for, such as bullying.
Suspensions are not a punishment for most of the kids who get suspended (troublemakers).
Troublemakers, mostly boys, are kids who will not silently sit still. It's easy to blame the parents of these children for their lack of discipline, but casting blame doesn't solve problems.
The problem with troublemakers is that they are disruptive to the rest of the class. Further, they encourage other students, who ordinarily have no problem silently sitting still, to act like troublemakers as well.
Removing troublemakers from the class makes helps teachers teach, helps non-troublemakers learn, and relieves troublemakers from the boredom of silently sitting still. Win-win-win, right?
Unfortunately, troublemakers often feel out-of-school suspensions as a reward, not a punishment. In-school-suspension (ISS) is somewhat better, because the troublemaker can't just play video games while they are supposedly being disciplined. But ISS still reinforces the notion that there is an alternative to education.
As someone who had trouble silently sitting still as an adolescent -- and I still struggle with lectures that discourage audience interruptions -- I hope to see education evolve into more polymorphic system where creativity and spontaneity are valued along with discipline and time management.
> "Troublemakers, mostly boys, are kids who will not silently sit still."
The best remedy in this sort of situation, where a boy's got ants in his pants and can't sit still, is sports. Sports give kids a productive way to burn off their energy. I know some people here and in other STEM-associated communities think sports is a four letter word (ackshully it's six) because of the pop culture meme that athleticism and intelligence are mutually exclusive and you can either be a jock or a nerd but not both. But that's nothing more than a dumb pigeon-holing stereotype perpetuated by lazy hollywood and television writers (and sometimes internalized and aped by impressionable children.)
Extramural sports help unruly kids in other ways too. By providing a structured environment for a greater portion of the day, the strain placed on parents is reduced and kids are kept from getting into trouble unsupervised at home.
Add this to the list of reasons I don't live in California. My 3rd grader has been suspended from school before and it needed to happen to teach him a lesson.
You couldn't have come up with a sufficient punishment to teach him the same lesson? You could even voluntarily pull him out and home school him for a week if you wanted.
Think of school as part of your childrens early socialization tests.
You can only instill the best into your child. When they leave the nest they need to be guided into the correct social path. Otherwise you end up with a society of sociopaths.
That is what school suspension does.
It is a small coarse correction for teaching children right from wrong.
I'd wager adults suddenly deviating from their normal routine because of something you did tends to induce a sense of severity for most kids. Perhaps not for the shittiest kids, but most kids understand when adults are no longer laughing at their 'shenanigans'.
There are, of course, other ways to accomplish this. I was "scared straight" as a young teen when my mother cancelled her plans for the evening so she could go talk with my teachers after school about my behavior, which wasn't severe enough to warrant suspension but was nevertheless bad enough to disturb my parents and teachers.
Ideally the kid is set back on a good path before their behavior becomes severe enough to warrant suspension, but sometimes (probably most often because of poor parenting) this doesn't happen.
Sounds to me that suspension for no reason teaches them to be sociopathic... but you are free to explain why small kids will take suspension as the correct signal for behaving more empathically towards other.
Wouldn't that lead to encouraging punitive justice as society does right now? Is that the correct non sociopathic path?
Well, when I was younger and in 1st grade, I had someone chasing me and throwing rocks at me. I ran up the nearest slide and stayed at the top and around the side wall where the rocks couldn't reach me. They came up with rocks in hand. I kicked them in the face and sent them back down. I got expelled, nothing happened to the other student, at all, except the bruise on their ass from when they hit the ground and a welt across their chin from where my foot impacted.
Kick asked for reasons a student that young might be suspended. They seemed incredulous to the very concept of suspending a child that young, not to suspensions specifically relating to disobeying a teacher.
That would still qualify for suspension here. The law just says the student can't be suspended for disobedience. Like, refusing to do the work, or participate. Other forms of active disruption can still be punished as always.
While removing blatantly-disruptive students from classrooms is vital, suspending them doesn’t solve anything. In fact, I’d say officially “banning” them from school just puts them on a path towards mischief / criminality. These are the kids who need positive male/female adult role-models at school to intervene and correct problematic behaviors. There are adults who can and do specialize in this sort of mentoring and behavioral “attitude adjustment.”
As someone that would be disciplined for doing work correctly and getting correct answers, I support this.
A handful of teachers would give really bad instructions. Like, commanding everyone how to round numbers incorrectly kind of bad. I can’t even wrap my head around it still.
I’d do the work as it’s supposed to be done. When my answers matched the book and nobody else’s did: I was accused of cheating & stealing the answer keys or disobedience & not following instruction.
My third-grade son's teacher insists it's spelled and pronounced "communitative" (as in "commutative"), to the point where we had to have a parent-teacher conference about my son correcting her.
Maybe a bit off topic but can we criminalize giving advice encouraging violence towards kid in the disguise of 'parental wisdom'?
As someone who is still a kid and now non functional one at that, I
don't get it why people have so much freedom in raising their kid but not in other places.
Why do we not treat parents as someone with higher authority to abuse?
It's not really fun being abused like a punchbag and emotionally drained by narcissists without a resort.
I haven't bullied anyone in school, I haven't been violent towards other kids even close to just broing, I don't get triggered by whatever people tell me. And not much parenting was done here since I mostly lived in my own chamber. (single mentally ill parent with no care taker or anything).
A lot of the behaviors I have seen that are disruptive in school or in kids are result of their parents outright. They are violent because their parents train them to be or not care. They are dumbed down by parents because they don't want to work they don't want to take the time to patiently explain why if you beat someone else or be disruptive, it will be bad for you not because someone will punish you, not because the rules said so but the society you live in will have worse environment later on when you grow up.
Schools are too boring. There are exceptional teachers, but they are not in one school.
There are countless bad teachers. Teachers need to be educated to make their subject actually interesting. Too many are trained in classroom management rather than storytelling.
I will give an example. My business law professor was so good that I still have tapes of that class from 20+ years ago. I remember every single lecture! My electronics high school teacher was equally excellent.
No one disrupts a truly interesting class. History can be as boring as a recital of dates or as vivid as creating a play. English can be made interesting by incorporating writing prompts and etymology vs pointless book reports about uninteresting books. I can’t write about poems that are meaningless to me. No one actually taught me how to write term papers and what were the acceptance criteria.
Suspensions are pointless. I was threatened with suspension and was confused how it was supposed to be a punishment. If anything, it felt like a good outcome.
Bad teachers trigger negative emotions. I was 38 when I took a class in choreography from an incompetent teacher in college. She actually banned me from watching our class’s last public performance for which you could buy tickets. I had an ambitious project involving mixing two dance styles in 3 tempos to a Japanese song.
Well, I am not 18 and so I endured her nonsense but at the same time resisted it. She made me cry, which takes a lot. That person hated me with a passion. I must have reminded her of an ex boyfriend because I can’t explain it any other way.
One more tool taken away from teachers to maintain order and respect from their students at school will lead to:
- good teachers leaving (because they can't do their jobs)
- quality of teaching going down (because of the above and because disruptive elements will not be dealt with properly)
Long term impact on society from this kind of decisions is terrible.
Good quality teachers already leave, public school is the bottom rung for teachers in the USA and I'm not saying that's okay but it's the least pay and the most work. Look into the turnover rate for new teachers, especially highschools. Violence and sexual harassment against teachers is far from uncommon and the administration probably won't have your back because then everyone just accuses the school of being some kind of racist or sexist conspiracy to protect evil teachers. Professionally minded teachers move on to charter and private schools once they've done their time in the pits long enough to transition into a role where they're not just daycare workers.
No, professionally minded teachers do no such thing. The pay at private and charter schools is roughly 50% to 70% of publics' pay. Charter schools and privates are also no picnic. I'm not sure what makes you think they don't also have the same problems, but they do. I work in higher ed analytics in a role congruous to teacher education and the charter schools we partner with for teacher's in-classroom training are no better in this respect than the public schools we work with.
>No, professionally minded teachers do no such thing. The pay at private and charter schools is roughly 50% to 70% of publics' pay.
Is that the average or median figure for pay? Because I can tell you right now that in LA and San Diego the most common starting place for teachers earning or who have just earned their credentials will either be juvie or low income neighborhoods albeit this is from a highschool perspective so maybe I'm simply wrong with respect to the article. Maybe if you account for public schools in higher income neighborhoods then teaching publically remains competitive and I failed to acknowledge that in my earlier post but the overall picture for a starting teacher is none the less that they will work to either escape public school or ascend out of bad/high-turnover schools.
Actually the urban areas pay higher. Starting salary where I'm at is roughly 15% higher in "difficult" school districts. I'll stipulate that this applies to my state and a half dozen or so nearby states; States further away may differ, but I know of only 2 or 3 states where teacher pay is actually quite bad. In those places, privates and charters probably are just as good in pay.
> Good quality teachers already leave, public school is the bottom rung for teachers in the USA and I'm not saying that's okay but it's the least pay and the most work.
This isn’t true. The pay is better in public schools, the jobs are more secure and the pensions are much better.
> Professionally minded teachers move on to charter and private schools once they've done their time in the pits long enough to transition into a role where they're not just daycare workers.
Utter tripe. The only part of being a teacher outside the public school system that’s better is the average quality of the students. You have to really value that to think it’s worth more than being effectively unfireable and having a fantastic pension, with pretty good pay once you’re somewhere between three and six years in.
>Utter tripe. The only part of being a teacher outside the public school system that’s better is the average quality of the students.
Apparently a lot of teachers care heavily about this going by turnover rates in low-income public schools which are often the starting schools for fresh educators.
Kind of ironic that we now have School Resource Officers permanently stationed in schools but we are taking away the ability of teachers to police their classroom.
I think the good old days when a teacher could hit you with a ruler were the best form of discipline.
Nothing gets a kids attention better than humiliation.
In what objective way was society better off when teachers could hit kids with a ruler. Lower crime rates? Longer life span? More productive workers? Less income inequality?
>In what objective way was society better off when teachers could hit kids with a ruler
We weren't but given the choice (false dichotomy, obviously) of teachers hitting kids with rulers for being out of line or having someone who is trained to see everything through the lens of "what charges can we toss at this, what law is being violated" patrolling every school I would choose the former in a heartbeat. Kids hit with rulers is a diffuse bad thing. Kids catching criminal charges is a concentrated bad thing.
They weren't the good old days for everyone or in every way but only a moron is going to look at the past and say they got nothing right. Not having cops in schools was something they got right in the past.
I'm not sure that was the effect. The kids may have responded in the desired fashion after being struck by a ruler, but I bet they hardened their minds against that teacher. My parents hated the nuns who ran their schools like this and took every chance they got to undermine them, because of the ruler business.
Using size and power to rule children earns fear, not respect, and I think there are a lot of studies to back that up.
Do you have data to back that up? Has the crime rate against the elderly increased?
Or does it just feel like it was better? My parents think it's much more dangerous for kids to play outside now than back when I was a kid in the 80s. Despite the fact that the crime rate is much lower.
We certainly did not need to have Police permanently stationed in the school.
That alone makes the point.
Our society is much more violent than in the past.
It starts at childhood age.
Lack of discipline leads to anarchy.
Citation?
Maybe Americans are doing something wrong but educational reforms and less abuse of kids in other places have shown positive effects.
Not to mention, crimes rates are slowing down in those areas with more development.
